Look down at your phone. How many apps do you have on it? How many of those apps belong to large corporations? How many apps do you have on your phone that were launched by smaller, local businesses? In many parts of the world, it is not at all surprising to feature a whole bunch of small business apps on one’s phone. The reason why this is so is that business owners are becoming more and more aware of the fact that an app can do wonders for their brand and the overall success of their business.

Today, we will be talking about what an app can do for your business and why it might be a good idea to develop an app yourself (or more precisely, have someone develop it for you).

Apps Make a Brand Stand Out

Perhaps the best way to explain this is to use an example. Let’s, therefore, imagine that you live in a city with 1,000,000 residents and you run a business which has 99 competitors that are nearly the same in size, the type of service/product and every other aspect. The only difference is that you are the only one in the 100 to have an app that your customers and potential customers can download. For this mental exercise, let’s even forget that your app can be useful. We are talking the pure psychological moment here.

When potential customers are making their decision, your business is immediately going to stand out. Not only do you have a great website (we expect that you have a website), but you even have an app that they can download. They immediately think that you run a professional, successful business which is looking to future. From the very start, you are positioning your brand ahead of your competition and that can have incredible effects on the number of your customers and your profits.

Apps Enhance the Customer Experience

In the modern business world, it is all about the customer experience. The days of customer service are all but gone and this outdated concept has been assimilated into a much more comprehensive concept of customer experience. A business app can do wonders for the experience your customers will have with your brand and this is only going to increase their loyalty and inspire them to recommend your brand to their friends and loved ones.

With an app, you can allow your customers to get in touch with some type of customer service 24/7, 365 days a year. This is something everyone can appreciate. In addition to this, with different features, you can turn your app into a tool that will make your service so much better for the end user, your customer. For instance, you can connect your app to your project management software and set up automatic notifications when your customer’s service is finished, for example.

Apps Allow More Effective Marketing

While business apps can be great for improving the relationship between the customer and the business, they can also be used by business owners to do some direct marketing without seeming too eager, which is always something that is better avoided.

Perhaps the most obvious example of this and also the most common one are push notifications, i.e. notifications that your app will send to the users when you have something to say. For example, you can send a push notification to your app users when you come out with a new product or a service. One thing to be careful about is not to do this too often. Notifications can become bothersome and annoying and if you are not careful, you might alienate your users and cause them to remove your app.

How to Develop an App

By now, you are probably convinced that your business might benefit from an app and you are probably wondering how you can go about building one. Well, the first option is to approach one of the many app development agencies that you have in your area. You can even choose someone thousands of miles away. If you choose to do this, you need to be prepared to pay heftily for their services. Apps do not come cheap and you will need to spend upwards of $10,000 for even the most basic apps.

For small businesses that are more limited when it comes to their finances, there is another option, an option that makes app building much more affordable. This option entails approaching an app building website where you can purchase apps that have been pre-developed to a certain stage and that you can then modify and personalize for your business. For the end user, such apps will not be any less amazing and attractive while you will not bankrupt your company to have it developed.