Market Research for app development

Market research has been universally proven to play significant roles in determining a business's success. It is also the same case for website and mobile application development. Solid marketing research ensures your applications strategically reach your target audiences with the right features and designs. There are multiple facets to be explored in market research explained below.

Understanding your audience

The first and foremost step is to define your target audience. There are multiple areas to be researched, including demographics, habits, lifestyles, and psychological aspects. Particularly psychographics, we advise doing extensive primary research and secondary research. Asking a lot of questions would unveil their hidden psychological thoughts that would potentially bring about interesting development ideas that your company might not have thought of. Additionally, audience analysis is crucial in helping your company determine the suitable UX/UI designs and guiding your next working steps. 

Understanding your existing competitors

Understanding your existing competitors is an area where a company focuses on researching your direct and indirect competitors. Learning their strengths, weaknesses, and uniqueness are the focal points to be explored to set your company's applications apart.

This stage is when your company should aim to discover what has worked and has not worked among those competitors. The result from focusing on this aspect is that your company would develop functional features, relevant and original for your audience. 

^{The four components of SWOT in a 2 × 2 matrix (Image: Wikipedia)}

Analyzing your company SWOT

This process is also fundamental in market research for solidifying your application ideas. It begins from internal reflection steps through analyzing your "S" strengths and "W" weaknesses. Continued with, your company should find "O" opportunities and "T" threats which are external factors yet highly influential in determining your app development success. 

Creating a business plan

Unquestionably, a business plan is like a bible of your company to keep everyone on the same page and with the same understanding. A business plan includes various aspects, including revenue streams, key activities, and cost structure. The key is to ensure your business is concise and understandable for stakeholders.

A well-built business plan would allow your company to strategize effective marketing strategies.

^{A Business Model Canvas (Senna Blog)}

Conducting market research is a process of understanding internally and externally before developing applications. Since the cost of developing applications is undoubtedly high, failure to conduct market research would highly possibly lead to failure to acquire success. Most significantly, you would waste specific amounts of money simply because your company overlooks the necessity of market research.

Our suggestion is to include market research as the process is entirely applicable and pivotal for a website or mobile application development.