How to Ensure a Future-Proof Mobile Strategy

Author: Ku Nisha

Over the last decade, the use of mobile technology for business and marketing purposes has received massive attention from small and medium sized businesses, enterprises, and entrepreneurs, regardless of business domain. According to Heidi Cohen, in 2012 US marketers spent over USD 4.4 billion on mobile marketing, which has grown at a consistent rate in past couple of years. One of the key reasons for this increased popularity of mobile commerce and mobile marketing is increased mobile usage - especially Smartphone usage - over the past few years. study conducted in the US in2014, shows that 90% of American adults use mobile phones, of which 58% are smartphones. In addition, 32% use e-readers and 42% use tablets. These high usage rates make mobile technology a highly effective approach to meet the needs of customers and potential customers, both in terms of selling as well as marketing.

A discipline of software development, mobile application development is a way to cater to the mobile app needs of businesses and consumers. One of the challenges most organizations face in establishing a mobile strategy for their business is determining whether their mobile strategy is suitable for a longer span of time, as mobile technologies and usage trends are rapidly evolving. This raises a question whether businesses have to restructure or redevelop their mobile application and mobile marketing programs every time a new trend hits the market. The answer is ‘no.’

By devising a future proof mobile strategy, businesses can address quickly evolving trends. Future proofing your business's mobile strategy simply means that you ensure it would not become obsolete in the near future, and will continue to provide value as market trends and technologies evolve with time.

Why do companies need a future-proof mobile strategy?

Mobile technologies are evolving at an unprecedented rate. In addition, customer needs are changing at a rapid pace. Organizations need to match their offerings to meet both customer and market needs to stay competitive and get the best returns on their technology investments. A future-proof mobile strategy is a proactive way of addressing changing needs while not letting their offerings get obsolete.

Principles of future proofing

There are several principles considered useful in establishing a future proof mobile strategy. These principles form a mobile framework, which are used for planning, designing and software development stages.

  • Identify the target market

Before implementing a mobile solution for your organization, you need to understand your users. What do they expect from a mobile app? What is the prime objective of using the app? What sort of mobile devices do they use? Answering these questions will allow you to categorize your user base into distinguishable groups. This makes it easier to determine which user category is more important to reach and the potential risks and benefits of each category. Unless your mobile strategy addresses the right market segment in the right way, there is a higher chance of it becoming obsolete in the near future.

  • Select a flexible mobile development framework

It is important that an organizational mobile strategy identify the right mobile development framework to be used, based upon business requirements. It could be a HTML5 based responsive software development framework, native, or hybrid development framework. The decision largely rests upon the nature of your mobile app and for the target user. For example, if you develop a native app for a particular device type and your customer base is likely to use different Smartphone devices; your mobile strategy likely will not survive.

  • Focus on enhancing user experience

A mobile app generally has more reach that a typical web application. However, the overall user experience provided by the mobile app is very important to ensure its success. For example, giving a few features that are fast, quickly accessible, and easy to operate is better than an app with hundreds of features, which are rarely used by the mobile user. A responsive application design is also vital in enhancing user experience. Users will discontinue use of a mobile app if it does not provide them a rich user experience.

  • Focus on changing customer needs

With the amount of new features and the pace at which they are offered through technological advancement in the current technology world, customer needs are continuously evolving and are often difficult to predict. Therefore, a successful future-proof mobile strategy is the one that taps into tomorrow's customer needs today and provides relevant features in the mobile application.

  • Stay innovative

The mobile application market is very competitive and evolves at a steady pace. In order to survive and succeed in such a competitive market, it is essential to be innovative. This includes researching cost effective development methodologies, using cutting-edge technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality, and keeping abreast with changing customer needs to develop innovative mobile solutions to stay competitive and sustainable.

In the coming years, mobile technology will continue to have an extensive reach and transformative impact on businesses and users. The advanced technologies, tools and devices introduced continuously allows businesses to develop innovative applications to effectively compete in the market. In that context, the right mobile strategy is one which is future proof, so that when customer trends change (as they inevitable will) and the technology advances (at an increasingly rapid pace), businesses are able to profit from their mobile strategy in the long-term.