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Developing a mobile application is a complex process involving numerous steps and stages. Each of these stages holds a unique significance and importance in the application’s development lifecycle. As a result, it is naturally important for the team undertaking the application’s development to give ample importance and attention to each stage.
A minor negligence in any of the stages can tremendously impact the app’s final quality and can hamper its success potential. One of the most important stages of the app development process is market research. This stage can either make or break the application and is highly crucial for the app’s success.
This blog will provide detailed information on the importance of app market research and its role in contributing to the app’s overall success. This blog will provide detailed information on the importance of app market research and its role in contributing to the app’s overall success. Let’s start the blog by understanding what exactly market research is in the app development process.
What Is App Market Research?
App Market research is the first and foremost stage of the app development process. This stage involves understanding the requirements of the market and focusing on creating solutions that innovatively fulfill these requirements.
You must be aware that millions, if not billions of applications exist in the app market. In this scenario, the only way for businesses to differentiate their application is to utilize market research and add value to their application.
You must be wondering how long will this stage will take, right? Well, market research for mobile app development can take anywhere from a day to a month or even more than that. It all depends upon your industry, business requirements, app’s complexity, etc.
Regardless of these factors, our recommendation is to give ample time to this step and not rush it, as well-conducted market research is the foundation of a successful application.
In the next section, we will discuss the different aspects of market research that businesses need to undertake while planning to build a mobile application.
Types of Market Research in App Development
Study Consumer Market
Without a doubt, customer research is one of the most essential aspects of app market research. This is because customers are the ultimate users of mobile applications, and therefore, their preferences, likings, and dislikings are a few aspects that businesses must keep in mind while developing a mobile application.
It is commonly known that businesses that fail to understand the consumer’s requirements or rush through this phase of app market research are most likely to launch faulty applications that are far away from customer preferences. Naturally, these applications have an incredibly low rate of customer acceptance and often fail after struggling in the market for a long time.
As a result, customer research is the first and foremost step a business must initiate for its app development project. Some of the most popular approaches to getting first-hand input from potential customers are surveys, forms, and questionnaires.
These customer research instruments are useful for businesses to understand consumer demands from the customers themself. Businesses can use this information and curate their application based on these inputs.
Research Competitors
As we mentioned before, millions of applications exist in the market. Moreover, most of these applications have existed for years, some dating back to the advent of smartphones. In this scenario, it is often challenging for businesses to penetrate the market and compete with the already existing giants.
A business can achieve this objective by understanding and researching its competitors. Competitor research enables businesses to understand what exactly has enabled other businesses to succeed in the market and gain popularity. Businesses can then add similar factors to their application in order to achieve similar success.
Moreover, competitor research is also useful in understanding the shortcomings of the existing applications. Businesses can utilize this knowledge and ensure that their application has a USP (unique selling proposition) that fulfills this gap.
Understand Industry
Different industries have different requirements, demands, and trends. As a result, a business planning to build a mobile application needs to thoroughly understand the paradigms, demands, and fundaments of the industry it is aiming to target.
Since every industry is unique in its requirements, this is a ‘no one size fits all situation, and businesses need to hold ample experience in the industry or hire people who do so and use this expertise to create fast-performing, industry-focused, and dynamic mobile applications.
For example, if you are planning to build a hotel aggregator app, you must be aware of the present-day situation, trends, and practices of the hospitality industry, which is possible through market research. Moreover, you must undertake consistent research and keep up with the current knowledge of the industry to ensure that your application is relevant to the users. We have thoroughly discussed this topic in the last section of the blog, so make sure to read until the end to understand how this can be beneficial for you.
Conduct SWOT Analysis
SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) Analysis is an examination of a business’s internal and external factors and their potential impact on its success.
While strengths and opportunities are positive aspects, weaknesses and threats are critical elements of the tool. Below-given is a detailed explanation of each of these elements of SWOT analysis.
Strengths: Strengths are the upper hands that a business has over its competitors. These are the aspects or areas that a business that excels in and holds significant value in generating revenue.
Weaknesses: Weaknesses are the aspects or areas that a business currently lags in. These weaknesses are the shortcomings of the current strategies, practices, or processes and can turn out to be a threat to the business if left unattended.
Opportunities: Opportunities are the areas that are open for businesses to grow in. A business needs to realize these opportunities on time to get the most out of them.
Threats: Threats are areas that can potentially hamper the business and might even affect its position in the market. Every business needs to be aware of its internal and external threats and address them on time to avoid major losses.
It is important to note that SWOT analysis is a type of self-assessment for a business and is highly important for the app development project. You must extensively focus on each component of the SWOT analysis and understand it to make the best use of investment in app development.
These were a few types of market research that a business must undertake while developing a mobile application. Of course, it will be a time and capital-consuming affair for a business to conduct thorough market research.
In case you aren’t aware, let us tell you that you can easily gain this trust from your investors by focusing on market research. By having a thorough knowledge and understanding of customer preferences, industry verticals, market gaps, and facts and figures, you are certain to gain the investor’s favor with ease.
8 Reasons Why Market Research is Important for App Development
Understand Market Requirements
Understanding market requirements is essential for businesses to deliver a high-quality product to the target customers. One way to achieve this objective is to thoroughly research the market and understand the demands of the target users.
We discussed before how market research enables businesses to understand customer behavior, preferences, likes, and dislikes. Based upon this understanding, businesses can create value-adding apps that are at par with the market’s expectations.
It is commonly known that businesses that fail to understand the market’s requirements often end up creating low-quality applications. These applications hold no value to the users and end up having a high uninstall rate.
Add Relevant Features
Features are a highly essential part of a mobile application. As a result, it is important for a business to thoroughly plan the application’s features in order for them to add value to the application. This is where the role of market research comes into the scenario.
