Mobile Websites or Apps: What should you opt for?

Planning to make full use of technology to promote and grow your business? The very first thing that you should be considering is whether you are keeping yourself updated with the new technology or if you are still a few years back. We take up an important point in this article – promoting your business using the mobile platform – mobile websites or the mobile phone apps.

You probably have a fully functional website for your business. I take it that you are promoting the website using internet marketing and search engine marketing as well. You may also be into social media marketing and the other traditional online marketing avenues. But how strong are you with all this?

The future is mobile marketing – using mobile phones to promote and advertise your business amongst your consumers. And there is more than one way of going for it. However, the most successful ways to make full use of the mobile platform is through mobile apps (or mobile applications) and mobile websites.

Mobile Business Marketing

Consumers are becoming more and more tech savvy today, thanks to the rapid innovations that the mobile phone market has seen. People want to stay in touch with everything they consider important and useful, on the go. And mobile internet services have made this possible. Be it for information, entertainment, communication, or shopping, consumers have all the information they need at the tip of their fingertips, 24×7.

A successful marketing campaign would be to make full use of this, and the most inviting arena at the moment is mobile apps and mobile websites. So how do you understand which one to opt for? Here is a comparison that will clearly point out where mobile apps work better than the mobile websites, and the vice versa, and which can be a better option for your mobile business marketing campaigns.

Mobile Aps vs. Mobile Websites

The market is flooded with mobile versions of websites, iPhone apps, Android apps and other mobile apps. Symbian (the most popular mobile operating system so far) is not far behind in the mobile application development arena either. However, numbers have always pointed out that the popularity of mobile websites has been higher than that of mobile apps.

By 2010, mobile touch websites content had seen a growth of 300 thousand sites compared to mobile apps – which was around 175 thousand. The rate of growth has obviously been higher in case of mobile websites as well. While this is an overall view, mobile apps have been found to win in specific areas over the mobile websites.

To give you an idea, while mobile websites are more popular when you consider shopping services, social media and business sites, mobile apps play a higher hand in case of games, entertainment & sports. Experts and research agencies have pointed out that no matter where technology takes us, mobile sites will still rule the business world, and a greater part of the mobile platform. The simple reason for this is while a mobile site can feature all the functionality and features that a fully fledged website can, mobile apps are very specific and have limited functionality.

Final Verdict

Hence mobile applications tend to die very soon along with the specific product it caters to, as nothing stays for long on the internet these days – be it games, information or entertainment products. There is always a fresh supply. However, in case of mobile websites, you can very easily change the content or the applications. You can add new pages, and therefore have everything available for the consumers on a single platform.

Based on the observed numbers and the functionality, it can very easily be concluded that mobile websites can do a better job for promoting your business than the mobile apps. And this is definitely worth your consideration, unless of course you feel more comfortable in sticking to the more traditional online marketing arena – and risk staying behind your competitors in the race!