Is Mobile App Development Right for Your B2B Business?

On average, smartphone users spend 4 to 5 hours a day on mobile.

Like it or not, mobile app development has revolutionized marketing and brand strategy. It's time to make your business mobile-ready, or risk falling behind tech-savvy rivals — and one of the most popular B2B strategies is building an app that boosts your brand's mobile presence.

Yet many B2B businesses pour time and resources into app development only to see it fail. What sets successful apps apart? Read on for the benefits of mobile marketing, real examples, and how to make sure your app succeeds.

What Is B2B? The Difference Between B2B and B2C

B2B refers to a “business-to-business” company that provides services or products to other businesses. B2C refers to a “business-to-consumer” company that sells directly to individual consumers.

The Benefits of Mobile App Development

There's no denying mobile's benefits for business. Companies that implemented enterprise mobility saw a 25% improvement in overall user experience and a 24% increase in revenue from consumer-facing apps. Mobile differentiates your brand from less tech-savvy competitors and lets you customize the client experience like never before.

Take Slack, for example. Billing itself as “team communication for the 21st century,” it lets users tailor the experience to their needs — team conversations organized into user-defined “channels” for specific projects or topics. Slack is also an effective document-sharing tool, sending any file type and syncing with cloud storage like Google Drive and Dropbox. These features let anyone use Slack regardless of device, OS, or software, making it easy for businesses to adopt.

Apps also streamline otherwise tedious processes. Take the Spotlight app from digital marketing agency Whereoware — it helps retailers showcase products, take orders, and monitor sales activity across teams, retailers, consumers, and designers. By packing these features into one app, Spotlight simplifies the retail process and helps businesses maximize efficiency.

Finally, Entrata's SiteTablet shows how an app can improve customer experience. Designed to let real estate agents mobilize their leasing office, it lets agents guide prospective residents through a property via virtual tour, showing ratings, reviews, and real-time pricing and availability. Residents can even use “virtual move-in” to see how their furniture would look in the home. By helping users assist their clients, Entrata made its users more successful than the competition.

Common Pitfalls of B2B Mobile App Development

Apps clearly have the power to take a business to the next level. But simply building one doesn't guarantee success — first, it's worth evaluating less successful B2B apps to see where they went wrong.

A common mistake is focusing solely on functionality rather than usability. This can make an app unappealing, or worse — when an app becomes overly complex, it feels confusing or cumbersome, discouraging use.

Packing in too many features can also make an app tedious. Since less is more on mobile, an app should focus on just one or two goals. Too many features, pages, or functions can slow it down — bad news, since most users only wait 6 to 10 seconds before abandoning a page. Development can be complex, but that complexity should never spill over onto users.

What's more, many B2B apps fail from simple quirks that quickly annoy users — connectivity being the most notorious. Mobile networks are widespread but still don't cover everything, so an app that only works with a data connection is bound to cause problems, when the whole point is letting clients engage from anywhere. Equally damaging: too many notifications, or inconvenient security like complex passwords or forced logins every 30 minutes. These seem minor, but they decide whether users think an app is worth the storage space.

Summary

If you're wondering why to bother building an app, the statistics make a compelling case: since mobile users spend roughly one-sixth of their day on mobile devices, an app can significantly boost a B2B business's marketability. That said, apps fail easily — too complex, too invasive, or simply useless, and people delete them without a second thought. That's why it's essential to plan carefully, from target market to features to aesthetics. In B2B apps, every detail matters.