Apps are not just for household brands, but for all businesses. Creating an app for your business is a great way to expand your company’s reach to potential customers and continue growing your business.
Businesses are making the shift to mobile to capitalize on the mobile trend, especially commerce, which has made one of the biggest shifts in recent years. E-commerce alone is estimated to surpass $2 trillion in the coming years.
Business owners have realized that having a website doesn’t cut it anymore: Apps are the future of communicating and engaging with their customers.
How Apps Benefit Businesses
With nearly 3 million apps on both the Google Play Store and App Store, the next logical step is to move into the mobile space and engage with more customers to bring attention to your business and drive sales.
Earlier this year, it was averaged that people spend more than 5 hours a day on their mobile devices. With so many active users, it means that the company will benefit and grow from having an app. Here are some of the key benefits for creating an app for your business:
- Having an app for your business makes it easier for customers to access your products on the go and browse when they are indecisive of what products they want.
- Promotional Tool that lets you address customers directly and send them the latest promotion offers and coupons to entice customers to buy more products.
- Apps can highlight any products or services that the business offers while keeping customers up-to-date on new discounts.
- Additional revenue stream that directs users straight to the business with Push Notifications directly to the mobile device.
- Creates brand loyalty to maintain and acquire new customers with multiple channels to easily make a purchase.
When developing an app, business owners need consider developing with an App Store Optimization strategy to ensure that their metadata will target the company’s intended audience and gain immediate visibility in the app stores.
Why ASO Matters?
While there are nearly 3 million apps available on the app stores, the number of apps start to decrease depending on the specific app category. Regardless of what category your app is in, there will continue to be competition among apps forcing these business owners to create new marketing strategies.
When promoting your business’s app in the app stores, you can adjust its metadata have up-to-date information that is relevant to what your intended audience wants to see.
Here are some areas to keep in mind when developing your app:
1. Keywords
Keywords are incredibly important to your business because they show what trends and features users are searching for. When choosing which keywords to target, think about what terms and phrases are most relevant to your app. These keywords can then be integrated through the app’s title and description to explain what products, features and services your business provides.
2. App Title and Description
The title will be the first thing your customers see, meaning it needs to be short while explaining what your business can do for its customers. Address what features, products or services your app can do with high-volume keywords.
While the description may not be the first piece of text users will see, it is the largest area of text that they can read to learn about the business and the app’s core features. The description is allotted 4,000 characters, which can be used to attract customers and entice them to click “Get.” Keep the description brief with bullet points and separated feature sets to highlight products and services.
3. App Icon
Your app’s icon is the first visual representation of your company and needs to be memorable to your potential customers.
The icon should make your business quickly recognized among millions of other apps to help convert users and increase your downloads. Keywords can be used in the icon along with the app title and description, but make sure that any words used in the icon are relevant and do not make your icon look cluttered.
4. Screenshots and Video
The screenshots and preview video show the app in action and how it will benefit customers. Users can see the app’s core features along with products and services they will have when using your business’s app.
Marketing an App
Business owners that take advantage of having an app need to make sure that they not only utilize ASO best practices but also have a marketing strategy. Businesses need to market their app on the app stores and the internet to drive up hype around their app to consumers.
Since the app stores are extremely competitive, business owners need to think outside the box to make sure their intended audience quickly finds their app. Businesses can utilize marketing tools such as:
- Paid search channels
- Monitoring user reviews
- Marketing via social media
Just by taking advantage of these tools, businesses will make sure their app can be discovered on other platforms. If business owners don’t take the time to figure out which marketing strategy works best for them, then their company, brand and app are less likely to gain awareness.
Why Develop an App?
Any business owner that is entertaining the idea of developing an app should take the plunge and create an app to expand the business’s reach on potential customers. During the development process, developers should use ASO to make sure their app’s metadata is relevant and up-to-date on current user trends to target their intended audience.
Business owners that focus their efforts on marketing their app with ASO can engage with their customers easily and immediately expand their company’s brand and name faster.
Guest article written by: X