You are proud of your company and your online presence, and you have had a year with Covid Lockdown to get creative with the digital side of your business. Surely now is the time to develop a mobile app. Coming up with a unique app idea, no matter what you want to achieve with it, simply isn’t enough anymore – the app market is simply too competitive. It is getting harder to stand out, and the investment is large, both considering your time and budget.
Going into mobile app development unprepared can result in costly, frustrating and brand-damaging mistakes. Below are a few things to consider before you move forward with your idea and a few things to avoid.
Points To Consider When Developing A Mobile App
Carry Out A Viability Study
Before you start developing your app, you should consider whether your idea is viable. Is your app going to be a solution to an existing challenge? If your idea has already been implemented and developed into an app by someone else, it will be of no use to develop an app of a similar nature.
Know Your Market
In order to develop a successful mobile app, it is essential that you know your audience. Even if you have got a revolutionary idea, it doesn’t mean it is going to be a success.
Do your research well before going through the process of development. Once you know about your target audience, you can accordingly plan the designs and functionalities.
The first step to inform everything you do moving forward is a thorough market research. Extensive market research should help you discover:
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- Who are your competitors?
- What is their strategy?
- What are their strengths & weaknesses?
- What are their customers saying in the reviews and on social media?
- What is their unique selling point?
When you have the answers to these questions, you will be able to focus on the strategies that work. There are millions of available mobile apps, and this is your opportunity to ensure yours stands out.
Define your purpose
Can you articulate your app’s specific purpose? This is probably the hardest step for business owners and marketers. Boiling all your ideas down to one or two sentences of clear purpose is hard, but it’s also one of the core steps to ensuring the success of your app. This is the time to define:
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- What will be the app’s key functionality?
- Why would people want to use it?
- What is the added value compared to a mobile website?
- Which business goals will it help you achieve?
- What audience will benefit from it?
- What does that audience need and crave?
Choose Your Developer wisely
This is where cheap is not always cheerful. One crucial piece of advice is to pick a good team. A good developer won’t do design; a good designer won’t know how to write code. Make sure there is a reliable team of fully skilled people to undertake your project and run things professionally. A sophisticated, time-consuming app, in most cases, exceeds 1,200 hours of development.
Design
Design of the app also plays an important role in its success. For your application to be successful, you should design the app in such a way that your user requires less effort to understand and use the app. It increases their interest in your app, and it will make them recommend your app to others.
How Will You Make Money From Your App?
In a nutshell, free apps make money using one of these 11 app monetization strategies: Advertising, Subscriptions, Selling Merchandise, In-App Purchases, Sponsorship, Referral Marketing, Collecting, and Selling Data, Freemium Upsell, Physical Purchases, Transaction Fees, and Crowdfunding.
As with any other choice, each path has pros and cons. While your decision now can be changed later, it’s important you gain a solid understanding of all the models first and steer your mobile app development based on what aligns with your business model best.
Create Your Marketing strategy
Understanding the many ways you can market your app is essential to developing your overall strategy. Here are a few marketing strategies:
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- Having a landing page is a critical mobile marketing strategy that allows users to learn more about your app on mobile web and desktop. This page should include links to your app in the app store and google play store.
- You will also want to keep your blog updated on your website. This is another way you can use SEO to find new users and reach your target audience. Your blog needs to be strategically shared across your social media channels, using analytics to uncover the type of content that is most beneficial to your overall strategy.
- App Store Optimization (ASO) is the process of improving your app’s visibility in the App Store and Google Play Store. (see below)
- Use social media.
- Create a video for your app.
- Ask for app reviews
- Email Marketing
These steps will make promotion easier when the launch time comes, and you will have a warm community to launch for.
Plan for app store optimization
App Store Optimization (ASO) is the process of improving your app’s visibility in the App Store and Google Play Store. This is critical to your user journey because even if your campaign directs a large number of potential users to the App Store, your app still needs to be well-presented to complete the install. ASO can also attract organic users without cost.
Just like SEO, ASO requires you to identify and utilize keywords that will help your app rank high in the App Store. It is also essential to include screenshots of your app and a video of in-app use.
Security
There is almost an endless list of reasons why application security is important to businesses. Those range from maintaining a positive brand image to preventing security breaches that impact the trust that your clients and shareholders have in your business.
People tend to keep a lot of their valuable information on their phone. From location to passwords and bank account details, smartphones hold a lot of personal information. Therefore, data protection is of utmost concern for any user. So before developing an app, make sure to make the security of the application a top priority.
Database
Modern-day smartphone users depend significantly on the mobile application to carry out their task. If your app glitches, chances are that users will uninstall the application and never reinstall no matter how many improvements you make.
Having a speedy database is very important if you aim to provide your users with optimum performance. There are a few factors that you should consider before choosing a database. These include a data structure, speed, and scalability, size of data to be stored, accessibility of data, and safety and security of data.
Supported Platforms
In the present day, there are two dominating platforms supporting the market, Android and iOS, so you can develop an app that runs on either of the platforms, but to ensure that your app is successful, it is absolutely important that your app runs on both.