Comprehensive market research will enable you to discover the most relevant and valuable features for your mobile application. Moreover, you can also use market research to find more uncommon and unique features for your application.
To add to that, you can also use this research to find out how the competitors are using similar features in their applications (in terms of application UI) and ensure the optimum functionality and usability of your application.
Gain Competitive Advantage
Every business aspires to gain a competitive advantage in the market to have higher selling prospects. However, it is often challenging for newly established businesses to gain a competitive advantage, owing to the already existing and intensive competition.
However, with market research, it is now possible for businesses of all scales and sizes to gain a competitive advantage. To elaborate, market research enables businesses to find the shortcomings of the already existing competition and realize the market gap.
This, in turn, enables businesses to gain an upper hand against competitors and have higher success prospects. This is one of the most noteworthy advantages of conducting thorough market research and analysis.
Align With Industry Paradigms
One of the most important characteristics of a mobile application is to be in alignment with the industry paradigms. Different applications are developed for different industries, and therefore, you need to ensure that everything from UI to features and appeal is at par with the industry’s requirements.
Market research plays an important role in this aspect and is useful in creating applications that follow the latest industry trends and standards. For example, you must be aware of the increasing trend and scope of IoT in the hospitality industry. Keeping this industry trend in mind, businesses are launching hotel booking apps that facilitate IoT-enabled smart features like locking and unlocking guestrooms, minibar tracking, room cleaning, etc.
These applications have high demand and tremendous success potential owing to their ability to keep up with the latest industry demands. Therefore, it is always a good idea to research the market in order to keep up with the latest industry paradigms and practices.
Undertake Easy Strategic Planning
Strategic planning is fundamental to every business’s success. Business owners undertake thorough and careful strategic planning in which they plan strategies and lay roadmaps for their business operations to follow.
Businesses that thoroughly research the market for app development have the upper hand in this matter. This is because market research makes it easy and efficient for businesses to plan their strategies.
To explain, by researching the market, businesses can easily understand and predict market trends and create fool-proof strategies with minimal to no failure rates. This aspect of market research is often overlooked but is of high value for businesses of all scales and sizes.
Program Seamlessly
Programming is one of the most critical stages of the whole app development process. Programmers need to work efficiently to complete the application’s development on time. However, this efficiency largely depends on the quality of market research conducted in the first stage of the development process.
To explain, conducting thorough and comprehensive market research will enable you to find out the best and most optimal features for your application. Moreover, the quality of your application’s UI will depend upon the quality of your research. As mentioned before, market research also enables businesses to understand various UI-related factors of an application like element placement, theme, typography, screen layout, etc.
In the end, the better market research you will conduct, the better your application’s UI design will be, and the easier it will be for the programming team to code it.
This also proves that market research is actually the foundation of the application and that other stages of the development process are by large dependent upon it. As a result, neglecting this stage or rushing it can potentially hamper your app development project.
Expand & Scale With Ease
Every business aims to expand and grow with time and achieve market success. However, this is often challenging, as business growth is not a piece of cake, but is a task that requires intensive planning. Moreover, as a business grows, it also aims to upscale its application accordingly to keep it in alignment with the present requirements.
These are a few objectives that can be achieved with intensive market research. Businesses that are aware of their market paradigms have more success potential, as they know what the customer and industry want, and competitors lag in. This makes it easy to upscale the application from time to time and keep it relevant to the latest market demand.
Attract Investors
Investors are the most important part of every business. This is because all businesses need funding to operate. However, it is commonly known that receiving funding is a highly challenging task that requires investors’ trust in the concept and ideas.
However, let us tell you that you can easily gain this trust from your investors by focusing on market research. By having a thorough knowledge and understanding of customer preferences, industry verticals, market gaps, and facts and figures, you are certain to gain the investor’s favor with ease.
Usually, investors are easily compelled by business owners who are aware of the market situation and are eager to invest in their ideas. Another way to gain investors’ trust is to build an MVP version of the product, but this is a more time and labor-demanding process when compared to market research.
Therefore, it is in your business’s best interest to conduct thorough and intensive market research, as it will have both direct and indirect advantages for the planned mobile application and will facilitate its seamless and hurdle-free development.
Moreover, the role of market research is not only limited to the app development process but extends way beyond, which is in the launch and support phase. The upcoming section will provide detailed information on how market research enables businesses to upgrade and upscale their application.
Market Research & App Upgradation: A Post-launch Process
Earlier, we discussed the role of app upgradation in keeping the application relevant to the market’s current requirements. The concept of app upgradation revolves around adding new features to the application and, in some cases, removing old and obsolete ones. Moreover, app upgradation also involves enhancing the application’s performance by eliminating bugs and errors.
Market research and app upgradation go hand in hand, as it is through constant market research that a business can upgrade its application. In simple words, continuous market research after launching the application enables businesses to keep track of the shifts in market paradigms.
Based upon these shifts, the business can upgrade the application to preserve its value and relevancy to the present customer demands. Moreover, this research is not only limited to the application’s features but extends to the technical aspect of app development.
This includes migrating the mobile application to the latest, most popular technologies and programming languages to get the best results. Of course, this also requires researching the market and finding out which programming languages, frameworks, and technologies are the best suited for your current requirements. This proves the essential nature of market research in developing a mobile application.
Summing It Up
Overall, the role of market research is undeniable in every aspect of the application development process. This makes researching the market not just an important phase of the app development lifecycle but also a useful business tactic.
By conducting thorough and comprehensive market research, you can not only ease the app development process but also guarantee that you receive a high-end mobile application with a solid foundation.
This will be useful for your business in terms of its long-term survival and growth, as well as for the target customer’s perception of the application. Therefore, it is always in the business’s best interest to focus on ample market research and build an app founded on the outcomes of the same.
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