App development to the service of user’s needs

Previously we’ve seen the necessity of new strategies to take your business to the next level. we’ve highlighted the importance of the digital presence of businesses to engage consumers, generate more market share and profit. Since we live in a digital era, data collection, as well as feedback, are key features every business need to integrate into its daily operation processes to determinate and adapt strategies to the target audience. Due to the massive usage of smartphones and mobile devices, billions of people are contributing to the increasing amount of existing big data

Let’s go a bit more in-depth with one of the strategies proposed which is the development of Mobile App and some risks people normally don’t take into consideration.

Mobile App development

According to Comscore (siwick,2013), as of June 2013, mobile devices accounted 55% of time spent interacting with online retail outlets. Mobile interactions take place via mobile apps specially designed to fulfill specific users demands such as shopping, entertainment, information and social interactions. Currently, there are around 1.5M apps in each one of the most used platforms Apple’s App Store and Google Play Store. With this amount of different types of apps, it’s important when developing yours, to fit it to your market goals and market niche. Past studies have shown that product value is one of the important factors in promoting app usage and purchases.

These are the steps you will need to take to develop your app:

1. Research: first thing is to have an idea of what you want to offer, which problem will be able to solve for your target audience. An effective way to know what your audience wants is to analyse your buyer persona’s behaviour
  patterns, doing so, you will be able to identify customers lifecycle, gain clarity towards developing the app and the use customers will make of it. Despite your app can be similar to others, you want yours to be unique in a specific way, so you have to ensure the viability of your idea. Don’t forget to research and analyse your direct competitors to know mistakes you should avoid
2. wireframing: this process it’s going to help you know and understand functionalities of the app you want to develop. An initial brainstorming of possible features that fit with the purpose of the mobile app and adapt them to users special needs. Including too many features can result in a very costly process.
3. Technical Assessment: Mobile apps have different requirements depending on platform and format, so you need to make sure that back-end systems will support the functionality
4. Prototype: build a prototype ASAP, that will help you to know how the app works and flows. This stage of the development will help you have a better insight of the direction the project is taking. You can test the prototype on stakeholders and get feedback from them.
5. Design: To enhance customers engagement, firms can design branded apps with features that offer different touchpoints at various stages throughout the customers journey. UX and UI designers will take part in this phase using blueprints as a guide to envision the final product. Your budget will condition the timeframe the design process will take. Addition of visual elements will increase possibilities of your UX being original.
6. Develop: After you are done with the design, now it’s time to test and fix functionality. One of the best ways of testing an app or any techy product is through a focus group, since they’re the public that will use the app, so you can get a good feedback and see if the app is ready to be released
7. Integrate analytics into app: Analytic tools will help you to collect info about users behaviour
8. Testing: Testing the app through the whole development process will help you keep the fina costs low. The intentionality of testing an app is to see compatibility, security, usability and performance. Once the app has passed the users acceptance test, you know is ready. Net step is a Beta trial to receive feedback about real life functionability.
9. Deployment: Last step is to submit the app and get feedback from users. That feedback will help you introduce updates into new versions. Make sure you have enough resources to maintain the product.

Now that you know the necessary to develop an app for your business, don’t forget that there are also risks related to app usage. First of all we have become more dependant on our smart devices, meaning that a huge amount on time spent in front of our devices and sharing our personal information through the internet. You can get more information by clicking on the following link

mobile app risks management

References

Ashwini, A. (2017). What Are The Various Phases Of Mobile App Development?. [online] Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/swlh/what-are-the-various-phases-of-mobile-app-development-4f0a1748e619 [Accessed 19 Mar. 2019].

boyd D, e. and P, K, K. (2019). Branded Apps and Their Impact on Firm Value: A Design Perspective. [ebook] Available at: http://web.b.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/ehost/detail/detail?vid=0&sid=1a73f707-6d5e-4635-8c95-a5b98f96621b%40pdc-v-sessmgr05&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZSZzY29wZT1zaXRl#AN=134550812&db=buh [Accessed 26 Mar. 2019].

lindner, d. (2019). 5 Risks Introduced by Mobile Apps. [online] Bankinfosecurity.com. Available at: https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/blogs/5-risks-introduced-by-mobile-apps-p-1406 [Accessed 26 Mar. 2019].

