MOBILE APP STRATEGY & APP MARKETING IDEAS | 5 HOW TO RESEARCH TECHNIQUES

by Shishir Dubey September 25, 2018

First of all, mobile app development is not as easy as it might seem. To get your mobile app based business rolling, you need to put in a lot of effort. As per our analysis of the market, 72% new mobile app based products fail to perform to their expectations.

The reason being – Inadequate market research, due to which they cannot build their initial foundation.

Mobile app market research is about a lot of things. Right from determining the need for your app to doing mobile application marketing, which comprises of creating an effective mobile app marketing strategy or mobile app strategy, mobile app market research comprises of a lot of tasks to accomplish. App marketing ideas will help you to frame an effective mobile app marketing strategy while determining the need for your app will help you to figure out your target audience and create a strong user base.

(fact courtesy: entrepreneur.com)

Also when it comes to researching about innovative mobile app ideas or developing hard hitting mobile app marketing strategies, it all boils down to creating a well strategized mobile app marketing plan.

Marketing an app is just a part of the overall market research phase. So the overall research plan and data will be –

A sum total of all the in-depth mobile app market analysis that you will be doing after studying the overall scenario of the competitive mobile app development market.

This analysis will then benefit you in a lot of ways for every aspect of your app development.

Just for example –

If you end up doing the best and thorough research, then –

Your overall research plan will then not only be a pool of excellent mobile app promotion ideas but even when it comes to marketing, you will surely end up framing the best mobile app development marketing plan for your app.

So before proceeding ahead just remember one thing in mind always –

Researching the market and competition is the only fool proof way to Build a Strong Product Foundation and Get Ahead Of The Existing Competition.

Since our establishment in 2010, ChromeInfotech has created a lot of mobile apps ranging from a small scale business to a large scale business for the sake of catering to quality app development. We provide services for both android and iPhone app development. Majority of them were top international clients and well-funded with an average funding of a million dollars. A lot of them succeeded while some of them did not perform up to the mark.

Out of the total apps that succeeded,

• 35% of them succeeded because of researching the exact market need for their product.

• 18% apps succeeded because they had a strong product core.

• 23% of our clients succeeded in becoming a hit in the market because of a strong business model. They got exponential growth due to our recommendations.

• 15% of apps developed by us, outperformed other competitors. We recommended a word of mouth marketing strategy for their mobile app which made them a hit.

• The remaining 9% leveraged the benefit of an adequate combination of organic and paid social media strategy. We helped them to launch their app at the right time and it got them maximum user engagement. Both paid and organic app marketing strategies have a lot of benefits for both the mobile users as well as for the companies who runs those apps.

Also, out of the total apps that failed,

• 40% of them did not had a strong business model. Out of them, the mobile apps related to small scale business were the major failures.

• Other 25% did not research the exact market need and moved ahead with product development.

• The remaining 35% did not had the most effective app marketing strategies for their mobile app. They spent too much on paid advertising rather than integrating word of mouth marketing into their strategy. Basically they lacked the vision to come up with innovative mobile app marketing ideas.

Before you decide to move ahead with the development of a mobile app based product, consider this –

Research out whether there is a need for your product in the market or not. A hard hitting mobile app market research will help you to establish something valuable in the long run.

Figure out what kind of business model you need.

For that, research –

• Similar existing products first of all.
• Successful mobile apps that resembles similarity to your product at some level, furthermore.
• How your competitors are generating revenue?
• Exponential growth factors for your app based business.

You need to research whether –

• You need a paid marketing strategy

or

• Word of mouth marketing strategy

Mobile application marketing which comprises of designing exceptional mobile app marketing strategy is one of the phenomenal phase of mobile app development process. It can either help you to establish a strong market presence or fall down the ladder like everybody else depending upon how strong is your mobile app strategy.

To master mobile application marketing to derive the best mobile app marketing strategy for your unique app idea, you need to think out of the box. Your main task would be to create such a strong mobile app strategy that users get bound to associate with your product.

You need to determine how to make your product core strong.

You need to answer,

“Can it easily get out-competed?”

Determine your social media strength across various platforms. Social media play a major role in determining the correct launch time for your product. Research and figure out how can you leverage that to your upcoming mobile app based business. 

(facts courtesy: cbinsights.com)

As per Neil Patel, it is necessary to have a simplified social media marketing strategy rather than a complicated one for your business. A simple strategy results in-

• More user engagement

rather than

• Pushing them away from your social media profile.

Quick Tip 1:

At the present moment, the entire population of mobile users spend 89% of their time on apps. Every company create mobile apps for its users to provide them with a lots of benefits. Mobile app development is the most convenient way to drive sales for your business because – Mobile apps simplify the purchasing experience as compared to a website. So it’s critical to understand the importance of having a mobile app for your business to – Drive sales and Generate revenue. For this you need to have one of the best mobile app development strategy. 

(fact courtesy: quicksprout.com)

Framing the most effective market research strategy for social media when it comes to making your app a success, is highly critical from the long term prospective. When it comes a to social media there is no thumb rule to frame you own set of social media market research strategies.

