Just because you’ve got a brilliant idea for your future Mobile App doesn’t guarantee success. Trust me, I’ve seen at first sight outstanding looking ideas for apps that were doomed to fail, though it’s not easy to determine at the time.

In this article, we’ll talk about the five most important factors that contribute to the success of your mobile app. The first one is understanding the Audience of your future app. Let’s go!

Understanding your audience

Identifying your target audience is important, but at the same time it requires a lot of work and time. In the first place, you’ll need to gain access to a lot of demographic data as well as gathering a lot of information about your customers to get an idea what types of users will use your app. Before doing research, you need to make sure that there’s no identical Application on the market.

So, you made sure that there’s a need for your app. Now it’s time to understand to whom that need applies. There are several ways of identifying your app’s users.

First of all, imagine you created an app that lets you book car wash services. Consequently, your target users will be car owners who are interested in giving their car a wash. However, if you can’t determine the category of users so simply, it might be a sign that you need to specify the main focus of your app better.

After this, it’s time to dig down deeper. You need to make a more detailed and comprehensive analysis of your project. Understand how to research competitors and actual customers.

For instance, it’d be great if you could find out how often people use the services of car washes, or how much they usually spend on such services.

Another equally important question you should consider, based on the answers to the above questions, is what features your app should have to engage as many of these potential users as possible.

After we’ve put ourselves in our potential users shoes, it’s time to get an idea of what statistics have to say about your target audience. There are various services that will be able to help you in accumulating data about such markets: Google Trends/Adwords, Flurry, Quantcast, and App Annie. All these companies will help you pull data from various relevant apps and programs. Remember what kind of information about users you need to get.

When identifying your target audience, find out their demographics, such as their gender, age, location, occupation, education, and socioeconomic status. Anything and everything you can find, will help.

To make it more effective, imagine you’re an FBI agent…..or is that just me…? Moving on….

The useful point here is that these companies will provide you with lifestyle data (this data is very different from usual demographic data) that consists of customer’s interests, activities, and other preferences.

More than that, you can get lifestyle data about your potential user base. With this, you’ll get valuable information for your application, such as where they usually shop, how they entertain themselves and so on.

Having collected all the data you need, keep an eye on trends that could potentially influence the behavior of your potential users.

Market strategy

So you’ve finally got an understanding of your target audience and now it’s time to choose the market strategy for launching your app.

Ideally, every dollar from your marketing budget should contribute to engaging more users with your application.

Once again, analyze all the information you collect about your users and carefully choose the right marketing strategy. Analyze their life-time value and determine the most valuable group for your app.

Picking the right time for your app launch

Another important factor of your app’s success is choosing “the right time” for your app’s launching. When’s the right time? Is your app seasonal (It’s specifically developed for Halloween or Black Friday, for example). Think about the most appropriate time. Maybe you can launch it before some upcoming events?

Promotional efforts are an integral part of your app’s success. Try to concentrate all these efforts on social channels and websites that target audience visits. Besides, you could look for some expert’s opinion in your niche or ask industry blogs for an app review. You may also place some information about your service in some thematic forums and communities.

And of course, keep constantly gathering and analyzing information about your users. That’s probably the most important part of any app marketing that will place your app at the top of the charts.

Having identified your key target market, your app will be much further down the road to success. A true understanding of your key audience may totally pivot your application.

To prevent any mistakes in the future, it’s better to do research at the very beginning of your development. It doesn’t matter whether your main goal is to develop a game, shopping aid, or some enterprise program.

Always bear in mind that the preferences of those users who will download this app are the most important information you can collect. By now, you understand who your target audience are, so start to think about what your app should look like.

Creating a sticky app

Nowadays, the digital market is stacked with millions of applications for all manner of tastes. So what makes you think it’s your application that’s worth users attention?

