More than 3000 apps are added to the Google Play store every day, and the number is in excess of 1,000 for the Apple App Store. If you want to ensure success for your mobile app in such a heavily competitive market, then you must conduct robust market research.
The importance of market research cannot be overstated. Every successful business owner knows how important it is to conduct thorough market research before starting a business. You can choose to conduct market research yourself or hire a top mobile app development company to do the job for you. Either way, you must understand the nuances of conducting thorough market research. In this blog, we have detailed the process of conducting robust market research for your app.
Define the problem and target audience
Every app intends to solve a problem. The first step to conducting successful market research is to be focused on the problem. To focus on the problem, you will need to define the problem first. While defining the problem, it is necessary to take a scientific approach to weed out any inconsistencies that can arise due to human biases. One way to do so would be to transform the problem into statements like what would be the effects of action A and what would be the effects of action B.
By taking a scientific approach, you will be able to look at the problem in a more objective manner.
Defining the target audience is the next step in conducting effective market research. Identify your target customer on the basis of age, location, profession, income group, and other sch factors. You do not want to spread your marketing efforts thin by focusing on every customer out there in the market. Successful businesses focus on the target customers and try to sell more to these customers.
In a world where an ample amount of data is available regarding customer behavior, good research means digging deep into data. Analyze the data regarding customer purchases to understand how your product fits into the mix. Data analysis will also help you identify the customers you should target for maximum returns.
Many times you will find that there are many groups of \customers that you would like to target. In such cases, it is effective to do customer segmentation. The process of customer segmentation involves breaking the target audience down into groups based on factors like income group, age and location. Customer segmentation will help you identify niche audience segments within your target audience.
Ideally, before launching the app, you would want to have a clear idea about the process of segregating the loyal customers from the first-time buyers.
Analyze your competitors
While conducting market research, you should put enough emphasis on analyzing your competitors. You will get a clear picture of industry trends and consumer behavior by analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. Sometimes it’s more important to know what not to do in the market. Competitor analysis helps you to find out what not to do. Competitive analysis helps you to learn from other people’s mistakes, a skill that will help you achieve success faster.
When you conduct competitor analysis, you should focus on both the product as well as the company.
These questions will help you to conduct a robust competitive analysis.
What’s the Revenue and profit made by your competitors?
What’s the marketing strategy of your competitors?
What are the problems that your competitor’s app solves for users?
What are the distinguishing features of their app?
What’s the business model of your competitors?
Who are the customers of your competitors?
You can use tools like Mediatoolkit and Apptopia to help you with your competitive analysis. You could even hire a top mobile app development company to do the competitive analysis for you.
Now that we have got the basics covered about what we want to research let’s have a look at the actual market research process.
Use market research methods
Let’s take a look at the various market research methods that will help you conduct effective market research.
Survey
Conducting a market research survey amongst your target group of customers happens to be one of the most popular research methods available today. The process of conducting a survey is quite simple. You just give a series of questions with options to tick to a group of people and record their responses. Surveys happen to be one of the easiest methods of market research.
There is a catch, however, you must take care while designing the survey. Your survey results won’t be of much use if your questions distract the survey takers from the main question or if the questions are framed to get biased answers. A good way to design a survey would be to give your users open-ended questions right at the beginning of the survey. You can provide close-ended questions as the survey progresses. Don’t include questions that do not provide conclusive answers.
Don’t include your friends, family, or co-workers in the survey, as their opinions will be biased. Make sure to include a heterogeneous mix of people of all ages, races, and groups in your survey. Sometimes getting enough people to take the survey can prove to be a task. Give your users goodies to motivate them to take your survey. It could be a free ebook, some exclusive member’s only access to the app, or even a discount. To ensure that your users do not get bored with the survey, ensure that the survey takes a maximum of 5-10 minutes to finish.
There are tools like Hotjar, Google Forms, and Survey Monkey that can help you create online surveys easily.
Social media listening
Listen to the conversations of your target audience on social media. According to research, people spend an average of around 2 hours and 22 minutes per day on social media. Imagine the wealth of information that these users generate on social media. As a savvy businessperson, you should leverage the power of this data to your advantage.
By monitoring the activities of your users on social media platforms, you can gain invaluable insights into how the users communicate with your app. You will also identify the pain points of your customers.
People love to rant about a bad experience on social media. Use this behavior of social media users to your advantage. Focus on the social media chatter surrounding your competitor’s apps. You will be able to identify the gaps in the market this way.
Listen to what users are saying on Discord if you are developing a gaming app. Similarly, listen to Facebook fitness groups if you want to build a health and fitness app. BuzzSumo and Buffer are great social listening tools that can aid you. A nice way to build a loyal fan following on social media sites is to give out reliable and relevant information. This way, you will be able to build authority around your brand.
Collect data
Data analytics will help you conduct robust market research. To conduct a comprehensive data analysis, you will need to collect quality data. Whenever you conduct data analysis, ideally, you would want your data sources to be relevant and trustworthy.
There are many online tools that will aid you in collecting relevant data.
We’ve listed some below:
- Google Trends
- Data.ai
- BusinessofApps
- Statista
In most cases, a simple and free tool like Google Trends will do the trick. Google trends is a great tool for comparing the different search trends across the globe. Google trends will help you to identify the countries where your user base is concentrated.
Data.ai is another great tool for data analysis. Using the tools, you can find top apps by revenue, analyze the competitor’s growth and gain insights about your own app downloads. The blog section of data.ai provides a lot of free and relevant insights. The premium plan of data.ai provides more powerful data insights.
BusinessofApps is another excellent data source on which you can base your research. BusinessofApps also guides you on app store optimization and app monetization techniques. BusinessofApps is also a great source of mobile app industry insights and podcasts related to app development.
Statista is another great platform as it has a large collection of data gathered from various countries and industry segments. You can narrow down your search on Statista using the industry overview page. With Statista’s premium plan, you get unlimited access to all the latest data collected by the portal.
The official bureau statistics of the various countries can prove to be a great data source if you want access to general data like the average income of your users. You could take the help of a top mobile app development company to conduct data analysis for you.
Market research is the best way forward
If you do the basics right, then your mobile app will reap rich dividends. Market research happens to be one of the most important factors that contribute to the success of the mobile app. Follow the process mentioned in this blog to conduct robust market research and take your app to new heights. Market research does not end when the app is launched in the market. You need to conduct market research consistently to feel the pulse of your users. A top mobile app development company can help you conduct thorough market research.
Summary:-
Market research is a tricky subject and even seasoned businesses find it difficult. Conducting market research is an important stage in the mobile app development process. We have outlined the various methodologies and steps to conduct thorough market research in this blog.