All you have to do is –

Have a look at all your existing competitors and players in the market and you will get an idea how to come up with the best market research techniques for your social media promotions. This is by far the most effective way to come up with innovative market research ideas for reaching to many people through social media.

Now let’s come to the core of mobile app market research and understand the main objective.

The goal of market research is to determine – 

How can you uniquely position yourself in the market?

There are certain important aspects that revolves around this question. Let’s have a look at them before getting the exact answer to the question. To position yourself uniquely in the market –

You need to come up with user-capturing mobile app ideas that will make you distinguished in the market.

Discovering the mobile app marketing strategies of competitors is a big part. This will give you in-depth insight on how you need to proceed with your app’s marketing and how to gain more users.

Apart from that,

positioning yourself uniquely in the market also involves doing extensive mobile app market analysis for all the players that exist in the market. Not only this will help you to understand the mobile app development market in detail but will also generate some effective mobile app promotion ideas that will help you in the long run.

A big part of positioning yourself uniquely in the market is about creating a catchy and exciting mobile app development marketing plan. This will help you to create firm roots for your business in the competitive market. Remember that at the end of the day, it’s all about beating the existing competition.

All these aspects when clubbed together, gives rise to one important term –

So positioning yourself in the market is the main game and –

To achieve that goal, you need to answer –

• What should be your product’s USP (Unique Selling Proposition)? How can you build your audience using your product’s USP?
• What do you want to be for your users? What problem you want to solve? How will you solve it?

In a nutshell, you have to craft a compelling brand story to capture the attention of your audience before starting your mobile app development phase.  A compelling brand story will definitely retain your users for long.

• How will you create a user friendly mobile app to maintain your USP and strengthen your brand story?

The answers to these questions will set you in the correct research direction. There is a difference between Plain researching and Researching relevant data that could be of use to you.

The output from these answers will set the tone of relevance to your entire research phase that will Push you in the right direction and Lay the foundation of successful product evolution.

Please note one thing before you continue to read any further:

Build an optimized and, effective and efficient mobile app development strategy that covers all the important aspects, is quite a lot crucial to the overall success of your mobile app based business. A concrete and hard hitting mobile app market research forms the base of not only your mobile app but also for your mobile app based business. We are speaking of this from the long term perspective. That’s because exceptional market research makes exceptional mobile app marketing ideas as well as the entire mobile app popular among the smartphone user community.

The Market Research phase for mobile app development begins with Primary Research followed by Secondary Research.

These two types of research methods help to formulate effective market research strategies and allow you to come up with user appealing market research ideas. These ideas are those that retain your users to your app.

Primary and secondary research when combined together further helps you to evolve your market research techniques and frame even better mobile app market research strategy.

This is the only way to ensure that mobile app market research phase for your app is worth all the effort.

Mobile App Development | How to research to determine whether your users need your product or not?

Before you move ahead with the your mobile app development, you should determine, whether your users need your product or not.

Keep in mind one thing that the most optimized mobile app development strategy will only create a hit mobile app. Also you can take note of this statistic –

14% mobile app start-ups fail because they did not scrutinise their audience. First of all, you need to have a general understanding about the –

• Product you are building

and

• Audience you are targeting.

For example:

If you are developing an app for the fitness category, an app where you bring together-

• Fitness coaches

and

• People who want to get fit,

Then you need to have a general understanding that there are –

• a lot of fitness coaches out there

who

• want to connect to people to help them provide necessary fitness training.

To get this general understanding you need to explore –

• The market in person
• Various online forums

and

• Different social media platforms.

It will give you a clear understanding whether there is a demand for such product or not amongst them.

Please Note:

Also keep in mind one thing that while identifying your audience, you will also come across various mobile app marketing ideas that will help you in the long run.

Apart from this you can,

• Create simple landing page along with Facebook ads. Run ads on Facebook related to what you will be building. Through those ads redirect them to your landing page.

• In your landing page, give a brief visual projection of your app’s idea and mention what it is all about.

• Also integrate two different buttons in the end of the landing page named as – SOUNDS INTERESTING and TOO COMMON

Record the no of clicks upon each button and figure out the target group interested in your app idea.

(Fact courtesy: sproutsocial.com)

Follow these basic steps to create a Facebook ad to proceed with the primary research phase of mobile app development:

• Create a Facebook page account.
• Straightaway go to your Ads Manager section where you will find two different approaches to create an add –
  • Guided creation (For those who are new to Facebook)
  • Quick creation (For those who have already been on Facebook for long)
• Click on the CREATE button, which is used for creating Facebook ads. Further click on Switch to Guided Creation to get started with creating your Ad.

 

CREATE FACEBOOK AD USING GUIDED METHOD.

8

Click on Create an Ad (as shown below) to create your Facebook ad and then place the link of your landing page on your Facebook page. Through the Ad you will redirect user to your Facebook page and from there redirect him/her to your landing page.

If you have benefited from this method, do let us know in the comment section below. To know how to create a Facebook ad using quick method, click here.

