Developing mobile apps is a very complicated process. There are a number of reasons that around 99.9% of apps become total failures. The biggest reason has nothing to do with the technical competence of the developers. Rather, it is due to the fact that developers and key decision-makers don’t take the time to understand the needs of their core user base. Fortunately, smart developers such as 7Ninjas don’t make these mistakes.
If you are developing an app, you need to make sure that you do your research on your target customers. Unfortunately, even if you do try to research their preferences, you might go about it the wrong way. You need to make sure that you don’t make the following mistakes.
Gathering poll data from sources that don’t coincide with your target users
There are many different ways that you can collect data. One option is to conduct polls on other websites. There are lots of sites for mobile app developers, some of which allow polls to be conducted there. You can also conduct polls on various forums across the Internet.
The problem is that you need to understand the demographics of the users that you are collecting data from. A lot of the publishers that help you collect data don’t have users that resemble your target audience. This means that the data you collect might be totally useless.
Using the wrong targeting criteria when using Facebook ads to promote polls
One way that you can get primary research is by running polls and promoting them with Facebook ads. However, there is a common mistake that you can make here. You might define your targeting too narrowly, which means that you will miss a lot of people that would otherwise be your primary user base.
It can be a good idea to run narrowly targeted ads, so that you can get the highest amount of clicks for the same CPM. However, you need to be careful that you don’t limit the number of campaigns if they are very targeted. You might need to run five or more campaigns to get sufficient data from various demographic groups.
This could actually be your best approach. You will have much more granular data and be able to figure out the very specific users that will be most interested.
Relying too heavily on secondary data
You don’t have to collect all of the data yourself. You can also collect secondary data. Many other publishers should have market data highlighting the preferences of your expected demographic.
Unfortunately, there are going to be several problems with this:
- Some of the data is going to be outdated. Even if it is only a couple of years old, it might be useless.
- The data is not going to be specifically tailored to your application. You might need to refine your own study, unless the secondary data was extremely relevant to your project.
- You don’t necessarily know that the data was collected properly the first time. There could’ve been a number of biases built into the model. The only way that you can control the weight of the biases is by running your own model.
Secondary data can be useful. However, it should not be the entire basis of your mobile app.
