Over the last decade, app development has become accessible to anyone with a basic understanding of app development software. If you want to create your application, read on to know why conducting prior market research is vital for success.
It is hard to ignore: smartphones have taken the world by storm by offering advanced efficiency, entertainment, and business capabilities. This technological surge has spawned a complimentary industry that has risen along the sidelines – mobile app development. Smartphones on their own are impressive devices, but what makes them truly excel in their functions are the creatively engineered programs. A successful app can make app development companies gigantic amounts of money through purchasing fees, ad placements, and in-app offers. Naturally, there is a lot of competition. To create a product that turns out to be head and shoulders above all competitors, marketing research can lend a helping hand. In this article, we would like to show you why and how marketing research is important to consider in app development.
The Ins and Outs of Marketing Research for Mobile and Web App Development
Why Is Marketing Research Important?
While success with an app can have great financial returns, the staggering amount of competition makes it difficult to excel. The truth is that less than 0.01% of all applications were expected to be a commercial success in 2018. 25% out of 72% of emerging phone apps fail due to a lack of marketing research and not understanding their target audience. If you are a developer or investor, these are some pretty worrying numbers.
If you put money towards making a software product, you need to have at the very least a rough estimate of what response or niche-interest you can expect. Going into IOs/Android app development operation with nothing but naive hopefulness is an amateur move that is likely not to end well, as the odds are against you from the get-go. Adequate marketing research can give insights to efficiently predict what app could be successful, and how it needs to be marketed once it is a finished product.
What Is Marketing Research?
Marketing research mainly deals with understanding the average customer and their behaviour at a given point in time. This revolves around studying why clients choose to engage with certain products above others, their purchasing decisions, and what makes them stay loyal to your brand. Above all, an app has to provide a qualitative experience, whether it is about usability, filling niche needs, or simply being fun.
All gathered marketing information can then be used to provide an informed context to market a new app efficiently. Give the Android/IOs app development a solid direction from the ground up.
Steps to Perform Marketing Research
Understand Your Target Audience
For cross-platform app development to be successful, it is imperative to know who your product aimed at. This means that you must get acquainted with your target audience. What kind of customer will be interested in what you are offering. Efficient research starts with honing your ideal user’s overall habits, lifestyle choices, and demographics. To do that, but questions that lead to such insights. These will vary according to the type of app that is being developed. Some general guide points would be based on the current trends in an app niche, usability aspects, customer needs, and innovative features that users might enjoy.
Analyzing Competitors
To get a good idea of what works in a specific niche. It is of great help to look at what successful and unsuccessful apps have done in the past. Upon outlining and comparing these, one can attain a competitive edge as to what could be improved upon in functionality, features, design options, and overall development direction.
Create a Business Plan
After gaining insights on what type of app could work, the next step lies in building a thought-out business plan. The latter will specify the financial side of things, calculating how much will go into marketing, development, and potential profits. Amongst the most important factors of a business plan is how the app will be marketed to users. Namely, this means strategizing efficient ad-placements, promotions, finding potential affiliates and sponsors that would fit in introducing the product into the market. These days, marketing strategies tend to get increasingly innovative, and depending on goods or services, may vary greatly.
We hope to have given you a rough understanding of what marketing research is. It’s importance, and how it can help when it comes to developing an app. Overall, it is a crucial step in formulating an app’s potential functionality. How it is to be marketed, and who it should be marketed to. Such insights allow developers to use their budget as efficiently as possible.
Author’s Bio
Thomas Glare is a college professor of Economic disciplines with a passion for learning new marketing and advertising tips. He shares further information with his students and, in his blog, dedicated to different business strategies.