Quick Tip 2:

Every month an average person who uses the internet, spends close to 120 hours on their smartphone. This equates to around 4 hours per day on the smartphone. And not to mention, smartphone users spend most time on apps rather than on browser. So every year that same average person spends nearly 1500 hours on the smartphone engaging with apps.

(fact courtesy: thisisglance.com)

There are some key metrics that acts as benchmark when you decide to move ahead with your app development such as –

To satisfy these benchmarks, you need to figure out your target audience. Online surveys and focus groups helps a lot in determining who needs your mobile app.

Online Surveys:

Creating a successful app is all about common sense. As per Dávid Pásztor at uxstudio, If you need a UX survey, you should do it in the right way.

Follow this 7-Step checklist to create one of the most effective mobile survey to move ahead with your app development phase:

• Pick the desired survey tool of your choice.
• Figure out what questions you will be asking.
• Decide your audience.
• Design the mobile app’s UX around survey research questions.
• Integrate that mobile app design into your mobile experience.
• Do a pre-test for experiences and functionalities which you will include in your app.
• Finally collect all your results and analyse it.

Out of the 7 steps mentioned above,

The main attention revolves around how to frame the right set of questions for the survey to develop a mobile app. Follow this approach for figuring out exact questions you want to ask –

• Think about asking them what they care about and what they don’t care for in your product?
• Brainstorm about how can you give value to your users?
• Figure out how can you prevent your users from leaving you for another competitor.
• Frame attitudinal questions by thinking about what can be users’ attitude towards your app.
• List out demographic and technical aspects.
• Keep in mind the behavioural aspects and how your users will interact with your app. 

Some essential tips for framing questions for online surveys related to your mobile app development :

• Keep your questions simple
• Do not ask polar questions (questions which has only two possible answers.
• Ask smart open ended-questions which can give you a comment as an answer.
• At one time ask one question. 

Example of sample questions can be –

• What is your biggest challenge in the fitness industry?
• Please mention the aspects which deserve a solution in the fitness industry
• What is absent in the fitness industry – Basically services and tools you think should be there?
• Can you tell me your fitness expertise?
• How do you learn things?

Apptentive 7 Steps to Successful Mobile Surveys, is the one stop solution for transitioning through a smooth online survey experience.

Let’s have a look at some of the best online survey tools that can ease your app development process.

Survey Monkey

Survey Money is one of the best online survey tools that can be used for all your survey needs related to your mobile app development project.

It helps to create and send surveys that includes a global consumer panel. Survey Monkey helps you to target a large set of audience for better input and engagement.

Their biggest USP is that they focus on improving consumer experience by understanding it minutely. They will make your life easier as it will –

• Help you to collect data as well as review them for you.
• Manage all your survey relate aspects so that you don’t have to micro-manage things yourself. Survey Monkey does that for you.

Let me explain you step by step how to create a survey on Survey Monkey and analyse results.

STEP 1:

Type your survey name and specify what type of survey it is.

STEP 2:

Add questions to your survey one by one.

 

 STEP 3:

Preview your questions and see its completion rate. 

 

STEP 4:

Specify how do you want to collect the response to your survey. Click on any one of the options below.

 

STEP 5:

Lastly you analyse all the data that has been collected by Survey Monkey in order to find relevant feedback for your mobile app idea. 

Plans and Pricing:

• The basic version is available for free. You get –
  • 10 question for free.
  • Respondents limit up to 100
  • 15 different question types to choose from
  • Light theme as well as customisation.
• Select version for $26/month.
• Gold for $300/year.
• Platinum for $780/year.

Survey Monkey is your one stop solution for online surveys when it comes to how to develop a mobile app.

Zoho Survey

This is yet another quite interesting tool for conducting online survey for your mobile app development project. Some of the key features are it-

• Helps to create mobile app development related surveys in minutes.
• Allows you to reach your audience on any device and every device.
• Presents you real time results in graphical form.

Other key highlights of the free version:

• It offers you unlimited surveys in the free version
• Each survey can have 15 questions
• You can get up to 150 responses in the free version.

Steps to create a survey using Zoho Survey

STEP 1:

Create your survey.

STEP 2:

Select the type of question you want to create for your app development related survey using the dashboard.

STEP 3:

Enter question details in the right side panel which opens upon clicking a particular question type.

Plans and pricing:

• Free for the basic version
• $20/month for the PLUS version
• $25/month for PRO version
• $60/month for ENTERPRISE version.

Focus groups:

It is always recommended to form a group of 5 to 6 people to gather user opinion for your app development project based on certain categories such as –

• Experienced mobile users
• Inexperienced mobile users

Interact with people in both these categories and gain insights from them about your product idea. Never involve a subject matter expert in your focus group because he/she will mislead your research direction.

A focus group with 5 to 6 members has more than 80% chances of redirecting you towards the right audience set.

Up to 10 or more people in your focus group reduces the rate to less than 60%.

