Supplement your brand experience with a mobile app

Creating an app for the brand is one way in which businesses can supplement their existing brand without defining it, and it can have a myriad of benefits for both the consumer and the business.

For the brands themselves, the advantages of implementing an app and including it in the entire mobile strategy are plentiful. Apps can help to build relationships and loyalty with consumers, as well as increasing visibility and accessibility. Businesses can bypass email spam and junk folders by sending notifications directly to the app, and they can connect with customers that are on-the-go and might just be steered into their store with a well-placed ad or a discount code. Social networking strategies will be enhanced, repeat business is increased and the brand is reinforced.

The benefits for customers are too abundant to list comprehensively, but here are just a few. They can access your inventory easily and check if the desired product is in stock, they receive special notifications that can be used to offer discounts to loyal brand followers, they have your contact information stored on their phone at all times without needing to track down the contact page of your website, and many of them can even function offline, where mobile web browsing requires an internet connection.

As beneficial as these apps are, there are a few pitfalls to be avoided. Some apps, through poor coding or some other fault, can take up huge amounts of storage space on devices – consumers will be tempted to delete these when they start to interfere with the number of photos or the amount of music they can store on their smartphone. Many retail apps can also be highly intrusive, sending notifications too often, being too heavy on the ads and not being valuable enough to justify the amount of storage space they take up on a device.

If these pitfalls can be avoided, there’s no doubt that implementing an app into your mobile strategy can be an incredible boost to a brand, and can open up new channels for marketing that the business never thought possible.

Here are three things to remember as you consider a mobile strategy and some thoughts on why you might expand your mobile strategy beyond the app.

1. Don’t build an app just to get downloads; build something people will actually use.
2. Building a mediocre app is just as bad as selling a mediocre product. The power of mobile is that you can interact with a consumer at any moment. The experience is everything. Make the first version of the app as good as you can within your budget. You can always add features when you release updates.
3. You might not need to create your own app, you may be able to sponsor or co-develop and app with a partner who already reaches your target audience. For example, P&G sponsored a third-party bathroom finder app called “Sit or Squat” to reach Charmin users. Can a toilet paper brand find anything more targeted than this?