Helping Your Brand Commit to Your Mobile App Development Program

If you’re the minority advocate for your brand’s mobile app program, there are a few steps you can take to ensure your brand commits.

Mobile apps are a powerful platform through which brands can engage, convert and retain customers unlike ever before. Strangely, many brands continue to treat apps as necessary evils they must (but would much rather not) do.

So how can you make your advocacy easier and get your brand on board?

Ensure CTO and CMO support

Building an app that delivers real value to your users has the potential to earn you a prolonged relationship with a highly engaged customer, increasing brand loyalty and sales.

But to get there you need the full support of the CTO and CMO. They’ll ensure the necessary budget and the best creative, marketing and development resources are allocated and maintained.

Get mobile apps in the budget

During annual budget planning, be sure that mobile apps are a line item in the budget. The resources should be significant enough that you can adapt to changing user needs, as well as the release of each platform’s newest OS release and new hardware announcements.

Don’t just check the box 

Last month I was onsite with a prospect and was told the impetus for our meeting was that the chairman of the board was humiliated when he had to admit to a colleague that his brand didn’t have an app. Your brand should never make an app to pacify a desire to check the box that says “Yes, I have an app.”

Because this app is being designed solely to solve the chairman’s deep embarrassment over not having one, the resulting app will be made quickly, cheaply and without focus on what problems it solves for their customers. The result will be a frustrating process, and an unsuccessful app, providing further “proof” that mobile doesn’t work to the majority.

Develop a marketing plan

There are over 1.3 million apps on the App Store. To be discovered, it is essential you have a significant and comprehensive marketing plan in place well before the app launches. Further, the plan should be monitored and optimized regularly to ensure maximum ROI. There are a host of powerful solutions to ensure your app is seen and downloaded.

If you can’t secure the necessary budget and support from your brand, don’t move forward with an under-resourced, under-marketed and inferior app. It will tarnish your brand, upset your customers, waste resources and achieve few of its KPIs.

Instead, I’d suggest channeling your efforts to engage mobile users in alternate ways. Both in-app advertising and Facebook advertising have an extraordinary reach into mobile.

These steps will help ensure your mobile app development project is well supported, funded, staffed and marketed. With these elements in place you will have the foundation needed to develop exception mobile solutions to your customers’ problems.