Good morning and welcome to the Monday Morning Marketing Podcast. I'm Esther
and I'm Melanie.
And today we're joined by Lisa Kelly, founder of MyApp.ie., welcome, Lisa.
Hi, guys. Great to be here and thanks for inviting me.
Lisa, tell us about MyApp.ie.
Well, I myself have been involved in marketing for over 20 years, but and a good eight years ago, I discovered mobile apps for small business and just saw how powerful they could be to really help small business reach their customers in an easy way. And and ergo, MyApp.ie was formed then and we've been working with anyone from micro-businesses to entrepreneurs to beauty salons just to help them reach more customers, get more business help people do, and you know book online and buy online 24/7. And what we love about it is they love it and the customers love it because it's really easy to use. What you have is like a digital intimacy with your customers because your brand icon sits on your client's phones,
Uhhh. Digital intimacy, that sounds... And intimacy.
That's going to be one of the keywords I'm going to use to promote this. Digital intimacy.
Are you sure we're going to attract the right audience with that keyword, Melanie?
And what happens is, you know, your brand is always top of mind. Your clients are, you know, using your phone all the time, as we know. And buyer habits have really changed because especially with covid, more and more people have had to pivot online. More businesses have had to pivot online. Whether you're a market trader or you're selling anything, even people doing yoga classes, everyone has gone online. And what the after is, it enables customers to have you have top of mind all the time because your icon sitting on their phone, they click into it. And it's like a portal to everything about you online as well. So it makes it really easy for them to access everything about you, whether you want them to look at your social media and follow you on channels, whether you want them to share the click. So it makes it quite viral a little, too, whether you want them to buy from you online or book an appointment, it's all there in the open. So it's really easy to use and also from you as a business perspective and how it differentiates as well from a website is that you can communicate to your clients through this app as well using push notifications so you can send messages at any time promoting new offers, new products, or you have a spare slice open if your business is open in a click again. So it's very easy for you to send new messages, new offers to your clients, and they can just see it in the red dots and the message box on your phone.
OK, I'll go ask some questions here. OK, I'm the cynic of the two, OK, now I'm, aren't I?
Yeah
And what I would like to know is. This kind of thing sounds so expensive and so tacky and so fiddly, and what kind of business would suit this it would be a start-up, surely?
Well, we've had some start-ups, and so we've had a lady who pivoted online with her meditation service. She created still mind up. So actually what happened there was she was teaching yoga classes, so she wasn't quite a start-up. She started from a technology perspective. She's been teaching her yoga classes to corporates and other people. And they say to her, oh, just love your meditation, which is love to be able to listen to you at home. Do you have a podcast, you have an app or something? So she came to me and we collaborated and she had one of the first acts, then Irelands focussed on meditation. She made it really simple, literally a few tracks, bite sized tracks for people to let to practise at work and a couple of bite-sized tracks to practise at home, whether you're a started meditation or you're more experienced. So it's as easy as that is a great example of us to be able to just and we turn that around within a month. And it can be done quicker, though. And her clients love us because they can listen to Granja at home, especially now with their doctor. They can they have Granja on their phone.
So I don't need to know a great deal of techie stuff.
You don't need to know anything. What we do is we have a simple chats. And know what I like to do is really listen to you and what your business is about. Where are you struggling? What do you need to do other than your other amazing website, your fabulous social media channels, what else can you do to reach your customers and make life easier for you and for them? And what we do is we create an app with certain features that suits thats solution and help you launch it as well. So it's very easy. The apps that we do are a bit different as well. We are using the latest technology is called "progressive web app technology". It's essentially apps in the cloud. So what happens is your app is published to a custom URL so it's www.yourbusiness.app. And when you share that ice to launch your app, the users are prompted to save it on their phone. And then your iphone, your logo sits on customers phones and it goes from there. We also publish to Google Play as well because we do it from a progressive web app technology, usually it doesn't take any space on your customers phones, because that's the problem. When people download roundups from a better word for businesses from Apple and Google, they can take anything from 10 to 20 to 30 megabytes on your phone. And nobody is. That's kind of space anymore, do they, with their home videos and WhatsApp groups exploding everywhere. So that's the beauty as well about this little marketing tool. So it's almost like from a business perspective, it's like a little marketing tool in your pockets. You also get an App management app to manage your app so you can be sending push notifications on the fly. You can open up your phone, "OK, today we can send out an offer at three o'clock and get fifty percent off and it can be sent in a check. You can schedule those as well. So it's almost like a marketing dashboard for the small business.
