The mobile’s Wild West Frontier - apps
You can, it seems, get an app for anything, from catapulting cartoon birds to making your phone fart. That last one is disturbingly popular! Right now there are over 300,000 iPhone apps and the Android market is catching up quickly. So, it's difficult to ignore. But is it worth getting involved?
At 20:20 we think the answer is an emphatic yes. There might be a lot of apps out there, but they offer a superb way of creating really deep engagement with customers and new revenue streams. As the word suggests, apps are applications, programs designed to make the most of the phone’s functions, such as location based services, the camera, and so on. Phones allow for a focus and pizzazz you can’t always get on a website.
For example we’ve all heard of Angry Birds, and some of us have wasted several man years playing it! As an experience, it’s easy to get grips with and compelling, because it’s designed around what the phone is good at: providing a colourful, compact and easy to use interface.... yet it stays simple. Imagine an app for your brand where people played with it obsessively for weeks and weeks... or like National Rail app or Nike app, it became an indispensible part of your day.
Although games and quirky little apps caught everyone’s imaginations quickly enough, what’s really interesting is how apps are integrating with or replacing websites. Guess what the biggest app is on most phones? We’ll give you a clue, it’s something to do with faces and books... Yep, facebook app is arguably as enjoyable and more easy to use than the website. It also comes with unique functionality such as location based facebook Places, which offers a stunning way for brands to create local promotions integrating barcodes, special deals... you name it.
One great question we were asked – what makes an app better than developing a mobile website? The simple answer is that it’s horses for courses, but if you can think of a useful or fun service that could be quite intense and regularly used, such as a game, then an app is where it’s at – apps can be made much more visible than a mobile site, as they are absolutely at the front end of Apple and Android’s strategy for content distribution. Research has shown that with a smart launch campaign, it is possible to create as much as ten times more traffic with an app than a site.
And let’s not forget money, moolah, dough, dinero... we’ve lost count of the number of furrowed brows we’ve seen as content publishers try and work out how to make money off a website... well, apps are the solution. People will pay for an app.
Apps are one of the biggest new developments in marketing for some time – they are a unique opportunity to create something truly useful and fun that could be a brilliant weapon in your marketing arsenal. But like every ‘next big thing’ they are part of a wider strategy and should be used to deliver what they are really good at: superbly involving and personal brand engagement... where there is a clear need for something functional, timely and ideally localised.