Many companies invest time, effort, and money in creating an app just to watch it fail. No one wants to waste half a year, putting their hearts and souls into mobile app development just to be underwhelmed by the lack of results brought by this venture. That’s why this guide will outline the steps to help your app achieve and surpass your business objectives, no ifs, ands, or buts.
Defining Your Business Goals
Before kicking off the development of your mobile app, it’s important to understand what goals you’re looking to achieve.
Generally speaking, businesses usually look at developing an app to:
- Increase brand awareness
- Boost company sales
- Improve customer engagement
- Streamline operations
Now let’s go through each one of these business goals to understand how they can be achieved through mobile app development.
The Role of an App in Increasing Brand Awareness
Before jumping right in, let’s grasp the concept of brand awareness itself. Brand awareness refers to the degree of familiarity and recognition that consumers have with a particular brand. It’s worth noting that this goes further than just knowing your name. Brand awareness includes associations, perceptions, and emotions consumers feel when hearing your brand’s name. One way businesses can build and strengthen this awareness is by integrating APIs that enhance app functionality and user engagement.
And most importantly, strong awareness leads to increased customer loyalty and trust, which leads to increased revenue for your business.
When brand awareness is properly built up, it can create a positive image. Let’s use Starbucks as an example. Starbucks has cult-like customer loyalty. You can attribute this to its consistent quality and rewards programs. In addition, their seasonal items have become part of our culture. When people think of Christmas, they think of a pumpkin spice latte.
This positive brand image influences your clients’ purchasing decisions and sets your company apart from other competitors.
Now, let’s talk about loyalty. People trust brands they’re familiar with because they’re perceived as reputable. This is due to people wanting to play things safe when spending money. For example, reputable phone manufacturers offer better specs, longer software support, and better customer service. They’ve been around for a long time and have been providing a consistent and positive experience.
Last but not least, brand awareness paves the road for word-of-mouth marketing. Consumers are more likely to share their personal experiences with others when they’re aware of a brand and have had positive experiences with it.
This is a powerful form of organic marketing. These recommendations and testimonials can act as valuable instruments as these recommendations are generally trustworthy (generally shared with friends, family, and colleagues).
The Role of an App in Boosting Company Sales
If we look at a recent report from Sensortower, we’ll find that US consumers' spending in app stores continues to rise with substantial growth. Applications continue to lead consumer spending growth, with YoY growth in non-games approaching 20% in Q1 of 2024. Overall spending has surpassed $35 billion for Q1 2024, signifying a massive opportunity for businesses planning to go digital by offering their own mobile applications.
While this figure showcases the overall app spending, just about 45% of it is on non-gaming applications. This means that no matter what your business is, there is a valuable opportunity for revenue growth through mobile app development, which is only verified through the 15.5 billion dollars in spending for Q1 2024.
A great example we can use is the Starbucks application, which offers a digital wallet for clients.
A great example of a brand that has used mobile to increase sales is Starbucks. Starbucks offers a range of features that contribute to its success, but one of the most important is the digital wallet. This can be applied to any business, as the development of features can make your client’s experience better while providing additional streams for your company.
The Role of an App in Improving Customer Satisfaction
An application isn’t just a way for you to collect cash or offer services. It can be a way for you to drastically improve satisfaction. You can create a more personalized user experience, removing barriers to communication and support with your clients.
However, measuring satisfaction is what you should be regularly doing to identify any pain points that could arise, adjusting your app strategy accordingly. There are a few ways, through which you can gauge whether or not you’re successful at improving satisfaction or if your user experience leaves more to be desired:
- Surveys or feedback forms: These can provide insights into any areas for improvement.
- Net Promoter Score: NPS is a metric that measures loyalty by identifying how likely they are to recommend your services to others. Keep watching this metric closely.
- Reviews: This will help you track overall satisfaction levels.
The Role of an App in Streamlining Business Operations
Enterprises can improve their operations in several ways using business management apps. A few of these are:
- Automating routine tasks: Many repetitive and time-consuming tasks involve data entry, payroll processing, etc. Even if these take an hour or so per day, hours can add up and cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. Every minute counts and optimizing these operations through automation can result in massive savings for your company.
