📱How to Create a Mobile App Strategy?

You have a mobile app idea but you don’t know where to start when it comes to planning its development as a full package or product.

First things first: Define your app purpose and value proposition

This is the first and most important step where your idea will grow from just an idea to an actual tool or service that will solve problems, bring delight or help your users learn something new. Ideally before crafting your mobile app strategy, you have laid out your vision. A few of the many questions that you should answer are:

• Why does your app exist? (app purpose)
• What value does your app offer to your users? (value proposition)

The answers to these questions will guide your app design, development, marketing and even monetization decisions (freemium, subscription, in-app purchases, or advertising).

If you are not sure what is the difference between vision and strategy, check out this very well-crafted explanation video on the topic, made by Jeff Humble.

Check the waters: Research your target market and competitors

Conducting market, competitor and user research is the best way to calibrate your compass and see which direction you want to use for living your mobile app digital print. This step can be as complex and detailed as you want it, but most importantly have to be tailored to your business objectives and plans (short-term and long-term). This phase will also help you clear out all misunderstandings or confusion around your product's value proposition and purpose. In this phase is also appropriate to test a prototype if it is available and pivot based on the learnings and insights gathered during the research and analysis.

Now how will you measure success? Set your app goals and key performance indicators (famous KPIs)

What is important to you? How would you measure your app's success? These can be metrics that your competitors also use as humble bragging on their social media and website or it can be as simple as retaining a specific number of happy numbers over a specific period. That last app goal would be oriented toward improving your customer loyalty, for example. Key performance indicators or KPIs could be the number of app downloads, retention rate, conversion rate, revenue or user satisfaction. Even if the idea is solely yours, make sure you schedule a meeting with someone who can question your hypothesis and ask you why, so you can dig deeper into the important aspects of your strategy.

Choose your app platform and development approach

In my last article, I also mentioned what is important to consider when choosing a development platform for your e-commerce business, and one of those is your business goals, budget and timeline. These two will help you easily seed out the options and decide on which app platform or development approach is more suitable for the development of your app. Nowadays you can build a mobile app in 14 days with the right team and tool. What you trade is customisation options and control over the complete user experience. Types of apps you can develop are web apps, native apps or hybrid apps.

How will people find out about your app? Plan your app marketing and monetization strategies

One of the most rewarding and exciting parts of building your mobile app is having it public and reaching your target audience. That’s why you need to also plan and take into consideration your marketing campaign. How and who will spread the word about your amazing app? Have you created a landing page to make sure your users pre-order your app? Are you going to start building your online presence? Are you going to start the conversation on Quora, LinkedIn, and Reddit? Or would you operate on sponsorships? A few things to remember are, to optimise your app store listing and consider running an ad or two. That’s how you will also gather feedback faster.

Monitor and optimize your app performance

After you gather a substantial amount of feedback and analytics is recommended you observe and derive some insights from those  numbers. Running tests (usability, functionality, loading, crashing, battery impact, security etc.), checking heatmaps, seeking user feedback, and doing A/B testing. All this information will help you improve your app in the next iteration and significantly improve the user and customer experience.

Here’s what else to consider

Make user experience a priority in order to significantly stand out in the ocean of mobile apps with bad user experience. Build strong foundations and upgrade from there. You don’t need to have it all figured out from the start. Remember, it is easier to build a skyscraper with strong foundations. Don’t play Jenga with your user's patience.

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