If you are a budding developer or happen to someone who just published your first app, differentiating your offering in the app market can be very difficult. One of the greatest challenges in app development is a differentiation with the competition being stronger than ever.
With the Android Play Store listing 2.8 million apps and Apple’s App Store with 2.2 million apps, creating your audience can prove to be highly challenging. Here are 5 ways to make your app stand out and find your desired audience.
Inventive Branding
Every app developer wants to create the next top brand in the world of apps. Business models exist for every known service you can think of, making brand innovation hard. And yet, some apps are spreading like wildfire because of their innovation. The best way to find out how to create something new is by focusing on apps that already exist.
If you already have ideas for apps, research on alternative apps that already exist in the app stores and try to identify what you can offer that’s already not on the table.
You need to think of multiple ideas that you can offer to your audience and analyze them to understand what would be able to create your niche. Offering something fresh is important because no matter how good your app is if it offers something that already exists in the form of other apps it will fail. Take in ideas from as many sources as possible to come up with something that can become the next big hit in the App Store or Play Store.
Inventive Pricing
A lower priced app or service doesn’t always need to be cheaper than the competition. Sometimes being more innovative with your pricing is all it takes to create the next hit app in the app market. One of the best examples to understand what inventive pricing means, were the invention of the 2-liter bottle by Pepsi in 1970.
John Sculley was a marketing executive at Pepsi who was assigned to develop a glass bottle to compete with the 6.5-ounce offering from Coca-Cola. Instead of simply creating something their competitors already offered, he chose to create something completely new – the 2-liter plastic bottle. It allowed the brand to create a solution for both retailers as well as consumers for carrying the soft drink around without the hazards or the hefty weight of glass bottles.
Just like Pepsi, you too can reinvent the pricing strategies against your competition. Try to find pricing strategies that are different and seem attractive to find your niche. From offering trial periods to having cheap plans for your services if users subscribe for long periods of time, there are many pricing strategies you can try to capture your desired audience.
Market Targeting
Research is one of the most important steps in creating a new app. While many mobile app development companies come up with ideas for apps, targeting the market is where a lot of companies fail even though their apps might be well-built and feature-rich.
Try to identify if your target audience should be the broad market audience or a specific niche. You have to find out everything from how good the conversion rate is, how much traffic you can expect, how you can leverage your audience and what problems you can solve for your audience.
The App Store itself can be one of the greatest sources of information as any developer can head to the App Store charts and find out what’s popular in specific regions or what apps are generating the most revenue. There are separate audiences for free (usually ad-supported), freemium (free to download but with paid features) and paid apps and targeting the right audience is the only way to make your app successful.
Offer better security standards
With data leaks happening more often than ever, security can be a great USP for your app if you market it right. Hackers with malicious intent can steal your users’ data for all kinds of criminal activity, and even some of the biggest names in the app market have suffered from attacks.
If you can market security as one of the selling points for your app, it can attract users. This would require you to be heavily focused on protecting the valuable information of your users through secure network connections, authentication measures and data encryption. Be very mindful of how customer data is handled and your app should never store any form of sensitive data on your users’ device.
Aggressive marketing
If you believe in your app’s potential, you can try paid promotion options available in the app market to showcase your app to the masses. Once you establish your brand in the app market, your app will automatically be visible on the top charts without requiring paid promotions as well.
You can also extend your marketing to outside the digital world if you have the budget for it. For example, as a restaurant booking app, you can partner with restaurants to promote your app or market your tourism app near important tourist spots of your target market. Marketing can be expensive, but if done right, it can yield tremendous results. As long as your offering is solid and caters to the needs of your audience, you can capture a share of the already crowded app marketing through smooth marketing strategies.
