Look at the photo above. Take a close look at the senior lady. She's living in the moment, while everyone around her - well that's probably you and me and 90% of the people we know - is experiencing it through their mobile devices.

Across the globe, mobile devices dominate time spent online, and 90% of the mobile time spent is in apps. People constantly engage with brands and businesses via mobile apps that deliver relevant content, solve a particular problem or provide utility.

Many businesses are still focusing their mobile strategy solely on content marketing and mobile ads. Content marketing may build awareness, achieve credibility and increase inbound traffic to your site. However, content marketing and ads usually fail to achieve sufficient user engagement - the interaction is limited and temporary. In his article “what you think about the web is wrong”, Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile explains why: the vast majority of us don’t fully read content we share, and that 55% of us spend less than 15 secs on a web page. Articles, images or videos simply do not achieve deep user engagement.

When your business provides customers with a useful mobile app, engagement with your brand happens on every app launch, and goes deeper than any tweet or blog post can ever go. This engagement is powered by the utility, service or function that the user needs, and sometimes craves. In order to fulfill this need, the customer engages with your business, brand or service in a deep, meaningful way. This engagement introduces quality, warm leads to your funnel and helps your business achieve sustainable growth.

Sustainable growth through mobile app engagement takes time and patience to achieve. First off, developing a mobile app that works and converts consistently requires both budget and time. Add to that a budget for marketing, releasing updates and providing technical support. However, if done right, a mobile app can and should become one of the central pillars of your business - an asset - that generates significant business value by attracting and retaining customers, generating sales, improving service and increasing customer engagement.

At 100grams, we work closely with your marketing and product team to design and build a mobile app that solves a specific problem for your target audience. Many times, we take an existing app and optimize it to meet a specific business objective through an iterative process of re-design and experimentation with target users. We design apps with users, not for them, in order to achieve genuine, repeat engagement. This approach is proven to yield results, and brings sustainable growth to your business.