Application development is popular nowadays and most companies, small and large will either have their own downloadable mobile phone application or at be at the stage of creating one. However, don't let this immense competition put you off. There are some fantastic applications which recieve plenty of downloads, such as Angry Birds which is played a cumulative 200 million minutes per day. For every success though, there are hundreds of rubbish applications that few people will download; remember those that the teams were tasked with creating on the 2011 series of the Apprentice. You might not have the budget to create a competitor for Angry Birds if you're a small company, but how do you ensure that your application doesn't fit into the latter category?
Making an application that complements your business is important, rather than creating one which can stand apart from it. You shouldn't branch into mobile development purely for the reason that everyone else, rather see your application as a way of rewarding your current customers and providing an incentive for future customers to purchase your products. Would this be something that's beneficial to your customers? Your customer could use an app to check into a location and then unlocks a special price or a discount of the day.
However, if your application isn't useful in the first place then incentivising customers to use it won't work. Coreware are often asked to build mobile applications for small businesses and they note that it's the ones that give their customers special powers that are the most popular. Chipotle, a Mexican food chain based in the US, allows their customers to click and pick-up their take-out order with their application. This is something that we're starting to see in the UK too - Pizza Express has created an application that enables diners to pay for their meal with Paypal. Add these magic touches to incentives that reward your customers for repeat custom and your application is onto a winner.
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