Before starting any business or a project it is always necessary to have a well laid out plan. This will give you the chance to create a strong foundation that will stand sunshine or rain and thus keep your business from collapsing. This idea also applies to your business when you want to create mobile apps.
Having a guideline on what you should do will keep you on the right track and ensure that you reach your goals. This helps you to plan and perform effectively in the direction towards your goal of creating a mobile application. Whether you want to develop an application for yourself or another company you are assured that you will prevail greatly in this task.
With today’s ever evolving technology it is important for you to keep up to date with the latest apps so that when you are creating one you can add features that are new and exciting. Also, these features should be useful and beneficial for people the app is intended for.
If you are making it for yourself you will find it useful and it should help to make work easier for you and your employees. This will further lead to a rise in business and more profits for you.
What is a Mobile Strategy?
Strategies for mobile apps are important. Strategic planning is used by many successful businesses worldwide because it has been shown to be effective and improves productivity. Having a good strategy helps you to follow a direction that will help you achieve a goal that you have set.
People who have good ideas but lack a good strategy to follow usually fail to achieve their goals. The following points show the importance of planning:
- It provides a good orientation,
- Only the important issues get attention,
- Progress evaluation is simplified,
- Easy to address various problems.
All these points show the importance of a mobile app development strategy. Always set goals and focus on them. Set goals within a specific time frame and work from there. You should already have a well-layered out plan if you are to achieve the maximum results from your goal.
A well-organized plan will not leave you hanging. Even if things fail to turn out as planned, you can still have a backup plan that will still lead to you achieving your goal. That is why strategic planning is important.
It gives you the chance to plan and even helps you to prepare for occasions where any loop hole appears. This buys you time to make necessary changes that will propel your business further into more success. You will for sure make the plan work and achieve success once you follow this path.
So, the same concept applies to creating a mobile phone app. A carefully prepared strategy will give you the chance to produce the best possible app and help you to achieve this within a time frame. Furthermore, this will help you to spend less and focus solely on what needs to be done to realize this goal.
How to Create a Mobile App Strategy
Here is a plan you can follow when creating a mobile application strategy for your company.
1. Recognize the importance of enterprise mobile app strategy
Having a good understanding of the company’s strategy will make it easier for you to create a mobile strategy because:
- It gives you a general sense of where your company is,
- Helps you to know whether your company is making enough progress,
- Gives you the opportunity to analyze the market condition in which it is operating in,
- Provides a list of the biggest competitors in the market,
- Gives you the ability to focus on customer satisfaction and how to create apps or products that will be helpful to them,
- It also enables your company to make an analysis of every operation it does. This is important because it allows you to identify any problems that need to be addressed,
- You will be able to identify any opportunity that will make your company more successful.
Additionally, you can use the SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis to determine your strengths, weaknesses, any potential opportunities or threats. Threats can either help or prevent your product from being a hit. This analysis helps you to analyze the biggest threats, both internally and externally, that can stop you from being successful.
All these points will help you to fit your mobile app project into the plan of your company. At this stage, it is necessary for you to involve all members of your company, especially, stakeholders get a better understanding of where your company is both in terms of its priorities, current processes, and plans.
2. Come up with a mobile development strategy
Once you have a clear picture of how your business is functioning and its current condition you can proceed to the creation of a mobile strategy. Put the following factors into consideration before you initiate this phase:
Main points of an application development strategy
Pay attention to the functional features you want your app to have. For example, do you want to create an app that will store documents? This is crucial because it allows out to create an app that is in high demand.
To start, you need a great idea, especially, one that will keep you ahead of competitors. A great idea should be simple, well planned, helpful to consumers, and should inspire you. A great idea should also be doable.
Having ideas that are impossible or complex can only put you in an uncomfortable position as you are most likely to incur losses or even create a mobile app that will be unsuccessful. For this reason, stick to simple ideas that are easy to achieve but still very motivational.
Target audience
This will determine the success of your mobile app. Different consumers require different features. For instance, you may want to place law books for a lawyer mobile app as this will be beneficial to them. Knowing what customers want or need is very crucial in this aspect. Satisfied customers will further lead to a growth in your business as other people will want to buy your product.
Why you should have a pricing strategy for mobile apps
Analyzing the approximate costs of a project will help you to determine if you are financially capable of carrying out this new project. One thing you do not want to do is start out a project only to get stuck in the middle or at the halfway point as a result of the depletion of resources.
Once you have calculated the estimated amount needed for your mobile app project, you can try to gather up resources which will be needed. This helps you to also prevent other aspects of your business from collapsing as there would still be enough resources.
There are two types of expenses that you should put into consideration, the capital expenses and project expenses. Project expenses include expenses like infrastructure, license, and software while the capital expense is the cost you need to achieve and maintain or keep the project running. Examples of capital expenses include the company building and equipment needed for a specific project.