For both the above categories, also have a diversity in users so that you can get diverse –

• Opinions
• Experiences

and

• Behaviours

You can create various personas which include diverse set of questions. Then, apply those to the above two focus group categories. It will help you to explore your app idea as well as further define the core aspects of your app.

Frame Focus group questions to ask your audience around aspects such as –

• Industry trends in mobile app development.
• Features and services they will like in your app
• Competitors
• Their usability aspects when it comes to app development.
• What they aspire

Demetrius Madrigal and Bryan McClain at uxmatters, lay quite a lot of focus on some of the essential Do’s and Don’ts to be followed while engaging with focus groups for your app development project. Let’s have a look at some of the major points:

Click here to read more.

The outcome that these focus groups and online surveys will give you, will help you frame the entire user experience for your mobile app.

You will get a lot of thoughts from your users through follow up questions that will help you launch an optimized version 1.0 for your app.

Mobile App Development |How to research to write the best and a highly effective Business Plan for your mobile app idea?

Before moving ahead, understand what exactly a mobile app business plan is.

A business plan is nothing but a detailed map for your mobile app based business. It is the road-map which connects aspects like sales, revenue, profit and market. It helps you to figure out whether your mobile app idea is worth pursuing the effort or not.

Doesn’t matter whether you are doing android app market research or iPhone app market research.

To make the best and most effective business plan

for your mobile app development project, you need to cater to an extremely critical set of parameters:

• Uniqueness of your business

You need to figure out what makes your business unique in the market.

• Short and concise details

Your business plan should not be too much detail oriented. If it is, then it will do nothing more than confusing your stakeholders.

• Flexibility of your approach.

Can your business evolve easily over the course of time?

You need to answer it very précised clearly.

When it comes to building a business plan for developing an app, you need to take into consideration one thing very important that will end up deciding the fate of your app in the market –

Just creating a business plan by under either iPhone app market research or android app market research is not going to help you completely. You need to come up with a plan to market your app among the smartphone using public. Creating marketing strategy is the most important of all whether it is android app marketing strategy or whether you are building an iPhone app and need iPhone app marketing strategy.

A business plan that comprises of hard hitting marketing strategies is bound to succeed there’s no doubt in that.

Every year 15-20 % mobile app businesses fail because they lack the most effective business model. You have to answer a lot of questions to get to the correct business model for your business.

There are 8 key steps which you should follow to write the most effective business plan for your mobile business:

STEP 1:

Goal – Write an executive summary of your app idea for devising an optimized business plan

How to do – Follow these steps:

• First of all, figure out your company overview and explain briefly.
• Then briefly describe the company profile with the complete business structure. This include the hierarchy of your departments and manpower.
• Explain about your products or services that you will be offering
• Briefly present your market findings using online market research tools.
• Present your financial aspects – how you are planning to fund the business and show the research done about future projections.

Why to do – Writing an executive summary will give your readers a high level perspective of your company. It will help them to understand the key takeaways from your business

STEP 2:

Goal – Tell about your company and business model

How to do – Brainstorm about your vision, the problems you want to solve and the footprint you want to leave behind in the industry. Figure out what gaps you will be bridging in the market with the advent of your mobile app.

Show how you will maintain the flow of money between revenue and profits. At last you will get to the core of your vision that will help you achieve the bigger goal.

Why to do – It will help your stakeholders to understand –

• What your company aims to do?
• Your mission statement?
• What are your location details?
• The marketplace needs your company is trying to fulfil?
• How will your product actually meet those needs?

STEP 3:

Goal – Analyse the present market condition

How to do – To analyse the present situation of the market, make use of:

• Social media platforms
• Online surveys
• Focus groups
• Seminars and workshops happening related to your industry.
• Follow all the top news channels and platforms.
• Set auto-update notifications from top media houses.

Why to do – It will help you come to the conclusion that whether your app idea deserves a place in the market or not. The market is the main deciding factor about the success of your app.

STEP 4:

Goal – Elaborate what your product will do

How to do –

• Take a pen and paper.
• Draw a table with two columns named – Product component and Problem it solves.
• Under the first columns, write down all the components and features of your mobile app.
• In the second column, write the problem it solves for each corresponding block in the first column.

Why to do – It will allow your stakeholders to understand everything about your product. It will help them to relate their problem more effectively to your solution to get the value they are searching.

STEP 5:

Goal – Draw the hierarchy for operational and management roles

How to do –

• Take a pen and paper
• Draw a hierarchical structure with n levels.
• Place everybody who will work with your
• Label their department along with their name and roles and responsibilities.
• Clearly write down the expectations that they need to fulfil through their work.

Why to do – It will help to highlight the unique structure of your organisation’s management and sub-ordinates. It will let the stakeholders know who will do what.

STEP 6:

Goal – Design a strategy and plan for sales and marketing of your mobile application based business.

You need to do the best mobile application marketing by framing the best mobile app marketing strategy. In return that mobile app strategy will build the strong foundation of your app for the long run.

How to do –

• Figure out how much is your target audience
• Figure out the no of users you want to cater to monthly.
• List out ways how you will make your own app visible to your audience.
• List out ways you will capture their attentions and maintain their engagement.
• Determine your user retention strategy for the future with clear focus on essential parameters.

