Planning a marketing initiative without considering mobile platforms is simply losing a big sales leads generation opportunity. Mobiles are overtaking PCs in term of usage, convenience, price and portability. Do you know?

•  There were 1, 746, 176 mobile users compared to 341, 263 PC users by December 2012 (Gartner – 2013)
• Android by Google  is leading the mobile markets with 60.3% followed by 23% iOS by Apple (Gartner – 2013)
• 89% of the smartphone users use their phone throughout the day.
• There are average 41 application per mobile phone.
• Social Media applications and games are the top used applications.

It means there are 6 times more mobile users than the PC users. Mobile users are interacting with the mobile applications the whole day. That is why marketing strategy over mobile platforms should be built around mobile applications. Keep reading to explore some interesting strategies and steps as part of the overall marketing strategy to define the mobile applications targeted for collecting the sales leads.

Strategies To Reach The Targeted Audience

You can reach your targeted audience using mobile apps by adopting any one of these two strategies given below:

Strategy 1: Aim the Working Time Preferences of Your Targeted Audience

Adopting this strategy, you can target the working time preferences of your prospects. Analyse the professions and designations of your prospects and try to explore the exact activities they perform at their workplace. Few of their tasks needs extensive usage of apps in PCs or smartphones.

You can easily offer them something that is helpful to them to perform their official activities without being bound to their workplace. By using your offered app on smartphone, they should feel convenient to perform their duties from remote areas or outside the office. This will also help them to work from home.

So analyzing the gaps between their needs and duties to be performed at workplace, you can easily offer something interesting to your targeted audience.

Strategy 2: Aim the Leisure Time Preferences of Your Targeted Audience

Adopting this strategy, you can target the leisure or leaisure time of your targeted audience that can be leveraged to engage them. Initially you need to explore the interests and hobbies of the targeted audience and then inspect the activities they perform in free time.

After learning the activities of their leisure time, you can offer something interesting that has some attraction for them. Engage them in the activity of their interest and you’ll find a good sales lead from majority of your registered users. Keep sharing with them your campaigns offers, products or services that will ultimately increase the brand awareness and sales volume.

Once the strategy part is done. The next question comes up that how to define the mobile application. Below we will share the steps that will help you define the mobile application.

How To  Define A Powerful Mobile App for The Target Audience?

An interest capturing and sticky mobile app needs a great idea. You need to be innovative while offering some new mobile application to your targeted audience. Following the steps, you can easily analyse the currents status of mobiles applications usage and what your target audience demands from their service providers.

Step 1: Collect Right Stats About Mobile Apps

You begin with gathering the data of mobile apps usage in different smartphones according to their operating systems. Conduct a thorough research to learn which application is the most downloaded in which category and on which platform.  It will help you to learn the interest of your audience.

Android and iOS capture the most of the market share of smartphone industry, so you can target these to begin with.

Step 2: Study the Features of Related Apps and Design some Interesting Features

Next, you need to study the apps features that your target audience is using the most, learn the workflow of these features and analyze what’s different and unique in them that is attracting the users. Using Reverse Engineering technique with the different apps, you can easily design and develop new features that can create best value addition for the target segment through the mobile App.

Step 3: Ask for the Registration While Using Some Enticing Features

One idea is to offer the mobile app for free. There must be a free download for anyone who wants to download it using Android or iOS.

After installation of the application on the smartphone, there should be unrestricted access to all the features and benefits of using this app. Few features can be kept open to all. But a few PRO features are restricted  and need the user to be registered before they can use those.

Case Study: Barclays Bank

Barclays Bank introduced an interesting application to increase sales and retain the existing customers. They offered some interesting features for the app users that required a ‘Bank Account Number’ to proceed further. Only registered members of the bank could access these features. This application helped tremendously in increasing the number of new bank customers.

Conclusion:

 The facts and figures shows that there is a huge opportunity for the businesses to target the prospects using mobile applications.

 Mobile apps can really give boost to business development by winning sales leads using innovative apps that fulfills a need or expectations of your targeted audience in the working or leisure time mobile usage. You can easily choose the right audience at the right place without any barriers to entry. Create something innovative, attract the audience, fulfill their needs, give something extra by value addition and generate a handsome number of sales leads for sure.

Appendix A: Smartphone vs PC Market Share

The production of lower-priced tablets & smartphones and their growing performance is causing the shift from PCs to tablets and smartphones. As consumers shift their time away from their PC to tablets and smartphones, they will no longer see their PC as a device that they need to replace on a regular basis.

The traditional PC market of notebooks and desk-based units is expected to decline 7.6 percent in 2013. This is not a temporary trend induced by a more severe economic environment; it is a reflection of a long-term change in user behavior. Beginning in 2013, ultramobiles will help offset this decline, so that sales of traditional PCs and ultramobiles combined show a 3.5 percent decline in 2013.

Appendix B: Top 3 Mobile Operating Systems

Google’s Android operating system is dominating mobile operating systems shipments according to both Gartner and IDC and will continue to lead the market through 2016. The following graph shows Gartner’s analysis of 60.3% of all mobile devices globally running the Android operating system in 2012 and it will lead in term of market share for many upcoming years.

Appendix C: Mobile Applications Usage Statistics

The average smartphone has 41 apps, and each day more new mobile devices are activated than there are children born into the world. Across all the main smartphone platforms, users still spend the most time using legacy phone features  In most cases users appear comfortable with the OS features provided (SMS, browser etc.) and see no need to download alternatives or are unaware alternatives exist. However, it is also clear that the popularity of social media and mobile gaming is increasing day by day and this trend is set to continue in line with rising smartphone penetration.

An Apple iPhone user downloads 48 new apps per month and the Android users download 35 new apps per month on average according to a study. 89% of the smartphone users use their phone throughout the day.

Appendix D: More Smartphone Facts

• Out of the 5 billion mobile phone users in the world, 1.08 billion are smartphone users
• 1.3 million Android devices are activated every day — that means that every 24 hours, more than four times as many new smartphones and tablets are set up than babies (300,000 a day) are born.
• More than 91.4 million smartphones users are from the U.S
• Smartphone platform Android has the highest market share of 46.9%
• 89% of smartphone users use their smart phones throughout the day
• 92% of smartphone users use their smartphone to send text messages to other phones, whereas, 84% of users use their smartphones for browsing the internet
• The age group of 25-34 has the highest smartphone penetration rate of 62%
• 50% of Android Smartphones and 43% of Apple iPhone users are younger than 34 Years.
• 53% of smartphone users are male and 47% are female
• Android Smartphone owners consume the highest amount of data at 582 Mbs a month, while iPhone owners on consume 492 Mbs of data a month on average
• Apple iPhone users download the maximum applications per month, which is 48
• Downloading applications is the most popular data usage activity for smartphone users
• Singapore has the highest smartphone penetration rate in world, which is 54%

References:

http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23818212#.UPeTeSdi58F
http://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2013/01/17/2013-roundup-of-mobility-forecasts-and-market-estimates/
http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2408515
https://wirelessintelligence.com/analysis/2011/03/smartphone-users-spending-more-face-time-on-apps-than-voice-calls-or-web-browsing/271/
http://www.go-gulf.com/blog/smartphone/
http://blog.flurry.com/

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