On the business development front, we’ve noticed a handful of clients and prospects that have expressed interest in developing a downloadable application for their brands. Who can blame them? I personally get giddy every time I fire up the Urbanspoon app on my iPhone. “Where should I eat tonight?? The possibilities are ENDLESS!” And we’ve all killed an hour or 70 playing Angry Birds. But is this the right solution for your brand / product / service / Russian mob scam? Let’s examine a few questions that you should ask yourself to see if it makes sense.
Will it drive sales?
First you need to be honest with yourself and ask, “Is this critical to my business?”
For a brand like REI to develop a mobile app with e-commerce capability that allows users to purchase a new camping tent with a few swipes, a mobile app can be an incredibly powerful way to connect to users. The app delivers a new, convenient purchase channel to drive sales thereby justifying the ROI for building an app in the first place.
However, if your brand is Yoplait, you may need to think twice since the same e-commerce opportunity is not there. Instead, you’ll likely explore content centered around brand positioning and identity, perhaps exploring more health-specific / promotional content. Which brings us to our next point…
Will it be good?
Sounds easy, right? Let’s continue to use the Yoplait example. So we can’t purchase online (cause that’d be gross) but maybe instead we build an app tied to healthy dieting and exercise. That is a very competitive space and you’ll be competing with best-in-class applications that will often be so much more robust with content, support, maintenance and updates. Think about the competition among health (Lose It!, Weight Watchers Mobile, Calorie Counter & Diet Tracker) and fitness (Nike+GPS, FitnessBuilder, RunKeeper). Building a mobile app on the cheap to compete against these is like trying to build a bike in your garage on the weekend, then racing it in the Tour de France in July.
Although this space is expected to experience tremendous growth (2010: 10.9 billion downloads; 2014 (projected): 76.9 billion downloads!), maintaining user engagement will continue to be a challenge as one in four apps that are downloaded are only used once.
Will it be costly?
It could be. Very quickly. Alarmingly so. Let’s say you wanted to develop an app for iPhones, which only account for a quarter of the total smartphone market. Don’t forget you’d probably also want to create a sister app so that Android users don’t feel left out. And what about Blackberry users? With each platform you want to reach, your development and maintenance costs will increase as well.
Until mobile apps can be more universally standardized, this is the harsh reality. The good news is that there are some companies (MoSync, PhoneGap) out there that are working on that as we speak.
How long do I want to support it?
Creating an app is a lot like having a baby. You don’t just give birth, raise it to be a toddler and then assume it can go out, get a job and become a functioning member of society. There’s a little more work to it than that. With each app that you develop, you have to manage against ongoing maintenance and bugs, operating system updates, and regular testing and that’s assuming that you’ve created an incredible app that doesn’t need any updates to functionality and/or capabilities (both of which your competitors in the space will surely be improving over time).
Once you create an app and let it out “into the wild,” – so to speak, you are now responsible for making sure that app will continue to function flawlessly indefinitely, or you risk a hit to your brand reputation. That is very much unlike a mobile-optimized site that you can swap out whenever digital objectives shift or a campaign expires.
It also warrants consideration that in the next few years, as the mobile web continues to evolve and become more dynamic, the need for specialized downloadable apps will diminish.
If I build it, will they come?
They might, but it’ll take some work to achieve that. Assuming you’ve built a bullet-proof mobile app, you will then need to put resources against driving the awareness of that app. With thousands of applications and hundreds more released each day, assuming consumers will just stumble upon your app is a risky bet.
This support could come in a variety of forms such as Digital PR, advertising, social media outreach and even search optimization localized to the corresponding app store. If your thought is that your mobile app is simply an extension of a communications plan but you’re measuring success by number of downloads, you may need to consider flipping that approach on its head or prioritize which is more important.
Hmmm…so now what?
Depending on what your mobile needs are, our experts are ready and willing to talk through digital solutions to achieve your brand goals while maximizing your investment in the process. We hate to see wasted money go down the drain. We’d much rather have you spend that money on pizza – preferably sent to our office at 77 North Washington St, 8th Floor, Boston, MA 02114.
