In today’s Internet Age, information is easily accessible and ubiquitous. Recent studies have shown that up to 80% of the Buyer’s Journey (their decision to buy) is done before you or any representative of your company is contacted by a potential customer. And most of that journey takes place on the internet and especially YouTube for product marketing videos.

That means that there has been an enormous shift in what the buying process looks like for your customers. There are a number of ways to effectively influence your customer throughout their buying process, but it all comes down to the exchange of information. Your customer wants to know what products or services you have available, and which is the best fit for them. You need to know what your customer needs in order to help them find the right product or service.

So how do you make that exchange of information easy, informative, entertaining and intuitive for your customer?  Gated landing pages are one way to gather some information, but a lot of consumers are wary of giving out their email or phone number because no one likes to be cold-called by a sales person or inundated with promotional emails.  Video is obviously and great way to engage your audience and communicate your unique advantage – but you already know that.  Another very effective tool that we have deployed with amazing results is a Java web app!

 

What is a Web App?

A web application (or app) is a self-contained application that performs a specific task or series of tasks. They can do virtually anything you want them to do, but a couple of common examples are Calculator Apps and Logic Trees.

In this example, our client sent us an excel spreadsheet with lots of calculations – not very user friendly! We took that spreadsheet and turned it into a nice, clean savings calculator application that now lives on its own webpage (click the pic to try it yourself!).

The savings calculator app is asking for the customer to input their own real data and taking that information through a very (very) complicated calculation.  Nearly instantaneously, the app will crunch the input values and output a dollar amount that the customer could be saving with our client’s product. The dollar amounts are sometimes quite large! Can you imagine a better sales pitch? And all of this is independent of any sales representative, an integrated part of the customer’s self-initiated, online buyers journey. Try it out for yourself!

If you have a wide variety of products, it may be helpful to your customers to have a Logic Tree application. In this kind of application, customers answer a series of multiple choice questions designed to lead them to one of your products that is the best fit for their needs. This is especially helpful if you have multiple, similar products with different sensitivity thresholds or tolerances, and only your customer knows the degree of sensitivity or tolerance that he or she needs. Here is an example of a Logic Tree application that assists customers in deciding between two similar products, or notifying them that either or neither product will work.

Again, this kind of application is all about simplifying the research process of your buyers’ journey and leading them to the right product to meet their needs.

 

Why Use Web Apps?

These applications are coded primarily with javaScript, a dynamic, universal programming language. That means you don’t have to worry about what kind of computer is trying to run your app – it works for Macs and PCs alike.

The application is self-contained, so it can live on any website or page without interfering with your website or server. Instead, it uses your browser to run, which makes it extremely fast and responsive, even for complicated calculations.

It is fully customizable! We can make the application do just about anything you need it to do, and we can style it to match the existing graphic design of your website.

Finally, this kind of web application enables you to give your customers are customized, personal buyer’s journey. Web apps make it easy for your customers to find and research your products and decide which best fits their needs.