It is so tricky to develop a mobile app. It is a prolonged process that involves various steps. A new mobile application can be disastrous or can receive a massive success. Well, no one wants their app to rest in the app store's graveyard and wants it to be on the user's mind always. Well, that's where market research for an app idea jumps in. A well-researched app idea can contribute a lot to the success of any app.

Apple App Store was having around 2.22 million As of the first quarter of 2021 available to download. Google Play app store has over 3.48 million mobile apps as of the first quarter of 2021 available to download. In the first quarter of 2021, 28.2 billion apps were downloaded from Google Play by users. On the other hand, 8.4 million apps were downloaded from Apple App Store by users.

Now you have an idea of how many apps are available on app stores, and before developing your app, you have to have an outstanding idea to survive the competition. So, if you have any ground-breaking app idea, market research is the first task you should do to convert it into reality.

And maybe you are looking for an answer “What’s its purpose?” let us tell you that it is an in-depth understanding and insight of consumer behavior that enable you to do comprehensive planning for app development.

We know it's tough; it is challenging.

So how would you perform thorough market research for your app idea?

Relax! We’ve come up with an ultimate guide to market research for your app idea. This article will let you know the various facets of mobile app idea market research, and you’ll learn how you can conduct market research for mobile applications.

How Market Research Could Be Used To Develop Successful Apps

Market research is the key to develop successful apps. A wise company always conducts in-depth market research to have valuable insight for their app development. Here are some way a how good market research help developing apps.

Market research exposes the strength and weaknesses of competitors. It helps businesses to compare themselves with their fellows and refine their own strategies.
Through market research, one can add interesting features for users that make the app attractive and engaging.
Market research is conducted to choose the app development platforms too.

Through market research, one can evaluate the app monetization methods and decide how to earn money through the app.

We have described briefly how market research is used to develop apps. Now let's move on and explore what market research for an app idea actually is:

What Is Market Research?

Conducting market research means you aim to develop a deep and detailed understanding of your target audience. It unveils why your consumers will use your app, what are their pain points, what are they missing, and how your app will be feasible with them. This will facilitate you in learning your customer’s behavior, understand their experiences, and find a way to gain their loyalty towards your app. The insights you get through market research help you developing your app by keeping in mind user intent. You come up with innovative and unique marketing strategies.

If you are looking for a company to handle the hustle of app’s idea research, reach out to Appedology. It's an app development and consultation company in the USA that has so many commercially and serving hundreds of clients with their successful apps. Reach out to Appedology for any query related to app development.

Four Types Of Market Research

Market research can be conducted in several ways. If you are a developer, a startup, or even an app development company, you want to conduct market research in the best ways. We suggest you start with your app’s idea USP and the story behind it.

But first of all, look for answers to these questions:

What is your app all about?

Is your app really required to develop?

What will be your marketing strategy?

Through market research, you’ll get exciting insights that you can use for making your strategies.

There are four types of market research that we are explaining below:

Surveys

Surveys are considered the most common market research method. The survey is actually a qualitative research method that includes a short series of closed or open-ended questions asked from respondents. The answers are evaluated and then the final verdict is generalized. These questionnaires can be delivered via email.

Why Surveys a Popular Market Research Method?

Surveys are easy to conduct, and they are for sure inexpensive.
Quick data collection is possible through surveys.
The data collected through surveys is pretty simple to analyze

It is really straightforward to analyze and categorize your answers.

Interviews: the most insightful

Market research that is conducted by one-on-one conversations and communication with individuals from your target market is an interview method or research. You can dive deep and gain a clear insight through it, and nothing can beat it. You can video confer if you can meet an individual in person.

Why interviews so insightful?

An interview benefits you in many ways to understand your target customers.
An in-depth well-planned interview will let you extract out what is on your target audience's mind. You may evaluate your app idea by talking to people directly if they need your app or not.
If you speak directly with your target audience, you’ll have an idea about the features you may include in your app to produce sufficient 'Aha!' moments in your user experience.

