Wondering whether it's worth your company's time developing your small business mobile apps? Wonder no more. A survey by AT&T and the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council has found that mobile technologies save small businesses $67.5 billion a year. Just under half of the savings comes from the use smartphones, the survey found, saving small businesses 1.24 billion hours a year, for $32.3 billion in annual savings. Next comes tablets, which account for 754.2 million hours and $19.6 billion saved a year. And mobile apps lead to 599.5 million hours and $15.6 billion a year saved. The survey was conducted with with 1,042 small businesses from 48 states and the District of Columbia from March 26-31, 2014. More than half of all small businesses now use mobile apps, and it leads to significant productivity gains, the report found. Some 91 percent of small businesses say mobile apps save them time, and two-thirds say it saves them money. How much money? A majority of businesses say they're saving $6,000 a year thanks to mobile use.
What kinds of small business mobile apps?
Mobile app use is booming for small businesses, the survey found - it's grown by 65 percent in the last two years. Not surprisingly, they use plenty of apps, with 77 percent saying they rely on three or more apps. Five percent say they use 20 or more mobile apps. The most popular apps are GPS/navigation and mapping apps, for the fourth year in a row. Also popular are remote document access, travel planning, and banking/finance management apps. Apps are primarily being used on smartphones, with 92 percent of respondents saying they use mobile apps on them, while a little more than half of respondents saying they use them on tablets. Also of note is that almost one-third of small businesses have at least doubled their use of of mobile data over the past two years.How can you build your small business mobile solution?
What's the message here? If you're a small business, any money you spend on small business mobile apps ends up being money saved, not money spent. And given that more than half of small businesses say they're using mobile apps on tablets, you need to develop apps for multiple form factors, not smartphones alone.
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