• Keep up with trends. This tip is especially important as this will allow you to know what users usually expect about the features of an app today. Everyday technology advances and the need to contemplate all your options to be aware of some of the outstanding ideas in current mobile app development.
• Spend some time thinking over your app’s design. To make this design the best it could possibly be, keep in mind an important tip. You may be proud of your app’s design if it influences users the moment they see it on the market. I think it was Paul Rand that said ‘’The best design is so complex, because it is so simple.’’ True then, true now.
• While developing your app, make sure you did your best to develop it with 100% efficiency and accuracy. Otherwise, it’s better not to do it at all. Put yourself in the place of your users and imagine an application that you’d like to download. Speaking about efficiency, also take into consideration data efficiency. Those apps that excessively use 3G or 4G will be probably forgotten after a while. If you don’t want your app to suffer the same fate, ascertain it uses data efficiently and doesn’t consume more data than needed.
• Think differently. Have you ever asked yourself why there’s always so much fuss about something new (whether it’s new movie or a restaurant). The answer is obvious. People are always looking for something fresh and new. We all tend to get bored of one thing within the shortest period of time, plan for updates.
• Understand the market. You should get a full picture of the market for which you’re going to develop your application. Spend some time on research and try to understand the way users behave. It’s obvious that Android has many more users than iOS. On the other hand, iOS users tend to spend more money on applications. Understanding of all these aspects is very important for building a right strategy for your product.
• Don’t make users wait. If your app’s loading takes some time, make sure you don’t lose touch with your users. Don’t let them think that your app is malfunctioning. Otherwise, they might get a negative impression and that’s the very beginning of a negative User Experience. One of the solutions to help you avoid such misunderstandings would be using loading indicators that will give an assurance that your mobile application is still working. A progressive indicator is the best option.

Strong USP

All these tips will definitely contribute to developing a really cool app, though there’s still one crucial factor that is worthy of your attention. It’s called USP (Unique Selling Point). It’s a strong USP that will make your app stand out from the crowd. Determine a USP that is peculiar to your application and then tell your users about it. For this you’ll need to answer three important questions that will allow you and your audience to become closer to your app:. Here they are:

Identify your competitors. Find and use all the apps that are similar to your application. Compare them to the features of your app and determine what makes your app special. To make things simpler, here’s a checklist:

• Determine strong and weak points
• Compare the price of your competitors with yours
• Determine the most important values
• Determine the most important features
• Learn from the experience of others. In this case, it’ll be useful to read customers reviews.
• Understand who is your target audience
• Pay attention to every trifle, (Is it even likely that I was talking about cream? Oh…you made THAT joke up yourself…that wasn’t even me.). Remember that even the most inconspicuous thing may totally change everything.

Understand the unique qualities of your app. To make the things simpler: find the answers to these questions.

• What is the best description, capable of persuading users to choose your app over another?
• Which features are capable of shocking and exciting your customers?
• What features will make your users come back again and again to your app?

Answer these questions and most important, don’t forget to talk to your users.

What are the main advantages of your app? What’s the goal of your app? How will it be useful for users? What does it offer? Does it offer entertainment, a healthy lifestyle, weight loss tips, food delivery, taxi-app? Remember, those apps that offer value to users, get good reviews and public recognition.

Make sure you’ve determined the answers to all these points:

• Characteristics of your app: for example, payment can be made by credit card, cash in select cities, Apple Pay, PayPal, and more
• Usefulness of your app: will it allow you to order a pizza quicker than you expect?
• What are the main differences between your app and competitors’ app?: your app is cross-platform, etc.
• What are the main achievements of your app: it’s had good reviews from international mobile app blogs
• Fun part: Figure out a cool slogan. It should be something that people will associate with your app immediately.

Conclusion

To get an overall view of your users, you need to do research before, during and even after the development process. Having determined what kind of users will be most interested in your app, you can plan the design and functionality according to their preferences.

If you want people to download your app, you have to make sure that they want what you’re offering.

However, all the points in the article are equally important and shouldn’t be ignored. Once you figure out the right approach to each of them, you’ll likely be able to create a true masterpiece.

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Top 5 Key Features of a Successful Mobile app was originally published in JetRuby on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.