The pros and cons of developing an app for your business

The old Yellow Pages tag line, “Let your fingers do the walking” is as true today as it was when it was released in the 70s. With today’s consumers hungry for convenience and accessibility, an app seems to be a great way to direct their fingertips to your business.

The key to successful advertising is keeping your business front of your consumer’s mind and an app helps to do this whenever a consumer uses their phone. As well as improving brand recognition, there are a number of other pros for developing an app for your business:

• Easy to use and accessible anywhere, anytime
• Helps attract new customers and make them aware of your products/services
• Instant gratification by being in there when the customer is ready
• Increase revenue by generating profits from new offerings
• Enhance customer service and experience
• Build credibility as forward thinking and innovative business

But what about the cons? Here’s what you need to consider:

• Finding the right developer to build your app
• Your app has be made separately for each platform – ie: iPhone, Androids, Blackberry which you would need to do to reach most users
• It is costly – according to Mashable Business, it can cost at least $30,000 to design, implement and deploy a brand-quality iPhone app
• There are literally millions of apps on the market – you need to do your research to build an app that consumers want and are willing to pay for.

The important thing to consider is what you want your app to do. Is it to generate income or as a marketing tool to help build awareness and improve the customer experience? You need to check there aren’t other apps available that do the same thing and if there are, how will yours be different? What will make yours stand out? What are you going to charge?

There are as many pros as there are cons when developing an app for your business. It is well worth the investment to do the research before committing to the project and speaking to both developers and consumers about your idea.

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Tags: app, business