Why Your Business Needs to Embrace Mobile Technology

Make no mistake about it: mobile has completely reinvented the game in recent years.

In the 80’s it was only accessible to the high-flying businessman, but mobile is now used by everyone from primary school students to their great grandparents. Therefore, with this universal embrace for mobile technology, it surely makes sense that you want to follow suit with your business.

You will be pleased to note that there are many benefits for implementing mobile as part of your business strategy. With that said, read on for why your company needs to jump on the bandwagon and embrace mobile technology.  

Save time and money with business apps

First of all, you can benefit your workflow in a significant way by simply using apps that are available for download. Small business apps are plentiful within either the Apple Store or Android market, and they can make life much easier for your business – to the point where they have the potential to supply massive savings regarding both money and time.

While various other app-related subjects will be touched upon further down the page, let’s take an account-related app as an example. Instead of having to crunch those numbers on a piece of paper or via a spreadsheet, this accountant app will take care of your financial needs. It will link up to your online payment methods – whether it’s something like PayPal or an electronic check – and automatically include payments and expenditures when applicable. So just looking at the financial side of things, this helps illustrate the time and money saved via using such mobile apps.

Communicate better with your customers

This is an obvious point, but mobile devices allow you to stay better connected with your customers. After all, statistics suggest that the average person spends over four hours a day on their smartphone. So if they’re on their phone, this means you want to target that as a way to get in touch. 

One of the best ways is by email. Yes email has been around forever, but it is only in recent years that it has been fully incorporated as part of the smartphone experience. Send an email and – assuming it doesn’t end up in the dreaded spam section – it will immediately pop-up on their display. The same goes for if you have their mobile number or are linked to their social media – essentially, your visibility will be improved tenfold as long as you fully utilize this aspect of communication.

Employees benefit from flexibility

A happy employee is an employee that will be committed to delivering quality work when called upon. So with that in mind, you will want to cater to their needs when possible – and when it’s possible that they can have the comfort of working away from the office without any negative consequences, surely you should facilitate that for them?

Thanks to the convenience of mobile, this has been made all the more possible. Because along with being great for communicating with customers as previously mentioned, mobile is also ideal for staying in touch with employees at all times. Combine that with the fact you can share and collaborate on files with ease, there really is no need for certain staff members to be required to reside in-house during working hours.

Cloud allows for quick growth

Growing a business takes plenty of resources, time and money. At least, that used to be the case before mobile became the prominent behemoth that it is today.

In fact, thanks to cloud-based tools, scaling a business up (or down) has been made all the easier. It’s no longer a necessity to drop a massive outlay to purchase and maintain certain pieces of technology – with the cloud this can all be done virtually. As well as allowing you to grow your business quickly, cloud also provides plenty of other benefits like added security and accessibility.

Say goodbye to paperwork

Okay, you’re not going to be able to throw away all paperwork or cease using it from now on. However, going mobile is a great way to significantly cut back on going the route of printing out countless amounts of documents. No longer do you need to be producing physical copies of spreadsheets and briefings. Now pretty much everything can be sent over the cloud with very little effort involved.

In fact, even documents you might think need printing can remain in their digital form. Take for example a contract that needs official authentication. Well now such files can be signed off on via an eSignature platform that is based on mobile devices.

As well as being beneficial for saving time and being more organized, don’t forget the benefit to the environment that cutting down on paper provides.

Mobile-optimized websites are essential

Seeing as we’re on the subject of mobile, let’s look away from the advantages for a moment and see how you can provide convenience to the consumer. As the title of this topic suggests, creating a mobile-optimized website is highly important. You don’t want potential customers landing on your website from their mobile, and then finding something that is difficult to negotiate because it hasn’t been optimized for their device. If this happens, chances are they won’t be sticking around for long.

Go to the next level with your own app

You have made use of other apps, got your site optimized, and fully embraced the mobile world. What next? Well, you could always take the next step and develop your very own app.

Admittedly, this involves committing a sizeable amount of time and cash – which goes against one of the aforementioned sections of this article – but the overall rewards of having an app could be very lucrative. Because while it’s been established that consumers use their mobile devices a lot, they spend the large majority of their time on apps – 90% of their time in fact.

With that in mind, crafting your own app could lead to users being even further connected to your business on the whole.