Why to do – It will help your stakeholders to understand how will you generate revenue and drive your sales target.

STEP 7:

Goal – Figure out a financial plan involving business costs, revenue details, and funding figures for your app development project.

How to do –

• Determine what are the areas that requires you to spend money on.
• Figure out salary cost for employees as per industry standards.
• Mention the development cost of your app.
• Determine the cost of company establishment.
• Figure out taxes and every single detail about it.

This will give you a rough figure how much funding you require at each stage of your business.

Why to do – It will determine the ease of kick-starting your business and how it will drive you to required sales and revenue targets.

STEP 8:

Goal – Summarise all the above with proper appendix.

How to do –

• Figure out all the important terms in your plan and make a list of it.
• Determine the position where they are present in your plan for easy navigation.

Why to do – It will help your stakeholders to easily navigate to any aspect of your business plan with external guidance.

Let’s have a look at a sample business plan template to make you more clear on how a business plan looks like. We analysed a lot of templates and selected the below one because of simplicity and clarity. You can refer to any other template available out of the million ones in the market. Do let us know in the comment section below if you come across any other better business plan template. 

This is a sample showing how the cover page of your business plan might look.

 

 

Describe your business in the space provided.

 

Elaborate your company and mission statement in the space provided

 

State the buyer persona in the space provided.

 

 

Tell about your products or services offered

 

Give an overview of sales and marketing plan for your mobile application

 

Shed some light on your Financial Projections

 

State goals to achieve to measure your success

 

These 8 steps will help you to figure out what you need for your business plan and how to do research to reach to the desired goal. As much it is important to write a business plan for your next mobile app, it is also necessary to know how to do research to figure out that plan. Hope it’s clear to you. Leave your doubts, if any, in the comment section below.

 

Some other Useful checklists

That will let you understand how to write a business plan for developing a successful mobile app:

 

Mobile App Development | How to research to devise an optimised Social Media Strategy for your product?

On your journey to set-up your own app based business, you will be surprised to know that out of every 10 mobile apps businesses, there are 8 of them which rely on social media marketing for growth and business evolution by executing effective social media app marketing strategies.

Hence coming up with the adequate social media app development marketing strategies is a must for every entrepreneur. Mobile app development market research is incomplete without formulating relevant social media strategies for your upcoming app. Consider this –

More than 50% mobile app businesses fail to perform in the market due to poor social media presence. As per Dominique Jackson, social media optimization is a key aspect that many emerging mobile app brands neglect and pay the price later on.

In today’s’ digital world – 

It is 100% necessary to have an online presence to make an impact on your users. If you dominate the social media regime, your app will dominate the market. Making your users aware that you exist is a big part of establishing your product in the market.

For every business which functions through mobile apps, they need one of the best social media strategy to win the users.

There are 10 key elements which are the key pillars of a successful social media branding strategy for your app development project –

• Have a specific set of goals which you want to achieve.
• Identify your set of audience.
• Aim at providing value to each of your followers.
• Always have a set editorial calendar for content.
• Optimize your social media accounts.
• Post more visual content rather than textual.
• Stay active on your social media accounts and let your users know you exist.
• Always be in touch with the trending.
• Approach organically but also don’t be afraid to go the paid path.
• Develop content which actually holds the interest of your users.

Now let’s answer the questions: HOW TO RESEARCH TO –

Figure out your specific set of goals?

• First of all, ask yourself why are you present on a specific social media platform.
• Then Ask yourself again what is it that you want to achieve specifically through your app development project?
• After you have got the answer, figure out is it a measurable and achievable goal or not?
• Lastly, decide how much relevant it is and can you achieve it in a specific deadline to successfully accomplish the app development process.

After you have answered all these questions, you will easily be able to conclude –

What is your specific set of goals that you want to achieve through social media for the success of your mobile app?

You need to specify objectively about your app development marketing approach on social media through these key points –

Identify your target audience?

Always remember that every person whom you target is not your audience.

• Analyse the social media profile of every single person you think could be your potential audience.
• Go through their face, twitter, LinkedIn profiles to get an idea of their social media habits and what they engage themselves with.
• Through this you will come up with a list of people who resembles similarity to you and others which don’t.

Provide value to each of your followers?

• Contact each of the person you think could be your potential audience through social media. Reach out to them through chat interfaces available on different social media platforms.
• Also form different social media groups and send them invitations to join them. Have interaction with them over there and get to know them through direct chat or comments.
• Understand what they seek and this will help you to add value to their lives.

Set your editorial calendar?

To set your editorial calendar means setting every specific day for a specific type of content.

Example of a sample editorial calendar for a particular week of a month:

You should post 7 out of 7 days on social media to create your user base quickly and within a short span of time.

To do that –

• Observe the social media profiles of top competitors.
• Analyse what they are posting on Facebook, twitter, etc.
• Look for the time and day when they post a specific content on social media.
• Figure out which type of content drive more engagement.
• Analyse and come with time periods when you can get more engagement.
• Keep track of how many users have liked, shared and commented to a particular content. Analyse the pattern.

