Brands might want to revisit mobile app strategies

marketingdive.com

Dive Brief:

• Branded mobile apps tend to fall into one of two categories: either designed to engage with prospects and customers, or designed to improve business processes.
• Given an overall lack of mobile app development talent, and the difficultly of grabbing consumer’s limited mobile app attention span, using apps to improve business processes might be a better approach to the tech for brands.
• However, a recent Forrester Research report finds that using mobile apps to improve processes is a better bet for most brands, and the report makes the challenge evident right in the title: "Your Customers Will Not Download Your App."

Dive Insight:

When creating branded mobile apps, companies often have to engage with external talent to develop the apps because of a lack of internal resources, and typically create the app to address two different business issues.

The Forrester research recognizes that most people only engage with a limited number of mobile apps, based on the need to find specific information. Forrester call these interactions "mobile moments," and encourages businesses to make the most of these "moments" based on users' data consumption habits.

Another challenge brands face with mobile apps is that the typical KPI tracking success for the app is number of downloads, while that metric doesn’t really reflect if the app is being used on a regular basis. The metric, thus, doesn't measure for engagement with the desired audience. 

“Owning mobile moments equates to owning at least a part of the customer relationship,” the report reads. “These moments can be monetized or, in the case of e-business professionals, used to serve your customers in their moments of need.”