A mobile strategy is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a definite must-have especially with the growing mobile landscape.

Your mobile strategy should integrate into your overall digital strategy which in turn needs to compliment your business and customer goals.

The objective of any business is to ensure the mobile strategy they decide to implement will have elements that consumers will find useful. Beyond having a nice look and feel, we expect mobile apps to be intuitive, available on their preferred choice of mobile platform, and provide the appropriate content. With many tech trends being talked about globally mobility is morphing with other tech megatrends.

The convergence of mobility, cloud, the Internet of Things, and big data is happening across industries. Over the past few years and through advances and development in technology, mobile has taken the position of being a first screen. With 23.6 million smart phones as reported by Mobile Consumer in SA 2015, World Wide Worx, businesses have the opportunity to use this platform and create useful and beautiful mobile solutions to further engage key audiences.

Go beyond 'mobile first', it’s time for a 'mobile-plus' strategy. It’s time to develop a mobile strategy that brings together enterprise mobility, cloud, and the Internet of Things. Today the smartphone is our phone, computer, camera, entertainment center, map, personal trainer, shopping guide, and more. If you are without your smartphone, you notice within minutes.

Many studies have been conducted to better understand how consumers interact with their mobile phones. Further studies have been done to understand how businesses allocate spend for mobile to realise whether they are leveraging the existing opportunity.

A 2014 Gartner survey asked what share of software development budget was spent on mobile apps — and the response was about 12% of budget. As this figure indicates, application development for mobile is still in its early phases, with not a whole lot of investment in mobility. However, about 80% of these same respondents planned to increase their spending on mobile app development by an average of 40%.

In addition to mobile spend another important aspect of building successful mobile applications is to put emphasis on building apps that focus on seamless and simple user experiences.

The mobile user experience is not a shrunk down web experience, it has to present core functionality on that limited real-estate that is context aware, that is presented in a user friendly format.

People will not always remember the information they were presented with, but they will remember how they felt using your product, and positive experiences will always reign supreme.

Building a mobile solution is just the mechanics of execution, understanding how mobile fits into the full ecosystem with a long term product strategy based on experience, and understanding the target market is key.

For more information, visit the Useful and Beautiful website.