A shift into a mobile-first reality is a fact that leading brands began to realize in the past few years. This mobile revolution has blossomed in the growing app culture and economy, with both
ecosystems gaining power and dominating corporate strategies almost simultaneously.
User awareness and funky user interface designs do not make the cut nowadays for marketers and executives to
boost the sales of the brand (product or service) they manage.
It is of the utmost importance to understand how the app culture works and create applications that offer added value and tackle
with a specific customer need, aligned with the company's vision, operations and brand.
A Brand's Guide to the New App Culture
Based on Vision Mobile's research
outputs, the global app economy was worth $68 billion in 2013 and is projected to grow to $143 billion in 2016. That makes sense if you consider the billion apps available in both major operating
ecosystems (iOS and Android), and the existing monetization methods.
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What will make your application work, what will make your application stand out, and what will make your application
successful are all valid questions. The actual answers come hand in hand with the brand’s own strategic vision of capitalizing this channel.
A mobile app is a marketing tactic, not a
strategy. Mobile strategy is directly associated with the brand’s overall strategy and vision.
Whether you are a top-of-mind brand, or you are striving to be, every channel you present
to your customers should be aligned with the projection of your brand in each (media) marketing and advertising effort.
App Conception
The app conception of consumers
is actually their app cognition silo, and it is maturing. At the same time, their attention span is expanding, with all the choices available at hand.
Users relate an app with a task or at
least specific purpose. They use one app for calling a cab, one app for using maps, one for ordering food online, one for mobile banking, one for contactless payments, one for booking flights and the
list goes on.
For brands, that translates into apps that tackle a specific user's need, an added value on an existing consumer habit, a new way to solve a problem, or a efficient tool that is
associated with the product or service.
Imagine the case of any retailer, whether it is a chain of supermarkets, clothing stores or any brick-and-mortar company. It would be exactly to the
point to build an application that enables your customers to see available products, create shopping lists, redeem sweepstakes or time-sensitive coupons, adding some location-based targeting
“spice.”
Mobile Apps As Direct Sales Medium
Taking it a step further, a brand's strategic vision on mobile is not limited to capitalizing cool features and creating
a useful app. A big monetization opportunity comes when you view mobile as a direct sales medium and revenue stream.
Users all over the world, especially in the U.S. and Asia, are becoming
more familiar with contactless and mobile payments. Targeting tools, behavioral data storage and seamless integration of payment solutions provide a concrete base to build upon and leverage your
mobile monetization methods.
A good example of this is food-delivery apps that consistently observe increased volume of mobile orders, by delivering relevant interactive campaigns in a regular
basis, using behavioral tagging and retargeting, and providing brilliant user experience. All these lead to mobile-first or even mobile-only clients.
Top-of-Mind Apps
A key
indicator to quantify whether you own a top-of-mind app is not only the number of acquired users. The emerging KPIs that matter are retention and churn.
Customer retention, used to express
your “keepers” and recurrent sales or usage, is the opposite end of your churn rate, also known as the amount of customers or subscribers who cut ties with your service or company during a
given time period.
Both are important metrics when deciding upon your monetization methods, nevertheless churn is usually underestimated by marketers as it is quite difficult to track.
Advanced analytics give developers and brands the power to recognize flaws and retarget, keeping retention high and churn low.
Understanding what keeps your users engaged, and consistently
adding value, will eventually lead an app to become top of mind for consumers.