4 Reasons Why Market Research Should Be Your Priority
Any Product Owner worth their salt knows that great ideas don’t come out of thin air: they come from logic and understanding.
Understanding your market is the key to finding your fortune as you can identify problems, issues and potential areas of success — all from knowing more about what’s going on around you.
Carrying out market research is how you gain that knowledge and find out exactly how to perform well in your niche. Here are four very good reasons why you should do it.
Cater to Your Audience
According to The Lean Startup method, the best way for any startup to achieve success is to cater to the needs of their early customers. And what better way to find out what those needs are than market research?
Whether you download every other app available, or look at every related forum, message board or thread of posts on Twitter, checking up on what your customers want is one of the most important thing you can do.
Imagine that your users are fitness focused but have trouble losing weight? You could use your initiative and include a meal planning feature into your workout app.
At EL Passion we use Agile development methodologies to make your ideas a reality. This means that we can quickly build features and launch them, solving your customers problems as soon as possible and maximizing your chances of success.
Marketing Your App
Market research can also inform how you market your app (even before it’s released).
By finding out more information about your audience you can better find out where they are, how to appeal to them and what sort of things they like.
You may have a general idea of who your audience is and what their broad interests are, but with market research this will allow you to fine tune it.
It’s a good idea as instead of finding people who ‘might’ be interested. You’ll find people who want exactly what you’re offering, saving you time and money in the process.
Thwart The Competition
While it’s always a good idea to keep a tab on your competition, doing market research can help you transcend their success and become a market leader.
This works for two reasons. Not only can you figure out what they’re doing wrong and fix those problems, but you can learn from them to make your offer better.
For example, if your competitor’s apps are always crashing, make it your number one priority to make yours crash less. Customers will flock to download your app as the experience will be a lot smoother and a lot less frustrating.
On the flip side, knowing what has gone wrong with your rivals’ projects can help you side step the same issues. If they’ve launched a feature that didn’t go down so well with customers, figure out why.
Did they market the feature poorly? Were there bugs? Or was it just plain useless? Figuring these things out can be a massive boost for your business.
Dominate Your Market
As mentioned, market research can help you identify paths to success within it.
Ways in which you can do this are via noticing trends and knowing your place.
This is such as realizing that more of your users are using tablets and therefore making plans to work on an optimized app before you competitors. Think about the factors that have an impact on your customers and your business.
There are more uses for market research and this is by no means a definitive guide. What is absolutely certain is that market research can help you get ahead of the game, before you’ve started playing.
