Creating a marketing plan for a new business can be pretty overwhelming.
Imagine the toil of going through revisions for a print advertisement, the number of storyboards you have to make for your television advertisements, and the amount of money you need for these placements.
A business can not succeed and grow without a solid marketing and advertising plan, because they will always go hand in hand.
No matter how good or amazing a product is, if your audience can’t find out about it, it will still not give you the results you wish to get.
It’s all about the marketing.
A good product deserves to be broadcasted—its benefits, pricing, uniqueness, and newness. While it is true that nothing beats word of mouth as the most effective form of publicity, you still need to create hype around it and launch it in such a way that people will find out about it and eventually do the publicity for you. Traditional marketing usually involves printing materials and going through the old route of messaging.
However, in the world of entrepreneurship and as people and businesses transform to become digital catalysts, there is every reason for you to integrate technology and innovation in all your marketing plans. One of the most popular marketing strategies used by both big and budding entrepreneurs is creating mobile apps.
Mobile apps allow you to reach your target audience without asking them to do too much. You can easily access them via the mobile app and it doesn’t require your target audience to step out of their homes. Mobile apps are hassle free—your customer is one swipe away from his purchase.
Should you develop a mobile app?
Investing in developing a mobile app for your business is a smart move. You can never go wrong with apps—unless you were not able to plan it carefully. With the plethora of mobile apps available in the market today, you can still identify which apps are working well, which apps have captured the attention of the public, and which apps have been successful in engaging people.
The reality is you have thousands more competitors with mobile apps, and a much more important bit of that reality is that you need to stand out in the sea of these mobile apps. You need to create an app that will give you traction and growth. The return of investments should be high and valuable.
Wealth is generated by customers who think about your product as the generic for that segment, such as Facebook for social networking or Google for search. There are important aspects that will determine the success of your mobile app. You also need to determine how to reach out to your customers and whether they want your app.
Here are some effective and proven ways to ensure the success of your app:
Identify your target market.
As much as you are excited to reach more people and grow your customer base right away, this is not a smart idea if you are just starting to make yourself known in the market. You can begin first by focusing on a narrow market.
When you go all the way and create big plans, your cost is extremely high and your competitors will take advantage of your mistakes with the first instance of your product. Instead, you should start small and build an app for a very narrow audience. Most often, you don’t know whether your app will fly or die and the best validation is when the customers use it.
Everyone knows Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg started building the platform only for Harvard students.
Once people realized this product was promising, Zuckerberg fixed and made it perfect and started selling it at other colleges. The advantage of building an app for a small number of users is that you get the opportunity to make your mistakes with only that select audience.
You get the chance to enhance your mobile app to cater to your customer’s demands by observing their behavior and put those lessons into product enhancement. This will help you to craft a better mobile app.
Acquire customers personally.
The best thing you can do as an entrepreneur is get feedback from your customers. You want to give them the product that will best satisfy them and will give them what they need.
You need to personally acquire your customers and hear it straight from them. There are customers who will buy into your app at an early stage, typically from your close or extended network and social media followers, who might become your brand evangelists.
You should value these customers because they often know more people in their own domain and help get word-of-mouth traction, which is undoubtedly the best way of advertising. You can grow that number gradually, week after week, by focusing on smaller increments and growing your business and app the secure and slow way.
There are many ways to gain traction with your app. It can be good to be aggressive, but it will also help if you create strategies that will best work for your app and for your business.