As mobile technology advances, there are certain trends that will pop up and will be important for any business to adapt to if they’d like to stand a chance of keeping up to date and readily available to provide mobile-related services to customers. While some trends may die out and be nothing more than a short trend, some will flourish onto becoming an important tool for business. That is why it’s important to adapt to trends to future-proof your business for years to come.
Create a mobile friendly website
This is probably the most important for businesses of all sizes. Having a mobile optimized website is incredibly important for your business and will help you to improve upon many aspects. With a mobile friendly website, you’ll be able to provide new and potential customers with the services or information they need right on the spot. Mobile websites beat desktop websites because they will load much faster on mobile devices, they will display everything correctly and neatly, and offer a much more intuitive experience compared to browsing desktop websites on a smartphone or tablet.
On top of this, mobile websites are usually a lot better than apps for business purposes because it’s much easier to provide a mobile experience to all mobile operating systems without having to force the user to download an application. They can instead instantly access everything they need to know just by visiting your website.
Put your Business in Mobile Search Apps
Whether somebody is looking for your business on Google Maps, Foursquare or through a simple search engine, if you don’t put yourself out there, customers will not be able to find you. By providing your business to Google maps, and social GPS enabled apps like Foursquare, you’re immediately opening yourself up to potential customers in the area, offering customers that already know about your business the quickest route possible to your place of business, and generally providing your location and service to those that may otherwise not know about you or the location you are based in.
Apps like Foursquare also allow for users to share their visits to certain places with their friends, and this is a very strong way to get your name out there.
Provide Mobile ‘Reward’ Systems
While you may not have a big enough budget to spend on expensive marketing schemes, there are plenty of ways to make your business more likeable using mobile technology and many are relatively cost-friendly.
One method would be to offer benefits or discounts to those who ‘check-in’ to your place of business multiple times. When someone checks in with an app like Foursquare, all of their friends will know that they’ve visited that location. This will gather interest from their friends, especially if they check-in to that place multiple times. To create an incentive to check-in, you could offer some kind of reward in-store for those who check in a certain amount of times over a weekly, monthly or yearly period.
Use mobile Apps to Manage your Business
+You and those associated with your business could benefit greatly from using mobile applications to manage areas of your business. For example, you could use a mobile cloud hosting service to share, upload and distribute files to everybody involved in the business. You could also use a note-keeping app to record notes and share them with those working with you. These kind of apps also have quick access from desktop devices making it incredibly easy to share something while you’re out of the office via mobile and have those in the office access it almost immediately afterwards. Email, text, video contact, and many other digital things you may need for your business can be accessed a lot quicker from mobile.