By , Sc Moatti
Published August 10, 2016
Since 2014, people spend more time browsing the Internet on their smartphones than on their desktops. Businesses cannot ignore mobile as a valuable channel to reach their customers anymore.
Marketing teams are focusing on reallocating a bigger budget to mobile. But to be truly effective, mobile marketing requires the involvement of technology, and the cost may outweigh the benefit.
When starting a business, every dollar counts. So how much should entrepreneurs actually invest in mobile? When making the decision, here are three options to consider.
Take this risk at your own peril. Make no mistake - no business ignoring mobile today will still be alive in five years.
Why do I say that? Look at your customers, employees and friends. They all carry at least one mobile product at all times - their smartphone. If a business ignores mobile today, a competitor will soon enough come up with a mobile offering. Since everyone is on mobile, that competitor will quickly grab market share.
Remember what happened to Kodak, Yahoo and Nokia? They refused to adapt to mobile and the tide quickly turned on them. Denial is someone else’s opportunity. It happens faster than you think.
Related: 3 Ways to Use Mobile Marketing to Keep Customers Coming Back
What’s the minimal investment you need to make in mobile? The minimal investment you can make in mobile includes three things.
Related: Getting Started With Small Business App Development
My recommended starter investment is to add an active presence in the top 10 apps.
Nine out of 10 people use smartphone apps instead of mobile websites so a website has significantly less reach than an app.
But by itself, that information can be misleading.
Many businesses jump to the conclusion that they need to cram their website into an app. This is a mistake. Remember the dot-com era, when companies hurried to build websites that mirrored their paper catalogs.
If you’re old enough, you’ll remember the barebone sitemaps that looked like tables of contents. Clicking links would open static web pages with lengthy product descriptions and no pictures.
Website visitors couldn’t read reviews, or go from one product to another to see what others had purchased or compare prices - let alone buy online. So few of them came back, and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy that websites were new line items on already fat IT budgets.
If companies build apps that look like cluttered websites, they’ll be left wondering: Do the benefits really outweigh the costs?
Having an app strategy works in specific situations, but it’s not for everyone. Consider this: every nine out of 10 minutes people spend on mobile is spent in the top 10 apps. And 50 percent of apps are never downloaded, not even once.
My recommendation is to maintain an active presence in the top 10 apps - social networks, like Facebook or LinkedIn, messaging platforms, like WeChat and WhatsApp, and marketplaces like Amazon and Thumbtack.
So when does it make sense to have an app strategy?
An app strategy often requires an app for iPhone, Android, tablets, smartwatches, etc. Each platform requires a new product and a new team so it can get complex and expensive fast.
Related: Why Your Small Business Needs a Mobile App
There’s likely a business case for making an app if any of the following is true.
Mobile offers businesses many opportunities to reinvent themselves, but they need to carefully assess the cost versus the benefit.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/to-invest-in-mobile-or-not-to-invest-mobile-that-is-the-question