Monday, 1 February 2010
How Will You Take Advantage of the Apple iPad?
The latest Apple product (AAPL), the iPad will be released towards the end of March. This gives marketers and business owners a small window of time to consider how they can leverage this tool to market their business.
Although companies that already have iPhone applications will have a significant advantage when it comes down to developing apps for the iPad, the increased power and screen size of Apple’s newest gadget opens some great possibilities for delivering content and education. Here are a few specific tactics companies could use to take advantage of the iPad:
1. Develop an interactive brochure – A well developed iPad version of your corporate brochure could be very impressive. Including rich graphics and text, incorporating videos and links to website application forms and shopping carts. Add to this the touch interface of the iPad and you have a cross between a traditional brochure and PDF that’s could be much more than the sum of its parts.
2. Deliver a regular newsletter – As with brochures, taking advantage of the iPad’s touch interface means that you can polished, professional and interactive regular newsletters to prospects and clients alike. If you already have one of these, the main challenge will be developing an app that will allow people to easily subscribe to your newsletter and incorporating the added features that are enabled by the iPad.
3. Viral games – This isn’t a new idea by any means, but again the increased size and processing power of the iPad means a whole new world of gaming possibilities. If the iPhone was too restrictive for the types of viral games you might have envisaged, the iPad could be perfect.
4. Hotel/Property 3D Tours – This one seems glaringly obvious, the iPads touch interface and plush screen make it an ideal tool for 3D tours of hotels, rental properties, historic sites, holiday resorts etc. If this could be relevant to your business, you need to start thinking about this ASAP.
5. Banking/Financial Applications – Sounding like a broken record now, but again, the bigger screensize means that financial and banking applications can be even more powerful and pleasurable to use on the iPad. Stock trading applications can take advantage of the additional screenspace to display more information, and banking applications can be clearer with a ‘bigger text size’ option for mature users (the silver surfers could be a huge target market for the iPad).
There are obviously tons of other potential uses for the iPad, the point is to get the ball rolling. We’ve all seen that the iPhone and the app store have been huge, and there’s no reason to doubt the iPad won’t be huge too. Better to get on board now than miss the boat!
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