Time needed to finish the project
Creating a roadmap for your mobile app is the best possible way to make sure it is completed on time. A roadmap shows you all work that will need to be executed for you to accomplish your project. With this, you can lay out all the work and spread it among teams. Each team should work at a specific velocity either through sprints or months.
Depending on your company, a sprint can last from 1 to 3 weeks. In general, sprints are designed to help you or a team focus on a specific project, especially in software development. Another benefit of making a roadmap is that it helps you to inform your stakeholders about the progress that is being made on a project. A roadmap may change depending on changes in priorities in your enterprise.
Technological factors needed
Aside from software costs, you should also think about the all the necessary things you need to do to make sure your mobile app works as you intended it to work. Other technological factors to consider include network, information access points, security, cost of maintenance, tools that monitor performance, architectural supports, and content delivery networks.
How many developers do you need to reach your goal within a specific time frame?
How successful your mobile app will be will largely depend on the team working on it. Man power, like in all types of businesses is the most important aspect to the completion of projects. Depending on how long you want to spend on your project build teams accordingly. Faster work means more man power.
Workers can be organized into teams with a team lead overlooking the specific task. Each team can be given parts of the project to work on within a specific time or sprint. This helps you to achieve the goal within the time frame you have planned for your mobile app.
What approach do you intend to use in creating your mobile app?
There are two types of development approaches that you can use: the waterfall and agile approaches.
The waterfall model is a software development approach in which you first determine what is required/needed and then work from there downwards. After defining your needs, you then make a design that matches your requirements, implement your design and then maintain your design.
With this approach, you do everything step by step, only moving to the next step upon completion of the previous one. The agile software development approach, on the other hand, doesn’t have fixed requirements as they are always evolving over time. Because the requirements are not fixed, solutions also evolve through the collaboration of teams.
An advantage of using this approach is that it helps you deal with unpredictable events. That is why it is better to use this approach as it still allows you to meet your goal within a period even if unforeseen events occur, they would not derail you as you would still be able to go around the block and find a solution quickly.
Another benefit of using the agile method over the waterfall method is that it allows you to make changes based on customer needs. With this, you can even alter the design of your mobile app to suit what customers need. Also, consider if the app can be used by another device apart from mobile phones.
Thinking through these points and asking these questions will give you a general sense of how to proceed with your strategy.
3. Work on a single mobile application
Now that you have an idea of what you want your mobile app to do, who it is made for focus on how you will bring it to realization. At this stage, you should carefully lay out your plan on how you plan to achieve the best mobile app that you want to create. Outline the specific requirements, costs, and features that you want for your mobile application. Make sure your app will provide a primary use for customers.
This is what will enable users to keep using your app. It is important to provide features that may not be provided by competitors to make sure you gain many customers. You can also decide to add secondary features that will further make customers to open and use the app for multiple purposes. There is nothing better than using an app to do more than one thing.
Try to create an app that will be useful not only for a specific group of people like medical people or lawyers but one that would be popular with the general audience. This will not limit your market and thus ensure your success in the mobile app industry. Also, knowing the target audience will direct the functionality of the mobile app that you want to create.
You can determine what a target audience needs by talking with stakeholders and developers. Try to understand what a specific group of people need and then work from there. Try to add features that may simplify work or make things more interesting.
Another thing to think about is how frequent users will put the app to use. Determine also if you will be creating your mobile app from scratch or if you would use a template.
Decide the kind of application you want
There are native and hybrid applications. Native applications are usually preferred because they provide more security, have a better performance, and can be used offline. Hybrid applications can be used because they cost less, need less time to be created, and can be deployed on Android and iOS by using the same source.
Other factors to consider:
- Determine the platform, either Android or iOS, you want to use for the development your mobile app whether Android or iOS,
- Marketing for your mobile app should start as soon as possible even before it is created.
4. Develop MVP
What is the definition of a minimum viable product – this is the simplest form of an application that performs its primary function while giving you time to work on and add additional features. So, consider developing minimum viable product before launching an application. Think about all the features you want your mobile app to have, and rank them according to the ones with the highest priorities.
With this, you can release features slowly realizing some at the time of launching and others later. Define your testing strategy clearly, outline how the testing will be done and assign a testing team to the application ahead of time.
So that you can prevent bugs from derailing your project. Make a test plan to work with that will tell you if the app is a fail or if it is successful. Testing can be done internally or by another company which specializes in testing apps.
Conclusion
If you follow the mobile app development strategy, you will create a functional app that is bound to be successful, spending less time and money to achieve results. Thereby you will get more work done with less time and money being put in.
Work out a mobile app deployment strategy before beginning any work on your mobile app. As soon as you have goals set, calculate how much you want to invest in it and how much work you need to put into it to achieve results at the time you want.
All these things will ensure you stay on schedule and achieve the best results even if glitches occur. Also, having enough time will give you the time to handle glitches and help you to stay on track. Even you spend less money and if any emergency should arise you would be able to use your savings to fix the problem. Contact us if you need more information or help with your project. LunApps is the best app development company that is able to meet all your business needs on a short notice.