Without question, the most important step before developing your project is defining your target market!
Identifying your target market (their values and their barriers) allows you to focus your resources and build your app to appeal specifically to your target market. Who is the most likely audience to generate interest in the app? Provide sustainable sales growth and loyalty to the brand? Help you reach the maximum efficiency when using resources?
Why your target market needs to be defined before you develop
To start off, the app development process is more than just writing code; it involves a lot of questions that need answers, such as: What features should be included? How should the UX/UI be designed? What font speaks to your demographics needs? And so on!
When these decisions are made without your target market in mind you start off on the wrong foot./ It takes 30 seconds for a user to decide if they’ll keep your app on their phone. Losing them once makes reestablishing that connection even harder.
By having a target market in mind before starting the development, your team will be able to build your app based on the needs and wants of this demographic. This ensures that when your app is finished it will be able to reach and attract the right audience in order to maximize profits.
Here we listed some questions to ask to help you define your target market:
Who is most likely to benefit from my app?
Conduct a Competitive Analysis using your competitors. They provide the greatest information for you to start with then ask yourself the following question: How does your solution stand out and why would they prefer your solution? The customers within your target market may prefer your app over others’ because your app is different in a way that appeals to the specific needs of the group. Match their values, overcome their barriers.
What are the characteristics of my customers?
The customers within your target market usually share common interests and concerns. This could be their demographic such as age, gender, family situation, employment and income, or it could also be psychographic characteristics such as their hobbies, interests and values.
The end goal is to create a marketing persona to serve as the foundation for your marketing strategy. A marketing persona is a specific audience that represents the IDEAL USER within your target market. It should be so detailed that you could imagine the person standing right in front of you. Your marketing persona should include the demographics, psychographics, behavioural information as well as their pain points, challenges, needs and preferred marketing channels of the key segment.
By mastering those information, you have completed the first, and most important step of developing your marketing strategy!
The Complete Picture
Building target audiences is an art, however, it starts with imagination and a willingness to admit that you may have been facing the wrong direction and require a pivot. The greatest challenge to building a target audience isn’t the creation of it, it’s trying to fit you app idea into that audience.
Remember, listen to the audience, they will inform you of when you’re right and wrong. Don’t be afraid of negative answers, they hold the greatest wealth of information.
