Going Mobile: Site or App?

In a perfect world, every marketing manager would have countless hours to devote toward figuring out the perfect way to take a company's message and services into the mobile market. With this assumed abundance of time and resources, you could experiment with every option for optimizing your site and making it mobile friendly, and then when you got done with it'd be time to start developing a mobile app and work towards getting it put up for sale in Apple's App Store or the Android Marketplace.

Maybe you'll actually end up doing all that. It's certainly a worthy goal to cover all the angles (and for some companies might even be a necessity), but if you're like any of the clients we work with, it's more likely that you just need to figure out where to start.

So, for fear of optimizing a site that doesn't need it or getting sucked into the expensive app craze for no good reason, take a look at this infographic developed by MDG Marketing. And be aware of the following points when weighing a mobile site against a standalone application.

Mobile Site

Shorter time to launch
Usually costs less
No store approval process to endure
Instantly available without any downloads

Mobile Applications

Perform faster
Integration with the phone OS provides more options for functionality
Must be downloaded before use
Search engines are not crawling app stores yet
People are spending more time with apps than sites these days

Of course, barring all of the above considerations, the most important factor in determining how you proceed should always be the content in question. How do you envision people engaging with your site? What's the call to action, and can it be carried out only through an app, or would it work just as well through a mobile site? The graphic from MDG Marketing serves as a great tool in figuring out how to meet the mobile needs of your company's unique content offerings.

Infographic by MDG Advertising

Devin Wieland

Digital Marketing Advisor
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