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February 28

How to succeed with your Marketing strategy

Overview:

Businesses go through many changes adapting to market fluctuations. in order to stay at the forefront, you have to analyze the environment and create effective strategies to help you achieve your company goals. Building an effective strategy will depend on the scale of your business. First of all, you have to get a diagnosis that defines the challenge you are facing. The second step is to create a guiding policy for dealing with the challenge. A policy directs action while also ruling out other approaches. Once you know how you are going to approach the challenge, you need to set coherent actions to accomplish the policy established. The future is digital and the market place has evolved in accordance, therefore strategies have to be focused on the digital.

Identify your audience:

There wouldn’t be business without customers, but you need to know what their profile is. Chaffey and Smith (2013, p155), state that there are two sources of competitive advantages, the ability to learn more about our customers faster than the competition, and the ability to turn that learning into action faster than the competition. Chaffey and Smith (2013, p160) also state that in the EU, customers are consuming less TV, newspapers and magazines and more internet.

It’s important to identify online consumers buying behaviour differently to offline consumers, doing so, you could move through their online mental stages. online customers talk back when the brand breaks what promised, they have unlocked the brand control. You need to know if your segment buys more frequently your product compared to your competition. How much time they spend on your website? , how much and how often they buy? , do they give feedback or compare different products before buying them?. All these questions are key for developing better customer experience as an outcome of your strategy.

Make your brand mobile:

The explosive growth of mobile devices is helping with the transition away from desktop web-based applications. Old systems have cluttered displays, complex and inconsistent layouts that make customers feel frustrated when they are purchasing and the network drops. The steady interest in user-interface design (UI), stems from designers’ desire to improve the users’ computing experience. When you decide to make your brand mobile, the user interface (UI) is important to define the functionality of the platform you want to launch. UI focuses on how the elements are laid out and how they communicate with the user

Always take into account your available digital marketing channels or assets to incorporate into your strategy, for example, your social media influence. It’s helpful to first consider the bigger picture to avoid getting overwhelmed. The development of a mobile app is the best way to take advantage of your competitors, ensure a boost of sales, reassure customers loyalty and gain a bigger market share. Apps have become necessary tools in which we spend 82% of our time when using mobile devices comparing to 18% we dedicate to browse the web. Here are some tips to take into account when creating an app for your brand.

Create a good product: your app has to outstand among similar ones, it has to be well designed for a good UI and UX ( user experience), and be able to solve a problem or address your audience needs. Build your app in-house will benefit you in many different ways like retaining full control, making it easy to customize or change the app whenever needed, and also respond quickly to user requests. keeping the app in-house will eliminate worries about compatibility with third-parties.
build virality: You can achieve this through UI and UX, incorporating a key feature in the app that’s going to make users want to attract potential new users
Promote the app: Let your marketing team prepare a good promotion for the app, necessary to test metrics, so you can know users acceptation and understand the real value of each one of them.
Track and measure traffic: Use tracking tools to monitor user’s clicking patterns and usage of the app
Make it Free: Always use the magic word free and you will increase the number of people that will try your app.

Despite the pros of developing an app for your business, not everything is as easy and beautiful as it seems, here you have some cons to consider before investing your resources to develop the app for your business.

your app has to suit both ios and Android platforms, which will increase the budget
Mobile websites are easier to optimize than apps
If the development of the app is done poorly, and consumers see a shoddy app, it makes the business seem amateur.

References

Chaffey, D. and Smith, P. (2013). Emarketing excellence. New York: Routledge.

gu9creative. (2019). pros and cons of developing mobile apps for business. [online] Available at: http://gu9creative.com/useful-stuff/the-pros-and-cons-of-developing-mobile-apps [Accessed 28 Feb. 2019].

Larizadeh, A. (2019). Eight Tips For A Successful App. [online] Forbes.com. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/avidlarizadeh/2013/07/19/eight-tips-for-a-successful-app/#391710b453e5 [Accessed 25 Feb. 2019].

Ryan, D. (2014). Understanding Digital Marketing. 3rd ed. kogan page.

