The growing use of mobile apps is a global trend in the business world right now. Every brand or enterprise strives to design their own mobile app that will represent their business value and serve as a powerful marketing tool for customer interaction.
To date, the App Store can boast over 1.85 million apps, whereas Google Play offers 2.56 million apps. Both platforms are major leaders in the mobile app market. Having a mobile app published on either platform can be a strong competitive advantage for many businesses.
However, not everyone ends up being there. If you are not sure whether it is worth placing a business app in the app store, this article is meant to dispel your fears.
8 Important Reasons Why Your Business Should be Present in The App Store
Here are 8 important reasons why your business app should be present in the app store:
#1. Brand visibility
There are 3.5 billion smartphone users in the world, among them 49% use at least 11 mobile apps per day. The trend for mobile app usage does not cease to grow. In 2019, a total of 204 billion mobile app downloads were made in app stores.
Today we can see that mobile apps become a prevalent form of customer interaction with brands. Placing your mobile app in the app store will help to boost your business growth as more users will have a chance to run into your brand online. The presence in the app store also signifies a sort of prestige.
There are 8.93 million mobile apps right now, but only a smaller part of them is allowed to appear in the app store. If you become one of them, your brand visibility grows at the speed of light, which eventually will give you more downloads, in-app purchases, and revenue.
#2. Marketing channel
App stores can be considered an effective start point of the marketing funnel. Encountering your mobile app by chance, some users may get interested in what you offer and immediately install your app. Based on that, it is much easier to keep them involved as you can use a variety of user engagement techniques, such as push notifications, in-app messaging, and games, in order to prolong their staying in your app.
The presence in the app store also opens up more opportunities for launching international marketing campaigns. Since the app store gathers visitors from all over the world, there is a high chance you can obtain new customers from the regions you did not expect to serve.
#3. Business optimization
If you are working on an effective strategy for business optimization, uploading your app to the app store might be a smart step towards its implementation.
The majority of app stores are interested in high-quality and valuable apps and tend to rank them on the top 100 list that serves as a credible guideline for new users searching through the platform. If your mobile app is fit with the app store’s requirements, it will let you receive different benefits leading to your better market position.
For instance, it will take you less effort to become visible to prospects as the app store will recommend you as a reliable brand to all users.
#4. Branding
Being present in the mobile app store does not only result in better marketing metrics but also allows entrepreneurs to come up with sophisticated branding campaigns aimed to help you catch a larger market share.
For instance, if your mobile app is well-designed and optimized for search engines, the app store most likely will favor you over other brands as well as recommend your app to potential customers from your market segment. It will make you more accessible to potential buyers as well as random users that can find your brand appealing.
Similarly, your mobile app can be showed on a par with your competitors when the user browses the app market in the search of a good and useful app.
#5. User experience
The admission to the app store is also a way to assess the quality of your app. Since the most prestigious app stores publish well-designed mobile apps, your presence there will prove that your mobile app offers extreme usability and top-level design to its audience.
Based on that, it won’t be difficult for you to encourage a new user to install your mobile app on their smartphone. However, providing both excellent UX and awesome design can be a challenge for many brands. One should think about different key features to implement, such as a user-friendly and intuitive interface, smooth navigation, contactless payment methods, and high-resolution images, and diverse content.
Supporting it all in one mobile app can be costly and probably will require hiring a bunch of software engineers to make sure a quality update happens every three months. But if you manage to maintain all of these features and improvements, you are bound to win a place in any app store.
#6. Offline mode
Finally, the biggest advantage of mobile apps over websites and WPAs is that they can continue their performance even when the connection drops off. This feature considerably increases user engagement as they do not have to stop their buyer’s journey and can store their preferred items on the wish-list as well as learn more information about the goods or services they like.
The offline mode can be viewed as a competitive advantage. Mobile apps with the support for offline mode tend to be ranked higher in the app store as their users report a higher level of satisfaction with their in-app experiences. If you are not thinking about a multiplayer game app, offline mode is a desirable feature to deliver in your mobile app design, especially if you want to gain your audience’s affection in the shortest time possible.
#7. Data analytics
The presence in the app store is likely to increase monthly downloads and organic traffic to your mobile app as a result of which you will gather more data on how users interact with your product. This knowledge is critical for your further mobile app improvement and development.
Relying on these insights, you will be able to understand how to make your mobile app fully compliant with your audience’s needs and expectations. Moreover, if your marketing team is in the habit of holding regular customer feedback surveys and uses email and website contact forms that gather customer reviews telling the client’s attitude towards your brand, it won’t be difficult for you to track consumer behavior and preferences and consequently adjust your mobile app’s upgrades to their wants and wishes.
Having your mobile app in the app store is an amazing opportunity to learn more about data analytics, which, in turn, will let you move higher on the app platform.
#8. Scalability
Finally, app stores are a simple way to popularize your brand and scale up your business on a global level. Most business apps published in the app stores are characterized by a high level of brand awareness and tend to build their customer base faster than other companies relying on marketing methods that do not involve the use of app stores.
Similarly, it helps you establish a good reputation that will precede your brand in the future, thus attracting even more customers to your goods or services. The presence of Google Play or the App Store, in particular, is a sign of one or another brand’s credibility, which encourages customers to opt for such brands first.
How to become the number one app in the app store
Be it Google Play or the App Store, it is not enough to submit an app to an app store to get published there. Your mobile app should comply with the guidelines of this store that often include software, testing, performance, and marketing requirements.
Since each store is concerned about data security, intellectual property, and other legal aspects of content being distributed in the app store, applicants should carefully design their apps so that they can meet all of these requirements upon the app’s completion.
The best approach is to examine the app store guidelines before you embark on the app development. This approach will let you save money and avoid unnecessary moderations that often come with inconsistencies popping up during design or testing stages. To put it simply, if you want to create a product that will perfectly meet the app store editors’ expectations, start with exploring the app store requirements.
Moreover, it is paramount to think of the tech specification of your business app in advance. Native apps are more likely to offer impeccable user experience and have a higher chance of getting published if you aim at Google Play or App Store. Similarly, it is vital to think about your app’s responsiveness and data processing capabilities. As more users will download it, it will have to process larger data volumes, thus increasing its performance.
About the Author!
Betty Lockwood is a web developer, blogger, fintech expert and caring mother of two kids. She loves to write about new technologies, business news, traveling, and music events. Betty is also an editor-in-chief at Computools. Follow Betty on Twitter.
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