Focus groups

Research conducted on a carefully selected people's group that resembles your target market is called the Focus groups research method. One gains deeper insight through asking these groups questions related to your app idea, the user experience of your competitors, and similar conversation by a trained moderator.

Why focus group is the least popular method?

The focus group method is an expensive research method.
Doing it on a budget may harm the authenticity of your research.
Your data may become full of errors due to factors like a forceful participant can influence the opinion of the whole group and due to biased moderators like the same study by different moderators can bring different results.

Observation

Observation is a market research method that involves a company's personnel observing the consumer behavior during an interaction and introduction of your app's idea. You may also include a similar competitor app to observe how people are interacting with it.

Why an observation method powerful yet inexpensive?

You’ll get a chance to see how people are interacting with your app’s idea naturally.
People react to your app positively or negatively without influencing other individuals. This will let you have a clear insight into your app’s idea.
Although observation is not a replacement for surveys and interviews, it is better as it helps you validate your app idea without much hustle.

Why It Important to Conduct a Customer Research For App Development?

A brilliant mobile app idea is useless if the app you develop is not specific to the user's requirements. That's why it is imperative to conduct market research on your target audience. The secret behind a successful mobile app idea is customer research before development.

The customer research answers the following questions:

Who individuals download your app?
Who are your ideal customers, and what persona they have?
What are their expectations?
What are their pain points?

Through market research, you'll be able to answer these questions, and it will eventually help you create a better understanding of the audience your app idea is targeting. Here are some facts that will help you understand why market research for an app idea is crucial to conduct before development.

Helps You Provide People the Exceptional User Experience

The engaging mobile apps are the most favorite of people. People love to use mobile apps having awesome UI and providing an exceptional user experience. And if your app fails to do so, people will switch to other counterparts. Through market research, you’ll be able to get an idea of:

How will your app look, and how will it work?
How will users interact with your application?
How will its UI components look? What will be their colors, symbols, button shape, fonts, and navigation icons?

Comprehensive user research may include

Researching target market
Researching competitors
Researching user’s needs and their pain points

Proper and well-executed customer research for an app idea before development helps you to answer all these questions. You can build your app with a great user experience to gain customer loyalty and satisfy them with seamless app operation.

You will develop User-Friendly, Easy To Use, and Fun App

Knowing the preferences of your customers helps you in coming up with an incredible mobile application. That is why when it comes to develop an app, it becomes such a challenging task.

You must be aware of your customer behaviors and their persona to develop the best app for them.

Conduct market research covering the following aspects:

Know your target audience
Know what education and qualifications your target audience has?
What is the socio-economic class of your audience?
What type of profession they have, and what work environment they have?
Customer research for app development before the designing process will help you get an overall view of your users.

Market research provides you with deep insight into your customer's persona if you research the mentioned grounds. You have to keep in mind that persona before you start working on your idea. This overall viewpoint of your users will let your designers and developers create a flawless app that is easy, user-friendly, and fun to use.

Helps You to Decide the Right Development Platform

Mobile app development platforms like iOS and Android are the key factors to decide the success of any app idea. These two are the most famous and the difference between the users of both is a lot. Android has almost 72% of the market share, while iOS has more customers who like to spend on in-app purchases.

Through market research, you would know which audience you want to target: If you want your app to launch worldwide, Android will be your choice then. And if you want to generate more and more revenues and want to target elites, iOS will be the best development platform for your app.

Besides, those other factors are involved like:

Audience’s geographic and demographic
Budget
Features
Project timeline
App maintenance

Through customer research, you will have a clear idea of which platform you can choose to make your app idea hit.

You can Generate Great ROI through Market Research

There are app ideas that look promising and brilliant on paper only. When it comes to development, they are flop projects. So what's the reason behind it? Its market research. You just thought in your head that your idea is brilliant, but you don't research enough to find out if it is relevant to your audience.

