No, I don't mean the apps that come with Applebee's 2 for $20 meal deals. Although I would argue that those apps are useful too (and delicious). I'm referring to the apps in the HubSpot ecosystem. If you're an agency - are you building apps? If you're a HubSpot customer, are you using apps to augment HubSpot features? Apps can serve as a very powerful and differentiating lead nurturing tool. Consider the following benefits of building an app:
Apps are a unique form of advanced content - Whitepapers and ebooks certainly are valuable content. Apps, however, take the concept of useful content to another level. Consider our SnapEngage app. This app allows you to chat with visitors to your site and automatically adds them to your HubSpot contact list. That's pretty powerful - you can engage with visitors that come to your virtual store and also capture a new lead. It's (software) content that offers immediate tangible value.
Apps highlight your industry or niche expertise - Whether you build your app in-house or have your smiley, geeky friends at LyntonWeb build it for you (hint, hint!), you will highlight your business expertise. For example, our Microsoft CRM Connector App , showcases our knowledge not only of HubSpot and Microsoft Dynamics, but also our understanding of the business imperative of sales and marketing alignment. How can apps increase your product or service thought leadership? Do you offer hazardous materials management services? Certainly that's a niche industry - why not build a custom HubSpot app that assesses your service ROI over in-house hazardous materials management. You can even build the app flexibly so that it can genericized across a variety of niche service industry.
Apps start a completely different conversation - instead of "thanks for downloading our whitepaper" it's "how do you like our app?" and "can we help you customize our app" or "let me show you this feature." It's a much more "let me show you how I can help you right now" focused conversation. Apps can quickly lead to a meaningful conversation.
How are you using apps? What's the downside of apps? Need a custom app built? Sure, we can do that.