All these will help you to come up with –

• Which content drive more user engagement
• When to post a specific type of content
• On which platform, what type of content should go. Example: should I post infographic on LinkedIn or Facebook to get more engagement.

Optimise social media accounts?

• Look out accounts of competitors.
• See how they have named their accounts.
• Figure out are they using keywords in their social media content as well as profile.
• Have they uploaded proper profile picture that fits all the size requirements?
• What kind of user name they are using?
• Is their bio section updated or not?
• Do they have their link on the home page of their profile?
• What kind of privacy settings they have implemented?
• Are they active consistently?
• Do they have links to their websites, email, or any other key particularly?

If you have figured out the answers to all these aspects, then start implementing them in a similar way to optimize your social media accounts.

Post more visual content than textual?

This one is quite simple and does not need much effort.

• Analyse the accounts of competitors and see what kind of visual content they are posting?
• Are they designing eye-catchy web and mobile infographics or posting images?
• Figure out how they are designing the infographics, if they are doing so?
• Determine how they are maintaining a balance between visual and textual aspect of the infographic?
• When they are posting info graphics and at what time?

All these will help you to get a better grip of visual content and drive audience to your account that will serve a greater purpose in the long run.

Let your users know you exist?

Letting your users know that you exist, is a big part of establishing yourself on social media platforms.

More than 75% of mobile app brands who have strong social media presence are aware of their social media responsibilities.

To establish your strong social media presence –

• Research a lot of other social media profiles and accounts.
• Understand their engagement patterns and trends to get that magical number you are expecting on your follower’s tag.

Always be in touch with the trending?

• Follow all the top technology websites for latest news and updates.
• Look out for the top technology channels on YouTube.
• Understand the logistics of hashtags on social media platforms.
• Follow all the top technology profile on social media.

Build an organic as well as paid audience base?

There will be times when developing an organic social media strategy will be a priority for your, and there will be times when you will need a paid one. To come to a decision when you need what figure out –

• Do you want to retain something for long term or short term?
• Do you want to cross a specific hurdle that might not be possible using organic strategy?
• Are you working on a deadline?

Answers to all these questions will help you decide whether you should go with paid or organic social media strategy or a combination of both.

In the long run you are more than 85% likely to develop quality audience base through organic strategy rather than paid strategy. 

Develop content which actually retains your users?

More than 72% of users who follow a mobile app brand on social media, turn to them for quick solution to any critical issue they face at times.

Content is not just visual material blended with text. It involves a quite big aspect which is emotions or facial variations. The power of human emotion is huge when applied correctly on social media platforms.

44 Interesting Facts about Human Emotion is a complete epitome of how human emotions can drive social media engagement for you.

To develop content which actually retain users, come up with all the relevant aspects of your mobile app. Create such content that serves two purposes –

• Provides users with the solution they are looking for.
• Promotes your brand and let users know that you are the one who is more concerned about that specific issue.

For that –

• Visit the social media accounts of top players in the industry.
• Analyse their text and infographics that can help to make your app a hit.
• Understand what is that unique thing they are doing which you can apply to yourself and create your own uniqueness.

Hope these methods will serve you the greater good in long run. If you did not understand any specific aspect, do let us know in the comment section below.

These aspects are highly critical to understand from the point of view of doing an effective app development market research.

Remember one thing that –

Don’t be pushy on social media just for the sake of getting engagement. It is a sign of desperation and gives the message that you care less about users and more about followers. So always strive for developing a social media strategy that gains you more followers rather than going for the one which makes your existing followers leave you.

Mobile App Development | How to research to strengthen your product’s core?

The core of your product is the ultimate deciding factor of its existence and sustenance in the long run. To determine how strong is your app development project and how much impact it will have on the market you-

• Need to research the core competencies of your product.
• Should be aware of the loopholes so that it doesn’t stop your app from becoming a success.
• Must be able to figure out how you can evolve your mobile app in the long run.
• Lastly, you need to figure out ways to stay ahead of the competition always.

All these critical aspects come under the dimension of SWOT analysis, which is how you do research to determine the strength of your product. You need to determine the –

• Strength,
• Weakness,
• Opportunities

and

• Threats,

related to your mobile app development project to derive the most efficient solution to sustain your product in the market.

This SWOT analysis is also applicable to other apps also.

When you are doing your mobile app research, you need to do swot analysis for smartphone apps that are also your competitors. Doing this has its own advantage. You will be able to figure out the strong points and loopholes of your competitor’s apps and in the end you will come up with swot analysis of mobile app industry in general. And this industry will cover all your relevant competitors and similar apps.

Remember, product sustenance is more difficult than product establishment. You need to stay creative and come up with something unique every time to keep your app development project going and evolving.

How should you do a SWOT analysis of your mobile app?

It is a four step process that can help you to determine whether your app will sustain in the market or not.

