There is increasing awareness of the positive effects of incorporating a mobile strategy into the overall corporate strategy, thus more and more companies are looking towards adopting it. However, the main dilemma that companies face is: Should I introduce a mobile application or a website to boost my company’s performance?
Read on further to find out which platform is more suitable for you!
Consider the nature of your product idea
What kind of features do you want to include in your mobile strategy?
In order to determine which approach is better for you, we must first consider the nature of your product idea. By firming up your product idea, we will have a clearer idea of the type of features and capabilities the system should be able to offer.
Some examples of certain features or considerations that would fit mobile app better:
- How frequently would you like users to use your product/services?
- Need to access user’s phone storage?
- Need access to user’s phone hardware (such as GPS, bluetooth, etc)?
- Complicated graphic capabilities?
- Smart home control
- Repetitive tasks
Some examples of certain features or considerations that would fit website better:
- Features that benefits from bigger screen
- Features that requires proper keyboard and mouse
- Features that needs to be universally accessible by all users who may not want to download an app
Why Mobile Apps?
In 2014, mobile app usage surpassed desktop usage. Not to say that desktop usage is dying down, however, mobile usage continues to surpass the former exponentially.
Mobile Apps Increase Brand Presence
Generally, mobile apps are a great strategy to expand your business, as you get a “home screen share”, where customers are reminded of your business everytime they use their phone.
Moreover, mobile apps allow for interactivity, as compared to websites which often have limited components that users can interact with. Since mobile apps are developed natively to be compatible to customers’ devices, it also offers a seamless user experience, which overall leaves a good impression of your brand on the customer.
Mobile Apps Can Leverage on Device Capabilities
As mobile apps are downloaded onto the user’s devices, they can leverage on mobile phone capabilities like push notifications, location, camera, touchscreen and instant updates.
On the contrary, websites require your customers to remember to search for the website first, which could lead to customers interacting less with your brand if you were to adopt a website-only strategy.
Mobile Apps Offer a Personalised Experience
Building on the previous point, due to access to device capabilities in mobile apps, mobile apps can offer a much more personalised experience for your customers. Some examples of personalisation could range from custom recommendations or updates (by tracking user engagements) to special offers only available at a particular store location (by tracking user’s location).
This would greatly increase a sense of intimacy between your brand and your customers, increasing positive impressions of your company and driving business up.
Why Websites?
Websites Have a Broader Audience Reach
Website pages are easier to be discovered than mobile apps because their pages can appear when customers are searching online. Furthermore, websites are easily shared between the user’s contacts as he/she only needs to copy the URL, in contrast to a mobile app where the user would have to screenshot the app or invite his/her contact to download the app as well.
Websites Might Be More Cost-Effective
With the rise of platforms like Wix and WordPress that allow a multitude of users to create personalised websites for a small monthly subscription fee, owning a company website has become very accessible and cost-effective.
While this is an attractive reason to go for websites, do bear in mind the promising features of a mobile app that websites do not offer.
Which Is More Suitable For You?
To sum up, it depends heavily on your company’s direction for the mobile strategy as well as the budget you can allocate to this project.
Aside: Check out our articles on how much it costs to build a mobile app here
If your company’s goal is to simply provide mobile friendly content to a wider audience, a mobile website could be a better option for you. If you are looking to bring customer engagements to the next level and communicate more with your customers, a mobile app is definitely a worthy investment. However, with mobile strategies, it is often not a this or that solution between mobile apps and websites. As both can offer good value and ROI if done correctly, you may be looking at a two-pronged approach to bring the most value to your company instead.
Aside: Want to learn more about how to choose the right mobile app development company? Click here to find out more.
At Originally US, we do not embark on building a mobile app unless we want it to be successful, because your success is also our success.
Looking for a trusted mobile app development company to build your app? Let us discuss how we can help you! Chat with us on Whatsapp today. We look forward to working with you on your Singapore Mobile Application Development work.
