Mobile Drives Bottom Line Growth for Business
A few years back, having a mobile app was something of a novelty for most businesses. Many companies had them, but few relied on them to do anything but expand brand awareness. Although there’s no way to quantify it, I would wager that most apps were launched without any real definition of what “success” might look like. There was certainly no widespread reliance on mobile apps to impact the bottom line— but that’s changing.
There can be no question that the mobile landscape has evolved. There are more mobile apps on more devices and operating systems than ever before. No matter what metric you look at, the mobile experience is improving every day. As a result, many large enterprises and small businesses—which have built their marketing and operations strategies on desktop and web platforms—are now feeling the heat from the mobile boom.
In the past, the path to mobile monetization wasn’t always so clear. For many, it appeared that the only people making money from mobile apps were game developers. Today, that path is becoming much clearer for businesses of all sizes and in all industries, as evidenced by development firm Mubaloo’s CEO Mark Mason, who told the TabTimes:
“An increasing number of businesses are preparing a suite of apps, both for internal and customer purposes. I think that this is really the end of the [app] gimmick and that we’ll see 2013 as the start when businesses really start to understand the value of apps.”
An example of a business that saw the potential in mobile long before most is eBay, who has seen their revenue increase by 15 percent in the past year largely as a result of their willingness to embrace mobile platforms. Steve Yankovich, eBay’s VP of mobile, has stated that 1.8 million new users made their first eBay purchases on mobile in the first nine months of 2012.
Like eBay, Go Daddy saw an opportunity to revive its business through mobile. Go Daddy just recently launched a mobile component to its Website Builder, offering businesses both mobile commerce services and tools for building mobile websites. Operating executive investor for Go Daddy at Silver Lake Partners, Jason Rosenthal, told TechCrunch:
“The way we think about it is, where is the market today and where is it going? We’re hearing loud and clear that mobile is becoming a huge channel for our small and medium business customers, so we want to be there.”
Even search engine giant Google now considers itself a mobile-first company. Three top Google execs at the 2012 Open Mobile Summit told Jim Edwards of BusinessInsider that mobile will be the primary way people access Google in 2013. Mobile searches have increased 200 percent to-date in 2012.
With Google leading the way to a mobile-first business model, it is easy to assume countless companies that haven’t already gone mobile will follow Google’s lead.
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