- Enhanced customer relationship management: Integration of customer data can help you manage and analyze client interactions more effectively, leading to improved service and more targeted marketing efforts.
- Supply chain and inventory management: Enterprise app development can optimize operations by tracking your inventory in real-time. As a result, you can manage orders and forecast demand, which can reduce costs and overstocking.
- Data analytics and reporting: You can integrate analytics tools that generate reports and identify trends. This can help you gain insights and make informed decisions to improve your operations.
Mobile App Development Strategy
When you’re working on your app strategy, there are a few steps you can take. We’ll mention the main steps involved in the development of a mobile application, as we’ve already written a detailed article going over the entire process of planning, developing, and launching an app from start to finish. Visit the article to learn about the process in detail. In this article, we’ll be briefly going over the steps of the app development strategy.
The Pre-Planning Stag
This is arguably the most important stage before developing your app:
- Identify your objectives: We already touched on some options, try to identify what you’re looking to gain from your app.
- Market research: Here, you should look at other competitors. Who are they catering to? What pain points are they addressing? It’s estimated that around 30,000 apps have been submitted in 2023. This goes to show how saturated the market is. Identifying your competitive advantage and the unique pain points you’re addressing can take your business to new heights.
- Define your budget: During research, you should also identify the number required to achieve your desired results. Things to consider include the overall sales funnel, operational costs, and your goals regarding downloads, customer engagement, user retention, etc.
- Define your app’s features: You don’t have to include all features right from the start. An app is released in several stages, starting with the minimum viable product, or MVP, during which you gather market feedback and confirm your hypotheses. Prioritize the right features for the initial stage.
- Develop your app’s design wireframes: Before the app design, A wireframe is created, which is a schematic placement of your app’s screens. Designers use it to create prototypes faster with minimal changes after the planning stage. These wireframes are just a blueprint, while the app design is developed during later stages.
The Development Stage
At this point, the app starts taking shape. Functionality is developed, the design is created, and the app becomes a tangible product you can interact with.
- Designers work on the app design, look, and feel, creating a design that aligns with the brand’s image.
- Developers work on the app’s code.
- QA Specialists ensure that the code runs without errors or unexpected behavior.
The Release Stage
The app release stage consists of a few steps:
- Creating store accounts: The client or development team can complete this step, it’s entirely up to the client’s discretion.
- Preparation: The recently created account should be filled with several crucial files in preparation for the build.
- Final build verification: The app should be verified and tested for successful installation. This is simulated through the app store. Android apps use Firebase which offers a tool called App Distribute, while iOS utilizes TestFlight.
- Submitting the build for review: With every release, you risk your build being rejected. Workarounds should be considered when you reach the app release stage.
- Final development stage: If there are any complications, last-minute fixes may be necessary before submission.
- Publishing the build: The app is finally published and listed in your desired stores.
The Importance of Security
When you consider that the majority of the world uses mobile phones to go online, it's clear why hackers see value in gaining access to user devices. One way they might do this is by breaching your service to steal data, highlighting the real need for reinforced security.
This is especially true if you’re running a service that requires user financial information, such as credit or debit card details. A breach could cause significant problems for your users and inflict reputational damage on your brand that may be difficult to recover from.
Here is what you should pay attention to to protect your users from malicious organizations:
- Secure your backend and data storage.
- Eliminate communication vulnerabilities.
- Use secure authentication procedures.
- Use adequate data encryption.
App Performance Best Practices
When you release your app, it’s important to monitor its performance through key metrics and KPIs to help you adjust your app strategy accordingly. Here are a few things to keep on the lookout:
- User growth rate
- The number of downloads
- User retention rate
- Session length
- Daily or monthly active users
- App churn rate
- Average revenue per user
- Cost per acquisition
Importance of Monitoring App Performance
This is arguably one of the most important steps to owning a successful mobile app. Thanks to monitoring your app’s performance, you can improve user experience and identify areas for improvement based on tangible data. This data-driven approach is what makes or breaks your app.
By gaining insight into how your clients interact with your application—these metrics include how long they spend on certain pages and which features they use the most—you can take this information and use it to make the app more user-friendly, improving your business’ performance in the process.