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A strong mobile app strategy is an absolute necessity for companies just getting started with custom mobile app development or those looking to revamp or overhaul their existing software. Put simply, it’s the best way to ensure your app is doing everything you want it to do—both for your company and for your current (and potential) customers.
A mobile app strategy is similar to a digital product strategy, but more specialized to consider the mobile platform at a deeper level. To ensure your strategy is as effective as possible, we recommend five essential focus areas of mobile app strategy: building your business case, understanding your market, defining success, building a roadmap, and developing a launch plan.
A mobile app should be a successful part of a larger business plan. As such, before you can get started, you need to understand what it needs to accomplish. Key questions that all stakeholders involved in the project should align to include:
If a key objective of your app is to be profitable, you will also need to explore different mobile app monetization strategies to determine the best ones to meet your goals.
Per Statista, advertisements are currently the most preferred form of monetization in apps, especially in the US. Interestingly, global markets saw more utilization of paid apps and in-app billing (i.e., subscriptions or in-app purchases).
Maximizing ROI from mobile apps requires balancing revenue generation with user satisfaction. Overburdening users with banners, pop-ups, and other ads can cause frictions that ultimately drive users off the app—and potentially onto competitors—so it’s important to consider the pros and cons of different monetization strategies before deciding on the right one.
A knowledge of the market your app will function in is a crucial part of building a successful mobile app strategy. Some of the best ways to explore your market include:
With this work done, you’ll want to be sure that all stakeholders, from developers to adopters and testers, are aligned around a mobile app strategy with a uniform definition for—and measures of—success.
That comes from analyzing certain factors key to the development process, such as:
Once you’ve explored the information available to you, you’ll want to align on how you will measure success for your mobile app. If stakeholders are having trouble agreeing on what success looks like, A North Star Strategy workshop can be a great way to get everyone on the same page. This type of workshop helps guide a team through the process of determining the most important metric for success.
With clear goals and metrics in mind, you can start prioritizing features that will manifest your vision more efficiently – this applies to both development and ongoing UX.
It’s also important to consider industry-specific trends and expectations. For example, the features that make a good banking app change over time as users now see functions like instant check deposits as basic rather than the exciting development it once was.
To that end, an effective mobile app strategy needs to be proactive, considering all of the possible features and prioritizing them into the ones that will help you best achieve your business goals in the short and longer term. While it can be tempting to want every possible feature for launch, creating a roadmap can help you understand what your users need most and what can wait for future releases.
Even the best mobile apps can’t succeed without a go-to-marketing or mobile app marketing strategy. This strategy needs to include a few key things including:
The best mobile app marketing strategy will cover your launch planning and also a mobile app engagement strategy. It’s important to consider how you will retain users once they become users of your app.
If your team has a mobile app strategy in place, it’s important to assess it regularly to determine whether it’s meeting (or on track to meet) its defined goals. This is vital to your overall mobile app management strategy and should happen continuously.
One of the primary goals of regular review is to identify areas for improvement and innovation. For example, you may discover that a new feature is not garnering users’ attention. That can lead to prioritizing customer experience in the next round of updates, identifying whether the issue lies within the functionality itself or its positioning—for example, how users navigate it.
Part of staying ahead of mobile technology trends is making conscious decisions about which new technologies to integrate. You should consider how a specific function or tool like artificial intelligence (AI) will impact your users.
To return to the example of financial institutions and their software, forward-thinking banks leverage generative AI to optimize customer journeys. This is an effective mobile app strategy because they use cutting-edge predictive analysis to answer users’ questions and provide real value instantaneously—and critically, cost-effectively.
Effective mobile app strategy starts with planning and defining what success looks like. At Hexaware, we help companies across industries plan for, develop, deploy, and manage software that meets their customers’ needs and maximizes ROI.
Get in touch today to learn more about what an effective mobile app strategy can do for you.
About the Author
Amy Kleppinger
Director of Customer Experience, Digital & Software
Amy Kleppinger is a Director of Customer Experience within the Digital & Software group at Hexaware. With a background in marketing, market research, and product management, Amy specializes in helping clients with product marketing and product management strategies.
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