How to Identify a Target Audience for a Mobile App in 5 Simple Steps

How to Identify a Target Audience for a Mobile App in 5 Simple Steps

A target audience is a key concept any mobile application development company considers. The entire marketing strategy depends on how accurately a customer portrait is determined. Generally speaking, the target audience is a group of people who are more likely to be interested in your proposal. By creating an accurate portrait of a potential user of a mobile application, you can broadcast the most attractive marketing messages that will surely resonate with the audience.

The Importance of Your Target Audience

You can run creative and expensive advertising campaigns, but if you want to develop a super successful mobile app, your ad must comprise the characteristics of your mobile app target audience. Otherwise, all of your marketing efforts will be useless. Creating an accurate customer persona will help you:

  • Learn to adapt to the preferences of potential buyers to make the decision-making process for them the most simple and enjoyable.
  • Gain the trust of people who are interested in your product because you will speak their language and use triggers that “hook” interested consumers when promoting the product.
  • Understand the most important criteria affecting customers’ choice: price, social status, quality, etc.
  • Personalize your newsletters and communication with customers: make it more targeted and individual.
  • Clearly understand which advertising tools, intonations, and marketing techniques will definitely work, and which ones should be completely abandoned.

Determining Target Audience for a Mobile App 

Many owners of mobile applications start thinking about the target audience after the app is developed. However, to be able to monetize you application, defining a target audience should be the first thing to do, before even hiring developers for the project.     

There are several different ways that mobile app development companies use to determine the target audience for a mobile app and create a portrait of a potential customer. Here we will analyze the most common of them.

Determining Target Audience for a Mobile App

Segment your Audience

First, you need to segment your audience. The five questions technique will help you with this:

  1. What – What exactly are we proposing to the audience?
  2. Who – To whom we want to convey the main message?
  3. Why – Why does the customer need our product?
  4. When – When is the buyer ready to buy?
  5. Where – Where will we place the advertising material?

Each of these issues is directly related to the understanding of the target audience. And the success of an advertising campaign and management of your mobile app lifecycle depends on the correct answer. 

Divide Segments According to 4 Criteria

Typically, your mobile app target audience can be divided into segments according to 4 criteria:

  1. Geography. Depending on the size of your business, break down your target audience into regions, cities, or even areas of a particular city. Each location has its own characteristics, which in one way or another affect consumers; it is desirable to know and take into account these features.
  2. Demography. No less important are the demographic characteristics, on which the customer’s purchasing preferences largely depend. This includes the buyer’s age, gender, marital status, even religion.
  3. Social status. Here, quite a few characteristics are considered: education, income level, property, etc.
  4. Psychology. This includes not only the psychological characteristics of the target audience but also its interests, attitudes, worldview, lifestyle, etc.

Collect Data

To find the necessary info, you can conduct surveys:

  • on social networks: if your group has enough members, you can arrange regular polls to identify your audience’s preferences and get to know it better.
  • on your site: embed or create pop-up surveys and polls on you website to get the necessary results from the web visitors.
  • offline: hire promoters or train floor salesmen to conduct surveys in places where your potential customers gather.

You can also outsource marketing research to a reliable marketing agency, which with the help of its own tools will create for you a ready-made portrait of the target audience and, possibly, immediately give recommendations on communication with it.

Create a Portrait

A portrait of your mobile app target audience is an accurate description of a vivid representative of a potential buyer.  So, the result of consumer research should be a well-defined customer persona, a typical representative of a certain group, and not a description of an abstract target audience. To create a portrait, you need to carefully analyze the gathered information about potential customers. 

You are Ready for an Ad Campaign!

The purpose of creating a portrait is to give the face and character to the data. Now, that you have created a mobile app and identified your potential user – you are ready to launch the ad campaign and be sure that it won’t miss the target! 

Tips on Where and How to Gather Info 

Now when you have an understanding of who is the representative of our target audience, and a list of questions for the respondent, it’s time to know where you can get answers to these questions. The following tools can be used to collect consumer information:

Live Communication

Live Communication

During live communication, or, scientifically, in-depth interviews, you personally communicate with your potential client, try to understand him, plunge into the world of the interlocutor. This is the main source of insights and hypotheses about your mobile app target audience.

Social Network

An invaluable way to learn how to boost your mobile app downloads is studying profiles of the representatives of your target audience. It gives a huge amount of information about a person: interests, connections, communities, pastime, career.

Questioning

With the help of questionnaires, it is quite easy to interview a large number of representatives of your mobile app target audience. You can objectively check your assumptions and guesses about customers, collect the necessary statistics.

Customer Data

The customer data you collect is an important source of information. As you know, about 20% of your clients generate 80% of your deals. So, the big data needs to be grouped and systematized to provide valuable insights about your audience.

Stages of the Sales Process

It is important to study the nature, habits, sequence of actions of the client in the process of communication over the product and deciding on the conclusion of a transaction.

Final Word

Knowing your mobile app target audience is a must if you want to grow your business, run successful advertising campaigns, and increase customer loyalty. To determine the portrait of your customer, answer the questions of what kind of mobile app development you do, why consumers need it, who will be interested in it. Then, segment the initial target audience according to several criteria. Thus, conduct a survey of potential customers to confirm your assumptions. That’s it! As you can see, it is not that difficult!

If you need help with creation of your own mobile app, SwagSoft, the best mobile app development company in Singapore is at your service! We provide custom mobile app development services, including the creation of apps, games, VR, AR, and iBeacon technology and follow the latest trends in mobile app industry to help realize all the potential in your product!