When the Apple Watch first came out in 2015, there were 3,000 apps available for download. Fast forward five years, and now there are over 20,000 apps—21 of which are built-in.
As an entrepreneur, Apple Watches can be an excellent investment, as there is a wide variety of Apple Watch apps designed with business in mind.
We’ve researched the top ten Apple Watch apps that may make it easier for you to run a company or excel at your job.
Apple Watches: The Basics
Before exploring the top ten Apple Watch apps for marketers and business, let’s go over what Apple Watches are and what they do.
The Apple Watch is a smartwatch produced by Apple. In essence, it’s a wearable, touchscreen computer you wear on your wrist.
What can you do with an Apple Watch?
- Answer calls
- Record voice memos
- Listen to podcasts
- Receive iPhone notifications
- Pay with Apple Pay
- Ask Siri questions
- Send texts
Why Should Marketers Care about Apple Watch Apps?
As a marketer, Apple Watch Apps are quite useful, and you can utilize them in a variety of ways to make your campaigns more effective. These are the three features we’ve found most helpful:
- Increased social media responsiveness
- Location-based alerts
- Email alerts
Increased Social Media Responsiveness
Apple Watch apps enable business owners to better monitor social media engagement. Social media has empowered customers to share how they feel about businesses more than ever before. However, businesses have to be listening.
The Apple Watch apps send push notifications to users when someone responds to a post or if someone sends them a direct message. Let’s say someone uses your product or service, and the customer had a great user experience. You’d want to respond quickly to that person, so the customer feels as though you care, and she didn’t waste her time sharing her thoughts.
Conversely, if a customer has a negative experience, you want to solve the problem as quickly as possible. Because your Apple Watch apps notify you immediately when someone interacts with your brand on social media, you can fix issues faster (rather than waiting until you next check your phone or computer).
Location-Based Alerts
Another benefit of Apple Watch apps is location-based alerts. Businesses, especially small ones, may be able to leverage this feature to drive more people to their brick-and-mortar locations.
Location-based alerts are the result of technology called geo-fencing. This serves up ads to mobile device users, including Apple Watch owners, based on where they are.
Geo-fencing works by setting up a virtual “fence” around a business. When someone enters the perimeter, the individual may see an ad for your company. Those ads may result in more foot traffic.
Let’s say a coffee shop has an app, and an Apple Watch user downloads it and opts in for notifications. The coffee shop uses geo-fencing. When the Apple Watch user is near the shop, they receive a notification on their wrist, offering them a discount if they come by right now.
They wouldn’t get this deal via email or anywhere else—why not pop by if they have a few minutes?
Email Alerts
This benefit has less to do with marketing to customers and more to do with staying connected to your business. With Apple Watch Apps, you can check your email wherever you are. You don’t even need to pull your phone out of your pocket to do so.
When a message comes in, raise the arm donning your Apple Watch. This gesture lets you read the full message. When you’re done reading, you can lower your arm, and the watch dismisses the notification.
You can also send emails from your Apple Watch, either by typing or by dictating a message to Siri.
Being able to use email anywhere, without having to dig out your phone and open your email app, may help you deal with pressing business issues faster.
Think Outside the Box
The three Apple Watch app capabilities we’ve mentioned are the tip of the iceberg for businesses. To maximize the value of Apple Watch apps, think outside the box.
There are so many Apple Watch apps that can be used to promote products and services. By thinking outside of the box, marketers may find creative ways to leverage Apple Watch apps to attract, engage, and retain customers. We’ll talk about some of our favorites below.
Apple Watch Apps For Other Business Areas
In addition to their benefits for marketers, Apple Watch apps may help make other areas of your business more effective. Coming up, we’ll discuss six types of Apple Watch apps that may enable you to run your company better:
- Customer relations management apps
- Organization apps
- Presentation tool apps
- Apps for sending and receiving payments
- Goal tracking apps
Customer Relations Management Apple Watch Apps
Customer Relations Management (CRM) apps gather information about interactions with customers and centralize that data.
For example, if a customer purchases from you, there’s a record of the whole process. You can see what the person bought, when they bought it, and how much the product or service cost. Did the customer have to bring in the product for repairs? There will be information about the incident in the CRM, too.
Three CRM Apple Watch apps we’ve found helpful are:
- Salesforce
- Bottomline
- Gro
Salesforce
Salesforce has over 30% of the market share in the CRM space. It was also one of the first enterprise firms to launch its Apple Watch app.
The Salesforce Apple Watch app gives users quick access to the charts and raw data they need so salespeople can close a deal and marketers can make data-driven decisions. With this app, employees can record customer interactions and use that information wherever they are, even if they’re not in the office.
Bottomline
While Salesforce works for companies of all sizes, smaller businesses might find it doesn’t quite meet their needs because it has more features than they require. Bottomline is a CRM Apple Watch app meant for smaller companies.
