How To Find The Best Target Market For Your Mobile App – App Pre-launch Blog Series (Part 2)

That dream of creating an app is still alive and kicking. The creative juices are flowing and you’re laser-focused. You’ve done your due diligence by reading all of the questions from the first article of the App Pre-Launch series: answers you must get before you start. 

According to Business Insider, the most challenging aspect of app creation is actually marketing. It’s not just enough to build a great product if no one notices it! Marketing deals with selling the product, enticing the customer to install, play and pay. 

Imagine a local town market, customers and sellers bargaining for the best price, I’m sure any trader can attest that it’s much easier to sell something if you have the chance to convince the buyer in person. But we can’t do this with mobile apps, as this potential customer is a remote, unattached and likely unaware that you even exist. So, what’s the first step in getting potential users to notice you?

If you want your customers to find you, you must find them!

That’s why you must go through the exercise of defining the best target market – or target audience – for your app. 

Target market definition: 

Your target market is a specific group of people for which your product is intended. They’re the ones most likely to be attracted to and benefit from your product offering – which means they have the highest potential of installing, using and positively reviewing your app.

For this reason, you must first envision and create your target audience – since you can’t sell to them face-to-face!  Who are they? What do they do? What problems are they facing on a day to day basis? How’s your app helping them solve this problem? 

Equally important is knowing how your target audience spends their time. Do they shop at the mall or is Amazon their go-to shopping method? Do they use Facebook or do they prefer TikTok? If you identify ahead of time that your target market isn’t a heavy Facebook user, it doesn’t make sense to focus a large part of your resources on Facebook outreach – even though that’s such a popular channel. 

How to define your target market:

Create buyer personas

A powerful tool for keeping your target audience outreach efforts focused, specific and consistent is to create a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a reality-based fictional characterization of your ideal customer that’s formulated by using real data and market research about your existing users.

You can create a couple of buyer personas, thus segmenting your own market. 

For example, Candy Crush Saga has many different users – each vastly different with differing mindsets, habits and interests. The game is played by young children after school, but there’s also a 25-year-old commuter who plays it daily on the bus to and from work. And then there’s a 35-year-old mother that plays it while waiting for her son to finish football practice. All different, but relevant to your product.

There are buyer persona-making tools available to help you get started. Here’s an example of a buyer persona that illustrates the types of information you want to know about your perfect target as generated by HubSpot’s Make My Persona tool:

Conduct surveys

An old but trusted method of doing social research is through surveys. A true guerilla-style method is simply asking random people what they think about your app, who they think it’s for, etc. 

Or you can make custom surveys for your already existing customer base since their opinions are the most valuable. If you’ve used surveys before, you might be wondering how authentic people are while completing this process; it’s true that people can be less honest when answering surveys because of hidden biases or assumptions of how questions should be answered. 

To fix this issue, you could decide to conduct in-person interviews with people either on the street or talk to them online through Skype/Google Hangouts. As long as you’re getting some feedback, you’re on the right track.

Leverage social media

Don’t forget to foster a connection with your newly attracted users through social media. It’s a great way to let them know about all the recent updates, deals and what you think they should know from you. While doing this follow these simple tips.

• Use call-to-action words!
• Tell your audience what you want them to do. Encourage them to install, review, and have fun!
• Share benefits, not features (e.g. your app’s easy-scroll feature allows for increased efficiency and a smoother swipe)
• Look at your competitors’ social media audience (i.e, who are they and can you make them switch to your app?)

So while today’s tech-dominated, mobile word makes it seem that finding your best target market is like taking a shot in the dark, it doesn’t have to be. And it’s important that you make sure it’s not!

Nail down your buyer personas and know your target audience. From here, you’ll be able to keep moving forward on your app-building journey. There’s lots more to come!

If you’d like a free one-stop resource to all of our mobile app launch tips, download our “How To Launch An App” e-book here!