STEP 1:

Determine the strengths of your mobile app

How to do it:

• First of all, list down the advantages of your mobile app idea.
• Figure out the USP (Unique Selling Proposition) of your app.
• Furthermore, state clearly how your app is better than others.
• Finally, determine what is the ultimate goal you want to achieve through your app that will generate revenue for your business? Figure it out.

STEP 2:

Figure out your app’s weaknesses

How to do it:

• First of all, list down the parameters upon which you can improve.
• Furthermore, be specific about what you need to leave behind and abandon to reach your end goal.
• Also, understand from the user’s perspective – What they think is the weakness of your app.
• Finally, figure out the affects that can hinder the revenue generation process in the long run.

STEP 3:

Discover the opportunities that can help you grow and evolve

How to do it:

• First of all, figure out the latest technology trends that you can integrate in your app.
• Furthermore, determine how can you take advantage of your competitor’s weakness to get ahead of the competition?
• Brainstorm on ideas and strategies that can help you to scale your mobile app business. Ex: Marketing, finance, operations, etc.
• Finally, get into the depth of your user’s lifestyle and understand their behavioural pattern.

STEP 4:

Unleash the threats to your success

How to do it:

• List down the difficulties that you might face along the way.
• Understand the ways your competitor implements to overcome their threats.
• Discover and realize how evolution of industry standards can influence your mobile app idea.
• State clearly whether your app will be able to sustain changing technology or not?
• Last but not the least, be sure that you won’t stay back on your pursuits due to funding issues.

Follow these steps and you will come up with the best strategies to make your mobile app a hit. The need of the hour is to do effective mobile app research. Doing swot analysis for smartphone apps is one important part of it that helps you to build up your own app product in the most effective way. More than 78% mobile app start-ups fail because they ignore the importance of SWOT analysis. Don’t be the one which falls into that category. Instead be the one that falls into the remaining 22% of people and make your app a hit. You should be the one who does swot analysis of mobile app industry and figures out what can work best for you.

Mobile App Development | How to research to come up with Optimised App Marketing Strategies  

How to market an app? – is probably the most common question asked by many entrepreneurs who aspire to create a mobile app led business. So for every entrepreneur, here are some wise words –

You need app marketing strategies for your future mobile app as much as you need the other four aspects mentioned above. Optimized app marketing strategies will help you to reach to the hands of your users in the most effective way possible. Hence it is important for you to know how to market your mobile app.

More than 90% mobile app based ideas fail on the front of having an optimized marketing strategy. They usually get confronted with one thing from investors all the time – “What you are doing is very common. Show us your uniqueness when it comes to marketing yourself? We will fund you but first show us why we should?”

Developing an optimized marketing strategies for your mobile app is a 5-step process.

• Define how do you want to market your mobile app?
• Be clear where do you want to market your app?
• Decide whether you need an in-house team or an external agency?
• What are the pre-launch pitfalls that you should avoid?
• Determining the post-launch pitfalls you need to avoid at all costs?

Before we discuss these aspects in detail, let’s understand some essential facts –

When it comes to building effective mobile application marketing strategy, whether it’s an android app marketing strategy or an iPhone app marketing strategy, you need to research out each and every competitor of yours that exist in the market.

Building a marketing strategy for mobile apps will also require you to figure out the strategies your competitors are adopting. This will make marketing your mobile app a lot easier.

Building effective an optimised mobile apps strategy related to marketing aspects also involves figuring out the revenue model of your competitors. This can give you inner insights of formulating user-grabbing mobile development strategy when anyone talks about marketing your app.

Smartphone or mobile market research will also require you to –

Curate marketing research strategies by also focusing on the business model and plan of your competitor apps. This will help you to figure out how your competitors are reaching out to a wide audience set. This at the end indicates one thing – a business plan for developing an app is also the roadway to formulating effective mobile app marketing strategies. Hence marketing a new mobile app would be a lot easier for you then.

So let’s discuss the five step process in detail for doing effective marketing when it comes to mobile app development.

How do you want to market your mobile app?

Goal:

This question can be further simplified to – how to market an app?

The aim here is to come to a decision whether you need to adopt –

• Organic Marketing Strategy
• Paid Marketing Strategy

or

• A combination of both.

How to research:

To figure out this answer, decide between two important situations –

• Do you want to gain users fast and make your app a hit in the short run? Is your app project deadline-based?

OR

• You are aiming to gain users slowly but retain them for the long term? Is your project a non-deadline based project?

The answer to this question is extremely critical as it will set the direction of your app’s marketing phase. This will eventually tell you how to market your mobile app in a much better way.

Where do you want to market your mobile app?

Goal:

The objective here is to decide what are the platforms and areas where you need to promote your mobile app.

How to research:

You need to figure out two things here –

• Do you want to promote your app digitally or you want to the help of outdoor marketing such as hoardings, banners, etc.?

• How much money you want to spend on marketing?

If you want to promote your app digitally,

You need to choose the online platforms on which you will run promotional campaigns such as –

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn, etc.

Look into the plans that each of these platforms provide for paid –

• Promotions

and

• Campaigns,

because at one stage you will require paid marketing to move forward.

