A prospective customer asked me a good question the other day: "What are the different ways I can have a mobile presence right now?". I thought this might be a useful topic to briefly cover for everyone.

There are three primary ways you can think about getting a mobile presence. They are:

I'll layout how each of these options measure up below.

So which way should you go? Obviously we're strong proponents of the mobile app route.

That's why we've created EasyApp - so you can get an app for your business or organization, stand out from the crowd, and create a way for your customers to connect with you from their always-on, location aware devices/smartphones. And the best part is no coding is required so you can do it yourself.

Obviously we're passionate about mobile apps here at Apptive and believe it is absolutely essential for businesses to utilize these nifty little gems to gain an optimized presence on smartphones. I thought it would be useful to share a few data points and thoughts on this topic to help give a clearer picture of just why a native mobile app is so important for your business.

The first area I'd like to touch on is the rapid shift away from run of the mill feature phones to smartphones. Anecdotally you've surely noticed this trend, everyone you know and everyone you see seems to have an iPhone or an Android device. Well, studies backup what you're seeing. Nielsen recently released a study with some very interesting but hardly surprisingly results. They found that:

• 62% of 25-34 year olds reported owning a smartphone.
• 18-24 year olds had the next highest smartphone usage rate at 54%.
• 35-44 year olds come in right behind that with 53% reporting smartphone ownership.

Other interesting data points we've taken notice of lately include...

According to Google:

• mobile searches have exploded by 4x since 2010, to over 100 billion mobile searches in 2011. (people are looking for a lot of information directly from their smartphones)
• 30% of all restaurant searches are done on the mobile phone.
• 70% of smartphone users use their device while shopping in-store
• 53% of searchers purchase as a result of a smartphone search
• 95% of smartphone users have searched for local information
• By 2013, more people will use their mobile phones than PCs to get online

A study was just released by eMarketer looking at time spent by people each day with the major media types. They found that people are now spending more time on their smartphones each day (1hr 5mins) than they are with newspapers or magazines.

The last stat I'll mention today comes from a study Flurry Analytics conducted over the Summer. They found people are now spending more time in Native Apps vs. the mobile Web (81 minutes per day in apps vs. 74 minutes per day for mobile Web).

Looking at these numbers from a purely defensive standpoint you may think having a mobile app is becoming table stakes for doing business - that is, a de facto necessary thing for doing business in today's on-the-go, hyper-connected marketplace. I would agree with you there for sure. But I also see great opportunity looking at it from a slightly different viewpoint. And that is, these devices offer truly unique functionality you can use to proactively grow your business. A specific example is utilizing push notifications to drive loyal customers into your business with specials and deals. Ok, so those were just a few of the things on my mind this last week, I hope they were helpful and maybe even a bit interesting! Contact us here at Apptive today to learn more about how an app can optimize you for mobile and help grow your business.