With Bottomline, you can track all of your sales, customers, and products in one place. There’s also a built-in expense tracker function. Bottomline creates reports intended to help answer questions like:
- Who are my top customers?
- Who are my best leads?
- Which customer personas are most valuable to my business?
Gro
Gro is another CRM app that may work well for your small business. While Bottomline has CRM functionality, Gro is a full-featured CRM. This Apple Watch app offers:
- A CRM dashboard
- Lead and contact management
- Opportunity management
- Appointment scheduling
These components may help you manage your contacts, effectively nurture leads, and cultivate new opportunities. The built-in appointment scheduling feature could also save you time and effort, as you don’t have to navigate to another app to enter a meeting into your calendar.
A screenshot of Gro CRM for the Apple Watch.
Organization Apple Watch Apps
Organization apps optimize your productivity. Apps can make tasks more efficient, such as note-taking, project management, and scheduling.
Our research determined the best Apple Watch apps to help with organizational skills are:
- Evernote
- Noted
- Cisco Webex
Evernote
Evernote has become one of the top note-taking apps for a good reason. It allows you to:
- Sync notes to all devices
- Add text, PDFs, scans, audio, and documents to your notes
- Format your notes
- Search for individual notes
Noted
Noted integrates audio recording with note-taking. What differentiates Noted from other note-taking apps is it adds a timestamp to your audio recording. You can tag specific moments from lectures and seminars to return to them quickly and easily.
A screenshot of the Noted app for the Apple Watch.
Cisco Webex
You may hold a meeting anytime, anywhere, by using the Cisco Webex app for Apple Watch.
The Webex Apple Watch app lets you:
- Join meetings
- Present to others
- Schedule meetings
- Share content or your screen
Presentation Tool Apple Watch Apps
Your Apple Watch may even help you deliver killer presentations. Here are two Apple Watch apps for presentations:
Keynote
Keynote allows you to create audiovisual presentations on another Apple device, then use your Apple Watch to control the presentations—keeping your hands free while you speak.
PowerPoint
If you’re a PowerPoint fan, you can use the popular presentation software on your Apple Watch. As with Keynote, you can control the presentation from your watch.
Apple Watch Apps for Sending and Receiving Payments
When the Apple Watch first came out, there was an app enabling users to receive and send money. That app is no longer available for the Apple Watch—but you aren’t left out in the cold, thanks to Invoice & Time Tracking from Zoho.
With Invoice & Time Tracking, you can invoice customers and accept payments on the go. However, there’s no function to pay invoices with the app, so be sure to build that into your schedule.
A screenshot of the Invoice & Tracking app for the Apple Watch.
Goal Tracking Apple Watch Apps
There are several goal tracking apps for individuals which may help you keep tabs on your business benchmarks, including:
- Forest
- Strides
- Productive
- Tally
- Streaks
Forest
Want to avoid distractions while you work? Forest keeps you focused by rewarding you with an increasingly lush backdrop of plants when you ignore your devices to get stuff done. Making things even better, the app developers plant real trees to reward users and help the planet.
A screenshot from the Forest App for the Apple Watch.
Strides
The best goals are often SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based. Strides may assist you in reaching your goals by:
- Tracking good and bad habits
- Setting dates by which to reach targets
- Providing daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, or rolling averages of goals met
- Creating milestones to benchmark progress
Productive
Part of being successful is having good habits. The Apple Watch app Productive is here to help you try to get into a better groove.
The app sets reminders throughout the day and tracks the progress you’ve made toward your goals. When you complete tasks that may lead to the creation of good habits, the app shows you the chain of positive actions that may keep you motivated. There’s even a Siri shortcut, making it easy to access Productive with just your voice.
Tally
Like Strides and Productive, Tally tracks habits. However, Tally may give you insight into patterns you didn’t realize existed.
Let’s say you’re not meeting your goal of writing a weekly blog post. Tally’s tracker shows you this goal has been set for Wednesdays—the same day as your exhausting weekly staff meeting. By moving your blog writing day to Thursday, may be better able to meet your goals.
Another benefit of using Tally is being able to export your data as a CSV file, making it easier to save or share what you’re doing.
A screenshot from the Tally app for the Apple Watch.
Streaks
Want to form good habits? Streaks may help you do that by:
- Tracking up to 12 daily tasks
- Syncing across all devices
- Automatically completing tasks you’ve linked to the Health app
- Reminding you to complete a task
- Allowing you to create “negative” tasks so you can try to break bad habits
- Adding timed tasks
A screenshot of the Streaks app for the Apple Watch.
Conclusion
Apple Watch apps aren’t just for your personal life—there are plenty of apps you may want to use at work as well. You might find these apps help you reach your customers better, keep yourself organized and accountable, and take care of everyday and big picture tasks more smoothly.
Which Apple Watch apps will you use for your business?
The post The 10 Best Apple Watch Apps for Business appeared first on Neil Patel.
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