It is funny you should mention that seeing we called the Monday morning marketing podcast.
Yeah, that's always talking about marketing..
So it's a great little tool, you know, and also it helps businesses to increase their reviews online as well, because what's built into this technology are triggers. So when customers use the apps, they're triggered to give a positive or negative review. How is your experience at such a business? There are actually triggered to put a good review on Facebook or Google or if it's the hospitality business on TripAdvisor. So that's another thing from a marketing perspective, we all need our reviews, especially online. Everyone needs a lot of good reviews because you know that's how most people go through the decision making process. And so especially if they haven't bought for me before, they're going to Google. You look at the reviews and then go from there.
So do you think that people need an app instead of a website? Answer very carefully.
I know. I think your website is very, very important because at the end of the day, your website is your shop window to your business, whether your bricks and mortar or your virtual business. What the app is, it's a more it's like the next level of connexion. It's the deeper connexion with your customers because they bought from you. They are already familiar with you. I'll give you an example here as well. So your style, your story is a ladies online boutique, which launched last year Sharon Kearns's is the owner. So she's using Shopify as her e-commerce website is amazing. She does an awful lot more for her customers as well, she's just launched a podcast about confidence, her chosen range, by the way, is targeted specifically at working women, busy women who maybe don't know what to wear the next day. So she gives advice on that online. She has a whole and YouTube series on this as well. But what we did for her was, create an app that gives more value to her clients. So what the app does it goes a step further than a website. So what we do is it's like a portal, as I said earlier on, so her clients can click on her logo on their phone. It opens up. They can choose to go into her shop or we've got some new things on us that the website does not have, which is like an online style consultation for her clients to fill in and upload pictures of themselves. If they want to discuss their styles, they'll get back to them with recommendations and obviously hope to solve some of the clothes. And there's also a right size ID technology on there as well, so clients can see how to use that, so they can measure themselves with the clothes that they're looking at. It links off to her podcast. It has style and inspiration. So she's also going to use it for push notifications to send out advice to people what to wear tomorrow or what to wear next week on your zoom calls. They should send that as a push notification with an action that they go into the lookbook to see pictures of what she's talking about. So there's a nice connexion that the digital intimacy is there with the app
Anybody else's brain is just going, how can I get an app? What do I need in an app.
I'm honestly thinking exactly the same, I had no idea it had that capability.
Yeah. I just think they're amazing. And I suppose it's just sometimes it can be a challenge just to express that and communicate that. So I suppose by telling stories, talking about my clients and what we're doing for them, that kind of helps illustrate the whole thing. When I was talking there on Monday and Tuesday about that, the Women's Inspire conference and I was talking about that until you buy some of my clients and how we helped them pivot online is actually another client of mine who belongs to that app. Her name is Jennifer from Varnishing Rooms. She's had to go into lockdown again because of five, level five restrictions. What we did for her during the first lockdown, we were having the chat and she said she's the only way she can make money is trying to sell a few beauty products to Facebook and Instagram, whatever. But she was kind of inundated with all the messages and thats great, people wanted to buy from her, and she just finds it hard to manage all that. So I said, why don't we upgrade your app? She had enough, we already for people to book for treatments online. So I said, why don't we just build you a shop? So we did. And she made a couple of grands to help her get through that lockdown. And then since then, we've been working on expanding the shop. So her shop is now fully-fledged, opening Christmas gifts this week and everything so she can start. Although she's closed, she's still got an income line coming through as well from her app shop. And also there's another skin consultation online for a month or two which is monetised. So that's another revenue line for her. And thirdly, we have online gift fractures as well. So although she's closed, she's protected herself using her app to enable those income streams as well.
So for those who are suffering during covid and lockdown and more restrictions, etcetera, can they afford an app?
Absolutely. So traditionally, apps are mega money. App developers can cost anything from five hundred to two grand a day, depending on what
A day?!
