Hey, what’s going on everybody? Alex Branning here, your marketing coach. Today I’m going to talk to you about mobile apps and why I believe every single business person needs to have their own mobile app. All right, here we go.
Okay, so I want you to imagine something with me here. Imagine meeting a prospect and handing him a brochure. Your prospect puts your brochure in his pocket and promises you he will read it later. Later on that night, instead of throwing away your brochure, the prospect sets it on his night stand so that it doesn’t get damaged. In the morning he takes your brochure with him to work and reads it on his lunch break.
He’s not interested immediately, but he puts the brochure back in his briefcase and takes it home with him that evening. He keeps this brochure with him in his briefcase, on his nightstand, or in his car, every day for six months. Does that sound too good to be true? Well it’s not, if your brochure is in the form of an app.
Did you know that when your prospects download the custom app that you’ve built for yourself and your business, it stays on their phone for an average of six months? If the prospect does not delete your app within the first 24 hours, then your app remains on their phone months after they meet you.
That means that your digital brochure travels with your prospect to work. It is kept by their bedside every night, and it’s even shown to the prospects friends on occasion. “Hey, check this out. Look at this Alex Branning guy. Look, you can see his head shot on my phone, isn’t that a trip?” Imagine them doing that to you.
Your mobile app should have your head shot as the icon for your app, and it should be named after you, so that people can find it easily in the app store. Your mobile app should have the following functions, call me, a tool that enables them to do more business with you, for me it’s get an estimate or an ROI on your social media marketing. For real estate agents it’s search home.
There should be another button there about you, tells your story. You can embed a video in there, so that people can watch that and learn more about you. And there should be a refer button, that way in case somebody wants to send you a referral, they’d be able to tap a button there and send you the name and number of their friend.
Other buttons just depend on the industry. So, if you download my app, go to the app store and type in Alex Branning, you’ll find my app. There’s some fun things there, I have some goodies, and there’s some videos on there of me. And it’s there because I want my app to push the prospect, in this case you, down the road a little bit more into doing business with me.
Now, I want you to think about the business cards that you’ve been giving out, just in the past month. How many of them do you think are still not in the trash can? I’m going to guess probably zero, they’re probably all thrown away by now. Maybe you handed it to somebody that has one of those cool little handy dandy business card cases or whatever, where they throw all their business cards, but I doubt it’s been looked at.
Now, I’m not saying that to depress you, I’m just being real. How many business cards do you have that you walk around with? None. I don’t walk around with any business cards. For me I grab a business card, I’ll take a photo of it into my phone and then probably forget that it’s there. Unless I’m going to do business with that person, it’s pretty much it, I’m done.
So, I want you to envision yourself making a change. This is one of my breakthrough marketing ideas, getting your own mobile app. Now, one of the best stories, the success stories I have for mobile apps is this. I’m going to share a couple with you to inspire you. The first one is I had a real estate agent, her name is Colleen and she was doing an open house. She was doing open house for a friend of hers, so people were walking in and checking out the home.
She had just gotten my app, and so she had her very own app, and a couple came in. They were looking at the home, and they were not represented by a buyer’s agent. She was able to walk them around and instead of giving them a business card, she gave them her app. Later on that night, her phone rang, it was that couple, and they told her “We threw away all the business cards that we got on accident, thank goodness you had us download your app. We would love to talk to you about going with you to look at a couple more homes.”
And she was able to work with them and ended up getting a deal and working with them on that. So, if it wasn’t for the app, that couple never would have kept her contact information.
I’ll give you another example of how an app has helped. One of my clients is in the mortgage business and she has an app. Instead of focusing on giving it to her prospects, which she could totally do, and she has done, she focuses on giving her app to her real estate agent that she works with, so that they can refer people to her, and get that pre-qualification process started.
She told me that her app has been used, just over the past year, almost once a month with a real estate agent that had a hard time finding contact information for lender, and just instead pulled up her app because it was “So easy to use.”
Isn’t incredible? Her app is generating her business on a regular basis so that she can generate more leads for herself, close more deals. That app alone, if an average deal for her is $3,000, that app is a $36,000 a year tool that is growing her business. That’s just crazy, it is so cool.
For me, I love giving my app out to people, I love showing it to people. I want to introduce some ideas to maximize the impact of having your own mobile app. The first one is to integrate your mobile app with your email database so that all of the contacts that fill in a form on your app are also added into your email database. And even better, set up an auto responder. Isn’t that cool? So, you can setup auto responders with the different forms that come in and that way they get different messages depending on what form they filled out.
Now, another thing my company does is build mobile apps and so I’d love to build one for you. But even if you have somebody else build it, I want to share with you some of the new things that we’ve done with our apps to really maximize the benefit. One of them is we include your mogul, your Facebook pixel on your app so that we can re-target your app users on Facebook, with a customized ad. How cool is that?
Now, one of the things I was asked about was why an app? Besides the fact that it’s easy for people to see on their phone, why instruct people to use my app? Google and Facebook collect data on you, so that they can show you ads that you’re interested in. You could do the same things with your very own app. You could track your prospects as they navigate your app, so that you know exactly what they’re interested in.
Some ways to share your app, again, I referenced the business card idea. Instead of handing out a business card, invite people that you meet to download your app. I want you to mention your app on your social media profile pages, specifically mentioning it in your cover or background photos of your profiles. So, on my cover photo on Facebook, on my background for LinkedIn, my app is there.
And add a link to your website, so that your visitors can easily see your app, it should be available both on iTunes and Google Play, so that no matter what kind of phone they have, they can download your app.
I hope this breakthrough marketing idea inspired you. I want you to imagine what it’s going to be like when you have an army of people that are referring you. And if you have not heard my referral episode on how to build a referral army, scroll back down to episode four and listen to that. And then I want you to envision, you have a referral army of 5 people, maybe 10 people, maybe, like my mortgage lender, you have 30 different people who are in your space talking to your client, that all have your app on their phone. How easy is it for them to send you business?
Now, I want you to think how easy is it for them to send you business right now? It’s probably not as easy as them just whipping out their phone and opening up an app and having the person type in their information. I don’t know how difficult it is right now for your referral partners to send you business, but the goal is to make it as easy as possible so that not only do they not hesitate, but they want to show their prospect how cool it is that they’re going to be working with somebody like you, who is cutting edge, who is doing things that other people in your space are not doing.
So, this is my breakthrough marketing idea. Thank you so much for joining us. I’m excited, I want to work with you on this. If you’re interested in working with me on an app, go to alexbranning.com, and on the very top you’ll see a link that says work with me and hire me. Click that link, fill out the form, and let’s chat. Building an app is an inexpensive tool that is going to have a lasting impact on your business.
Thank you for listening, please rate and review my podcast on whatever platform you’re listening on, iTunes or SoundCloud, and have a great rest of your day.
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