Mobile app development is an exciting process for organizations, but before rushing to develop your app idea, you need to do in-depth market research. Mobile app market research is vital to the long-term success of any mobile app idea.
Market research is the bedrock of the entire app development process. Without app market research, it will be difficult to understand the pain points driving consumer behavior and current market trends.
There are several market research strategies your organization can employ to validate its mobile app idea and business model. Every successful mobile app begins with market research.
This post will explain the importance of mobile app market research in detail and the various terms and considerations your business should keep in mind to perform market research that delivers value.
Market Research: A Precursor to Mobile App Development
Mobile app development is fun and exciting. If you are an entrepreneur with a great app idea, you likely want to get started coding and designing the User Interface of your mobile app.
This is an understandable emotion. However, if you want your mobile app idea to succeed, you must conduct market research before mobile app development.
What is mobile app research? This market research helps your business understand industry trends, competitors, and target audience. Successful market research involves collecting and analyzing data.
There are two types of market research, primary and secondary.
Primary Research for Mobile Apps
Primary research involves actively collecting relevant data. For example, primary research in mobile app research includes conducting detailed demographic studies to define your app’s target audience and their pain points.
Typically, primary research will utilize focus groups, online surveys, interviews with potential customers, and competitive analysis of the current market.
In addition to conducting competitor analysis and accurately defining your mobile app’s target audience, primary research should highlight the latest technology trends and how current industry trends affect your business model.
This type of research will ideally be ongoing. Still, as you head into mobile app development, you should clearly understand who your target audience is and how your mobile app addresses their pain points while fitting your business model.
Secondary Research for Mobile Apps
Secondary research involves utilizing studies and reports generated by other sources. For example, your organization might rely on studies conducted by universities or industry research organizations to better understand industry trends and the target audience.
Secondary research is typically used to help organizations improve and hone their marketing strategy. However, this type of research shouldn’t be used to validate your app idea or business plan.
By the time your company uses secondary research, it should be working on crafting a sales and marketing strategy to ensure the success of the mobile application idea and business plan.
An optimized marketing strategy is vital to the app development project’s success and requires a deep understanding of present market conditions.
A Good Strategy for Mobile App Market Research
Every mobile app is different, and there is no one-size fits all marketing strategy you can plug into your operations. However, when it comes time to conduct market research, there is an effective strategy you can follow to gather valuable insights.
When performing market research, your organization should follow these basic steps:
- Idea validation
- Target audience identification
- Gather data
- Competitor analysis
- SWOT analysis
Idea Validation
The most vital part of app market research is validating the idea driving your application. You must ensure that there is a market and need for your mobile app before you begin development.
If you discover during this initial stage of app market research that there is no demand for your app, you don’t have to conduct focus groups and the other key aspects of mobile application research.
Learning through market research that there is no demand or market for your mobile application might seem alarming. Yes, it is disappointing news, but it is valuable to learn this news early so that other app ideas can be developed and explored.
Unfortunately, many organizations don’t do their due diligence when it comes to market research and only discover there is no demand for their mobile applications when they fail to gain traction in app stores.
If you discover there is a demand for your new app idea, great, move on to the next stage of research, which we will cover below.
However, if you discover your idea for a mobile app is not intriguing to users and the market, take what you have learned and use it to develop a new idea. Then, with a better understanding of market conditions and user expectations, your app’s features can be even better.
Target Audience Identification
Once your idea for a mobile app has been validated, you must turn your attention to identifying the potential users most likely to enjoy your app.
It is critical to be as specific as possible when defining your target audience. Saying things such as, “my app is for all men” or, “my app is great for everyone,” is far too broad and generic.
When it comes to defining the potential users of your application, you should include critical demographic information such as:
- Age
- Location
- Occupation
- Marital status
- Interests
- Values
- Lifestyle
- Education level
- Income
- Key traits
In addition to these key insights, you need to know what type of mobile devices your audience prefers to use. You shouldn’t begin writing a single line of code until you know what mobile devices will most likely be used by your audience.
For example, if your research indicates that the majority of your audience has Android phones, you will want to consider Native Android development and shift your strategy to the Google Play Store for app store optimization.
Don’t think about your target audience as excluding others. Instead, you are designing usability aspects and app marketing strategies to attract your target market. If others outside this identified audience also like your app, this is a positive and might lead to additional relevant insights.
An additional critical insight you should consider during this research stage is the social media platforms used by your audience. With this information, your organization can optimize social media accounts to reach users who spend most of their time online.
Social media accounts provide a valuable source of direct customer feedback that your business can use to build a robust and optimized marketing strategy.
Gather Data
Data analysis drives decision-making in every industry and market. Relevant data must support every mobile app development choice your business makes. Your organization will utilize primary and secondary research methodologies to gather the data it needs to drive decision-making efforts for its mobile app.
If your business is looking for reliable statistics and data from external sources, there are several good sources it can use in this effort including:
Google Trends
Google Trends gives businesses the ability to track the popularity of search terms on Google and YouTube and directly compare them. If you want to see how search volume for a particular term has changed over time, you can track this with Google Trends.
You can also compare two or more search terms to see which is the most popular. Not only will this tool help your business determine how to market its mobile app, but it will also show your business whether or not people are searching for terms related to the service or product it wants to develop.
You can even segment the data from this tool based on geographic location to see if people in your state, country, region, etc., are actually interested in the terms you are using.
Statista
When it comes to getting industry specific statistics, there are few sources as good as Statista. Finding reliable external statistics can be challenging when you want to validate the information you have gathered through primary research.
Statista makes it simple to find sector-specific statistics and trends in over 170 industries and 150 countries. Your organization will be hard-pressed to find another source as robust as Statista when it comes to industry-related statistics.
Pew Research
Pew Research is one of the most established and respected data gathering platforms in the world. They primarily gather data through surveys and polling. If the name Pew Research sounds familiar to you it is because they are well known for conducting political, demographic, and social issue surveys and polling.
However, Pew Research does offer information and statistics on other topics as well. While the focus is mostly political and social, this type of research can still be valuable to your mobile app as your business tries to get a sense of what the population is feeling.
In addition to some of the sources listed above, your business should also pursue primary research through its own surveys and social media listening. Gathering data for yourself is just as important as finding relevant data from a trusted source.
Through this process your business can get a complete picture of its market and audience. Trust the data and ensure that it backs up every key decision related to your organization’s mobile app development project.
Competitor Analysis
You must thoroughly research your competition. Analyzing competitors is valuable. Not only can you see what they do well and what pleases users, but you can also see where the competition is falling short.
When you understand where there is a market opportunity, you can adjust your app, business plan, and app marketing strategies to address deficiencies.
By addressing the shortcomings of your competitor’s products and services, your organization can improve its own app and revenue generation predictions.
You might be entering the market later than your competitors, but if you do thorough research, you can avoid their mistakes and expedite the development process.
SWOT Analysis
Finally, your organization is ready for a SWOT analysis after analyzing the competition. If you’re unfamiliar with the term SWOT analysis, SWOT is an acronym for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
This type of analysis can be done in several different business circumstances. However, SWOT analysis is beneficial for market research as a way to wrap up research and prepare for app development.
Analyze where your idea is strong, where it’s vulnerable, its specific niches and opportunities, and the external factors or competitors that could hurt it.
As you go through the development process, your organization should continually perform market research to update learnings and shift efforts to meet user and market demands.
Final Thoughts
Too many businesses embark on app development without doing the proper amount of research. Insufficient research can cost your company significant time and financial resources wasted on an idea that is not viable.
Learn more about the importance of market research in development by reaching out to an experienced development partner.