Apps. yes, apps are built from the ground up. They can be anything from twenty thousand for very basic apps to one hundred thousand, which is crazy. But because we're using a special progressive web app platform, our apps are really easy and affordable for any business. And we have a new app stimage on our website actually that we might share a link with later. And but they range anything from five or six hundred euros up to maybe two or three thousand euros, depending on how much content and what capability you want in there. And thereafter, we have a monthly plan and have monthly plan is maintenance plan, which makes sure your app is always the latest version, is fully secure with its SSL certificates. It has any new technology updates are coming down the pipeline, you will receive those. You also have access to your dashboard for sending out, as we talked about earlier on, the push notifications. You can do that any time you want without any text message charges. And you have full analytics dashboard as well. And you can also do one to one communications to very active clients as well. As you might see, that alliance is sharing the app online or they're tweeting about it, whatever it is, analytics device on the dashboard. So you can always send them the one you want,a special notification with a special offer or a special thank you. You know, you might be using a list with birthdays, so you might send them birthday messages. And so it's very good value and the monthly plans basically are sixty-nine ninety nine a month or if we published a Google as well, that's just slightly higher because it's ninety nine euros a month plus VAT, purely because and there's a lot more work involved with Google as a play store. We have to be constantly doing coding updates and whatnot to make it keep it relevant for Google.
My head is just red.
Right, let's talk about last week, you said you were on Women's Inspirer Network conference. I know, so was I.
She spoke as well.
I did. Melanie watched because you spoke at the last one.
I did.
But how can people listen back to that to us, to you and me. I was only going to talk about Lisa, but, you know.
Yeah, well, if you become a member of the Women's Aspire Network, you know, it's those that's going to give you some support for the rest of the year as well. That's only 20 euros a month. And to join the women's Aspire network, where you get an amazing amount of free training and webinars, et cetera. But I believe we also have a lot of access to the highlights of this particular conference where you'll get tips and tricks and not just myself. From Esther on how to lead with your website to Granja, who was speaking from Douglas Low about how to protect your business, especially now everyone's going online. You need to keep your terms of conditions up to date and your privacy policy is critical. And we also had Alison Arngrim and Ted Reuben and so many, so many incredible speakers we do is brilliant. But that's how you can get access.
Brilliant. OK, any other questions, Melanie or is your head just completely spinning?
It was moderately melted there, but, you know, is this something that you can actually claim for and trading online vouchers or business continuity vouchers as well?
That's a great question. Absolutely. And in fact, in fairness, I've done that by five or six projects recently that were specifically around the trading online vouchers. So what some clients did was say they already had a website. They decided to get an app to complement the website. So we were working with them to create those. Like your style, your story would be an example of something online boutique. And there's a couple of other beauty salons. I'm in the process of building their apps and them as well to complement their websites. One lady is actually doing a website and app with us as well.
Can you work with people internationally as well? Because we would just kind of putting our eye on a Republic of Ireland audience. But we do have an actual international audience, Lisa. So could do could you help that way?
Absolutely. I'm speaking with two lovely ladies in Canada at the moment. It was a referral from Alain Lindsey, who's also part of the Women's Aspire Network. Alain spoke about SEO, she's amazing. And experts, I suppose I'm speaking to two ladies in Canada regarding their equestrian meditation business as well. So we're looking at maybe doing enough for them. Yes.
So there's really no limit. There's no would you say that such and such a business or this industry does not need an up or would not work on an app? Are there any that are sort of exempt from needing an app.
Prison service
Not necessarily because your imagination is only limited. Like even down to I can speak to this financial advisor, I've been talking recently, and he has an incredible website. He's an active broadcaster as well. But it's not real and you can really see that when you go into his website, you can't really see that. You just kind of bamboozled by all the text. So we're looking at creating an app for him as well, where it's simple little buttons. You can give this as a value. I think for his clients it'll be maybe a gateway to the investment portals, the pension portals in check, because otherwise, you're getting these things you don't know what's that company called again, but just provide brands within them. It's amazing.
That's great. Well, Lisa, I mean, I think Melanie's just stupefied at the minute. She just can't talk. But it has been wonderful to have you on. And we know this is your first podcast and I'm sure it wont be be your last.
And we went pop,
and you've just been a mine of information. People can find you at.
And it's a beautiful website I have to say, not biased at all. I'm not biased. I mean, we made it.
You didn't do that one as well, did you?
We did, yes.
Goodness,
They do all the best ones.
We do. Everybody knows it. Well, thank you so much, Lisa, for being with us today. And thank you.
Thank you. That was great.
It was so nice to get some true background information on how anybody can get an app. So thank you so much for speaking to us today.
Thank you.
We'll be back next week, guys, with more podcast's, I don't know what we're even talking about next week, I'm just my mind's blown as well. But join us next week and we'll have more information for you on your marketing. Goodbye until then.
Bye.