5 out of 15 app ideas are likely to fail if there is a failure in developing an adequate balance between digital and outdoor marketing strategy.

If you want to promote your app via outdoor media –

• Figure out the top vendors that will offer you affordable and budget friendly deals.
• List out the areas in your city where your mobile app can get high visibility through banners, hoardings, etc.

Do you need an in-house marketing team or external agency?

Goal:

Here you need to specify whether you –

• Have sufficient time and money to hire your own in-house marketing team.

or

• Want to associate yourself with an external marketing agency.

How to research:

If you will need an in-house marketing team, then the answer to the following questions will be YES –

• Do you have abundant amount of funds?
• Can you handle an in-house team?
• Do you have proper infrastructural set-up? If not, are you willing to invest in one?
• Is your project a non-deadline based project?
• What is your marketing awareness? Do you have the knowledge-base to stay ahead of the competition?

On the other hand, If the Answer to these questions is a NO, then you definitely need to associate with an external marketing agency. These questions act as the base that can help to research how to derive optimized app marketing strategies for your mobile app.

You are more than 63% likely to succeed if you go with an agency as compared to setting up an in-house marketing team. 

What are the pre-launch pitfalls to avoid?

Goal:

Here you will define what are the marketing mistakes you should avoid before launching your mobile app in the market.

How to research:

• Invest properly in market research.
• Develop a feedback mechanism.
• Start your app’s marketing soon.
• Plan in advance the release date of your app.

For creating a successful app, you should always follow the above points to make your app a hit in the market.

Now to understand how to invest properly, you need to find out –

• All the key areas of marketing that needs spending.
• The amount of money that each area needs.
• When to spend on which area of marketing?

For developing a feedback mechanism,

you need to figure out –

• All the key aspects of your app.
• How to connect user to all these aspects directly and indirectly?
• What type of assistance you can provide to your user?
• Can you be available 24/7 or for a certain part of the day?

To start your app’s marketing soon, you need to find out –

• The best time to start marketing for your app.
• When each phase of marketing should be started?

To plan the release date of your app, you should figure out –

• Whether any competitor is launching something similar at that time.
• How much visibility you can get by leveraging the benefit of any festive season or any such time period?

This is how you should do research for all the pre-launch pitfalls to come to the most effective marketing strategy for your mobile app.

What are the post-launch pitfalls to avoid?

Goal:

Here you need to understand which marketing mistakes should be avoided after you have launched your app in the market.

How to research:

The post app launch pitfalls that you should avoid are:

• Focussing less on user engagement and retention.
• Not monitoring your app’s progress.
• Unnecessary push notifications.
• Not providing any kind of reward or incentives upon share or like of your app’s link.

To overcome these, you need to brainstorm –

• When to catch user feedback and how to improve upon it?
• Constantly monitoring app store statistics related to your app’s download and uninstalls
• How to deal with push notifications. Ways to make the best out of it without irritating the user?
• Methods of rewarding the user upon like and share through various incentive programs.

This is how you need to research to overcome all the post launch pitfalls to figure out the best marketing strategy for your mobile app.

Follow each of these steps and you will move in the direction of deriving the most optimized marketing strategy for your mobile app project. Be in the 10% club whose mobile app is a hit because they have the best marketing strategy for their product.

Before moving on to the conclusion of this article,

Let me clear out one thing straight-forwardly –

When it comes to mobile application marketing strategy development for marketing a new mobile app, you need to understand that mobile market research is incomplete without doing this.  Building effective mobile apps strategy for marketing your app not only strengthens your business plan’s foundation,

But also help you to execute your overall mobile development strategy in the most organised and systematic way. Creating marketing strategy for mobile apps is essential for marketing your mobile app in the best way possible. You need to attract audience for making your app a great success as much as possible, and building optimised and effective marketing research strategies is the only way to do that.

CONCLUSION

If you are thinking of building a mobile app for your business, know one thing –

Your mobile app is not just an app, it is your pathway to become an expert in mobile solutions in your category.

It is more important to know how to do research rather than what to research. Anybody can figure out the various aspects which should be researched before developing an app. But this article is an effort to bring forward some of the best ways to let you know how to research what you want to research.

Mistakes are common and all of us make it at some point or the other.

It’s time to rise above the mistakes that might happen during the research phase of mobile app development and focus more on how to prevent them from happening. Out of all the 5 aspects discussed above, the marketing of your mobile app is extremely critical and needs the most attention of all.

It’s the age of smartphone and also mobile marketing.

Hubspot’s The Ultimate Cheat Sheet for Mastering Mobile Marketing is probably the perfect guide to master the aspect of marketing your product by leveraging the power of mobile that will make your app a hit.

Also you should avoid these 5 mistakes if you want to walk on the road of success. If you are marketing your app, then mobile is the most powerful tool that can help you to connect with your audience.

Making a successful app requires moving beyond your mistakes.

So if you really want to make your own app get your business rolling, it’s time to stop making mistakes and focus on what needs to be done.