Maybe you are investing thousands of dollars to design aesthetically pleasing and featureful apps, but it’s all useless if you don't research before development. Market research helps you decide the features and functionalities the audience wants in your app. You can also decide on the popularly used development platforms. These all factors combine together to increase your ROI.

Poor Market Research Leads To App Failure

Poor market research leads to the failure of your mobile app idea. When you got a brilliant app idea, it's really easy to assume that users going to love it, but there is nothing that can validate your thoughts.

That's where market research jumps in. Many overconfident developers and companies skip it and start developing their apps, but market research should be the first step long before you begin app development.

Through market research, you'll develop a deep understanding of your app’s idea and its target audience.

The audience research is vital. As we have discussed above it lets you know if your app idea is feasible with your user or not.

Not knowing your target audience also create hurdles in planning your marketing campaigns. User research lets you come up with a successful pre-launch app marketing strategy.

Consequences of not doing marketing research:

Building an app without market research, a well-defined target group, understanding your audience, and researching features and functions your audience wants is just a waste of time, money, and resources. You may be assumed based on your idea that people will love it, but in actuality, they won’t.

Factors to consider while researching an app idea

Researching app idea involves several factors including the method of your research. We are listing some of the most important ones below for you to keep in mind while researching for an app idea.

Browse similar app ideas in the App Stores

Check out all the apps in the app store that you think match your app idea. You can search them by using the most relevant keywords. Look for what these apps providing to users and how they are providing the solutions to the audience.

Change your routine

When you think of an app idea, it is what revolves in your brain all day. Don't do that. You have to research that idea too. So just take a break and change your routine. Go to market, run several errands, do shopping, and observe people around you. Try to think from their perspective and see what kind of apps they are using to solve their issues. There must be several problems a lot of apps are solving. But you have to see how differently these apps are addressing these issues. That is the part of your market research.

Attend meetups and seminars

Try to attend seminars and meetups related to app development projects. It will help you have an idea of how to convert your app idea into reality differently and creatively.

Check keywords related to your apps

Think of several different keywords related to your app idea. Now its time to research how popular they are using the following tools:

ASO tools (App Annie, App Tweak, etc.)

ASO tools or App store optimization tools are used to search the popularity of keywords on app stores. You can use these tools to see the keyword’s search volume. Your idea will be considered popular if the keyword has higher search popularity. Consider that app idea as valid.

The Google Adwords Keyword Planner Tool

You can also use the Google Keyword Planner tool to validate the popularity of keyword searches related to your app. If the Google search volume is more than a hundred or a few hundred, it means people are searching for an app like yours. You are good to go.

Ask potential users

Identify your target audience and users first. Then ask them questions related to your app idea and seek their response. You can use the following ways to find people online to survey for your app idea:

Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram

Post on your social media handles and inform people about your app idea. Ask them to share their opinion and feedback to validate your idea

Reddit or Quora

Reddit and Quora are community-based forums where you get feedback and response from people pretty quickly. Use them to ask for their feedback on your app's idea.

Analyze if your App idea is a market fit

Researching also includes analyzing how much of your app idea is market fit. It includes the evaluation of your app’s features and the best suitable monetization model that resonates with your target users.

You can do it by analyzing your selected app features with 3 to 5 competitor’s apps. In that manner, you'll be able to come up with a USP of your app through a little research on your competitors.

You can analyze if your target audience will consider using your app or your competitor's apps through it.

You discover important insights by analyzing if your app idea is a market fit:

Unique features your app has and your competitors don’t.

Important features that your competitor has but your app doesn't.

Final Piece Of Advice

Whether you’re an app development startup or a business that wants digital transformation, having a mobile app is the need of your time. We hope that you have now gone through the guide to market research of your app’s idea. So always consider it before you start your development and come up with the most successful app.

And if you are looking for an app development company that handles all the hustle, from idea research to app development, what's stopping you from contacting Appedology? It's an app development and consultation company in the USA serving hundreds of clients with their successful apps. Reach out to Appedology for any kind of query related to app development.

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