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December 13

CHOOSE THE BEST FOR YOUR SKIN

A brief History about Dove

Dove is a Canadian company that has been selling beauty products for more than 60 years. Their main target market is all type of women above 18 years with a good awareness of skin care and good purchasing power. Dove main objective is to fight the fake perception of women beauty that we are being sold by media. Dove doesn’t use Photoshop, just real life women so every woman can identify herself with Dove models. They go beyond with their Dove self-esteem project, designed specially to address women daily issues with their look.

Dove’s first product was the beauty bar, and from there new products like body wash, body lotion, facial cleaners, deodorants and shampoos.

A study carried out by dove shows that 8 out of 10 women don’t feel confident with the way they look, so they opt out of daily activities.

Doves buyer personas

Customer’s journey

Dove vs competitors

The effectiveness of websites:

There is four approaches we use to analyse customers behaviour when purchasing online. Those approaches comply with attraction since is the first thing will help a customer to decide whether continue on the website despite the product they are looking for. Secondly the website should inform broadly about the services or products they offer to make the customers journey easier, with clear description of products, accessibility to payment methods and so on. What makes a customer choose one brand or another depends on the positioning of the brand. Meaning that the customer will feel more attracted if there is a variety of products, good merchandising and offers including membership discounts like student discount or >25 discount.

Dove website doesn’t sell their products directly. it’s a B2B company which have agreements with various retailers like ASDA, Tesco, Waitrose, Sainsbury’s etc. On the website products are very easy to find with the description of the product and a valoration of the product based on customers experiences. Dove competitors use the same method of purchasing through their websites.

From the positioning perspective, the layout of Nivea website is better since it’s easier to access to all their products with fewer clicks than Dove’s. Therefore, customers experience is more engaging.

When customers go to a website they need to be attracted about the advertisement and banners. Dove keeps it simple, using a single image of a model with no advertising or banners at all. just the categories such as baby Dove, man care and their famous self-esteem project. On the other hand Nivea and Olay websites are full of banners that can make customers want to check other products that could be of their interest.

For any organisation in terms of reach to the buyer force, social media it’s key part of the marketing strategy because potential buyers can track in real time the new arrivals and the organisation can analyse their behaviour. Analysing Dove and its competitors social medias we can see clearly a advantage and better acceptance in the main social medias such as facebook instagram and twitter.

Website traffic comparison

DOVE Vs OLAY

DOVE VS NIVEA

The charts show a clear winner when it comes to website traffic. Dove is ahead with 2.5 M, i second place we have Olay with a total of 821.09K visits. Third position is for Nivea with 163.73K visits.

in both Olay and Nivea, the activity is very stable comparing to Dove which is more fluctuate.

bibliography

Dove UK. (2018). Welcome to Dove. [online] Available at: https://www.dove.com/uk/home.html [Accessed 5 Dec. 2018].

Nivea.co.uk. (2018). Always there for me: NIVEA. [online] Available at: https://www.nivea.co.uk/ [Accessed 5 Dec. 2018].

Olay.com. (2018). Skin Care Products and Tips | Olay. [online] Available at: https://olay.com/en-us [Accessed 5 Dec. 2018].

behadur, n. (2018). How Dove Tried To Change The Conversation About Female Beauty. [online] HuffPost UK. Available at: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/dove-real-beauty-campaign-turns-10_n_4575940 [Accessed 5 Dec. 2018].

Bhasin, H. (2018). Dove Competitors – Personal Care & cosmetic Competitors Of Dove. [online] Marketing91. Available at: https://www.marketing91.com/top-dove-competitors/ [Accessed 6 Dec. 2018].

SimilarWeb. (2018). dove.com Traffic Statistics. [online] Available at: https://www.similarweb.com/website/dove.com?competitors=nivea.co.uk [Accessed 7 Dec. 2018].

SimilarWeb. (2018). dove.com Traffic Statistics. [online] Available at: https://www.similarweb.com/website/dove.com?competitors=olay.com [Accessed 7 Dec. 2018].

Mangukiya, P. (2018). Social media by the numbers [Infographic]. [online] HuffPost. Available at: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/piyush-mangukiya/social-media-by-the-numbe_b_9757926.html [Accessed 10 Dec. 2018].

randolph, m. (2015). Dove Social Media Analysis Summary. [online] Her Marketing Blog. Available at: https://hermarketingblog.wordpress.com/2015/12/05/dove-social-media-analysis-summary/ [Accessed 11 Dec. 2018].

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