Comprehensive Guide to Conducting Mobile App Market Research
Mobile app development is exciting. New entrepreneurs and established businesses alike are always eager to bring their app ideas to life.
But before you rush into development, there are a few things you need to do first.
Mobile app market research is arguably the most important step for any project. It helps validate your ideas and lays the foundation for every other stage of mobile app development. No matter what type of app you’re building, mobile app research cannot be overlooked.
Key Takeaways
- Importance of Research: Validates app ideas and sets the foundation for development.
- Understanding the Market: Identifies target market, competitors, and industry trends.
- Data Collection Methods: Combines existing data sources with original research.
- Strategic Pivoting: Helps refine app ideas to better fit market needs.
- Informed Decision Making: Guides feature development and marketing strategies.
Continue below to learn more about mobile app research, the importance of market research, and the best market research strategies for mobile app development.
What is Mobile App Market Research?
Mobile app research is the process of understanding your target market, competitors, industry, and current market trends. Market research is the first step of every mobile app development project.
Mobile app market research helps validate your app idea and ensures your app is addressing existing market needs.
Conducting mobile app research requires data collection and analysis. In some cases, you can pull data from existing sources. Other times, you’ll need to conduct unique research on your own. Most of the time, market research is a combination of these two approaches.
Mobile app research aims to answer the following questions:
- Is there a market need for your application?
- Who is your target market, and what are their preferences?
- What competitors and obstacles are you faced with?
- Does your mobile app have a unique differentiator from the competition?
- Do you have a viable mobile app business model?
- How can you create an optimized marketing strategy?
When you’re sourcing information from existing sources, you’ll want to stick with trustworthy and authoritative references like Statista, Pew Research Center, Gallup, Google Trends, and similar sources.
You can also refer to our Mobile App Statistics Guide for general information about smartphone users, industry trends, and other data related to mobile technologies.
Original research is typically conducted through focus groups, interviews, customer surveys, and observation.
Why is Mobile App Market Research Important for Mobile App Development?
Every successful mobile app starts with quality market research.
Without thorough mobile app research, you’re essentially just guessing whether or not people actually want your app. This could prove to be a very expensive guess if you go through the entire mobile app development process only to discover there’s no market need for your product.
You can save a ton of time and money by simply validating the idea first—before you start writing code or hiring a development team.
Market research also helps you identify competitors and obstacles on your path to success.
For example, let’s say you have an app idea for a free video sharing platform, making it easy for anyone to share and watch videos from their smartphones. Users can create their own profiles, like videos, follow content creators, and write comments on videos.
Great idea, right? Well, this idea basically just described YouTube.
Market research would help you identify this, and you’d likely decide not to directly compete with the largest video hosting platform on the planet.
Instead, your market research could help you pivot your original app idea to target a different market niche. Maybe you still want to create a video hosting application, but you want it to be specifically for online education.
Market research helps you better understand your customers. You’ll find out who they are, along with their wants and needs. You might think that your target audience wants to use your mobile app. But market research will help validate or disprove your hypothesis.
Then you can lay the foundation for your mobile app features, brand positioning, and app marketing strategies based on your findings.
Types of Mobile App Research
It’s much easier to perform market research when you break everything down into categories.
Market research for mobile app development can be segmented into two phases—primary research and secondary research. We’ll take a closer look at each of these stages below.
Primary Research
The first thing you need to do is conduct in-depth market research on your users.
Define your target market and find as much information as you can about them. Start with generic information, habits, likes, dislikes, wants, and needs. Then narrow that research even more, specifically related to their behavior with mobile applications.
Your primary research should also consider the latest technology trends and how the current market landscape works with your business model.
These initial steps are crucial, as this early market research ultimately guides you through the entire mobile app development process.
Your findings here will help you determine whether or not to target certain users. You can also frame certain components of your mobile app based on this early market research.
For example, let’s say you want to create a real estate app. The initial idea might be focused on prospective home buyers.
But after conducting your primary research, you could discover a lack of market need for this type of product. Maybe the market is too saturated, or maybe the app’s goal didn’t meet the needs of your target audience.
If you’re an expert in the real estate industry, you still might proceed with the app creation. Only you’ll pivot to an app that addresses the needs of real estate agents instead.
Then the app’s features will be based on meeting the needs of your new target audience.
Secondary Research
The second step is your sales and marketing strategy research.
By now, you’ve already validated your idea and decided it’s worth moving forward. You just need to take your existing research and get more information on how you’re going to reach your target audience.
You’ll use this information to create a marketing plan, optimize social media accounts, prepare ad copy, and other things that will ultimately speak to and attract your target market.
What does your target user base respond to? How can you market your mobile app accordingly to pull on those strings?
Your secondary research will help shape your branding and market positioning within your niche.
For example, let’s say you’re creating a B2B smartphone app designed for other businesses. Rather than simply branding yourself as a
For example, if you discover that 90% of your target market uses iPhones, you may not necessarily create an Android app for the Google Play Store right now. You could focus your efforts specifically on Apple devices and make an iOS app.
| Target Market Device Preference | Development Focus |
|---|---|
| 90% use iPhones | Focus on iOS app development |
| Mixed device usage | Consider both iOS and Android development |
When you’re doing market research on your target audience, it’s important to remember that you’re not excluding other users or other people who might be interested in your app. But your primary focus and efforts will be surrounding your target market.