How to Find the Target Audience for A Mobile App?

Digitization is leading the competition among businesses, and dedicated applications are the harbinger of this race.

Do you know that the mobile application market is only set to surpass 935 billion USD by 2023?

Hence, creating dedicated mobile apps is a necessity for all modern businesses. Searching the target audience for a mobile app is an important phase of all the detailed steps in creating mobile apps. Further, any business needs to reach an audience interested in your products or services.

Let us go through the detailed process to find the target audience for any mobile app. We’ll start with the need to search the target audience for any app, the process for the same, and the key places to accomplish the task. We’ll incorporate the search for the target audience for some of the top apps and other details related to the marketing strategies. Let us start with the need to find the target audience for any mobile app.

Why Is It Important To Find The Target Audience?

In every business, you are selling your product to people. Whichever sector your product or service belongs to, a certain group of people might be interested in that product. Hence, finding a target audience is very important because you can’t please everybody. So while doing business, we need to be precise about what we are selling and to whom we plan to sell it. You need to make sure that what or exactly who your product is for. Whether it is a game we want to advertise or a soap, you need to know who will be willing to buy it. For mobile apps, it is crucial to plan UX/UI design, mobile app features, etc., based on this target audience.

Further, if you plan accurately on who and how you will sell some stuff to, you can design and make sure our product is desirable to that certain group of people. Knowing more about that particular group of people will help us develop our product in a way that they like the most. We can also see what our audience is currently using, what they need, and what they complain about. This will make sure that the product value goes up. Hence, it gives a clear path for the design and development of mobile apps.

How to Find the Target Audience?

After going through the importance of finding the target audience, let us move to the dedicated process of finding the target audience in different steps. These are:

Step 1. Explore Your Current User Base

It is important to think like your audience while exploring the current user base. It becomes easy to personalize Google Analytics if your business has a dedicated website. The other alternative is to access customer data from the custom relationship management system from YouTube channels, social media accounts, live-chat systems, website blogs, etc. 

If your business doesn’t have a website, it is recommended to go for an advertising landing page. Applying Google Analytics at this point can give valuable data on geographic location, psychographics, demographics, etc. This can help solve the following questions:

• What problem is your app solving?
• Who is your app helping?
• Who would want to use your app?
• How would a person use your app?

Step 2. Find out Who Uses Your Competitors’ Apps

The next step is to keep an eye on the competitors’ app users. Starting by examining the user reviews on different app stores, it becomes easy to prepare a checklist of the yes and nos for your dedicated mobile apps. Other techniques to find the competitor’s app users include evaluating their app marketing strategies, social media campaigns, etc. The best part is that some of the leading online services like Appptopia, MobileAction, App Annie, etc., can help you in this step.

Step 3. Draw up A Preliminary Target User Profile

The third step comes down to drawing a preliminary target user profile, which will help your app stand high ahead of the other competitors in the market. The ideal criteria for segmenting the target audience include:

1. Target Audience Demographics

It should cover the points like:

• Income level: It is easy to find the income level of the target audience to pitch them the right price to quality ratio.
• Occupation: It becomes easy to determine the income and solvency of the target audience by knowing all about their occupation.
• Family status: The level of responsibility, preferences for in-app purchases, and nature of decision-making are best determined by family status like single, divorced, married, etc.
• Education: It is important to define the level of education of the target audience to help them interact properly with your app.
• Language: It is easy to define the language of the target audience, adding common jargon, etc., to make your app familiar to them.
• Location: It is important to launch your mobile app in a particular geographic area and slowly make it global. 
• Age: The age group criteria can be a hit when making a dedicated list of the target audience.
• Gender: It is important to define gender- men, women, or all genders, for the users of your mobile app.

2. Target Audience Preferences

It should cover the points like:

• Favorite apps: It is easy to help design app features, design elements, screen interactions, etc., for the target audience by determining their favorite apps.
• Technologies: It is important to bank on the favorite technologies used by your target audience.
• Preferred social network: It is important to determine the preferred social network of your target audience, like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
• Platform types: It is important to define whether Android or iOS is popular for your app?
• Device types: It is crucial to know the type of device used by the target audience, like mobile, tablet, TV, smartwatch, etc.

3. Target Audience In-Market Behavior

It must include:

• Frequency of buying: It depends on the income level and solvency of the target audience. It helps determine the monthly subscription rate of the targeted audience.
• Different reasons to buy: Knowing what is encouraging your target audience to buy is important. These may be discounts, recommendations, perfect price/quality ratio, variety of goods/ services, a tribute to trends, product quality, etc. 
• Methods to make decisions: It is important to know if your target audience prefers personal or corporate interests, continuity or change, recommendations or reports, facts or storytelling, action or caution, narrow or wide information, etc.

4. Target Audience Psychographics

These cover:

• Motivation: It is important to determine what challenges the target audience to use your app or how it meets their expectations?
• Need and want: This helps find the challenges faced by the audience by outlining their needs and want to understand their intent.
• Fairs and uncertainties: It is important to include the fairs and uncertainties observed by the users.
• Different interests: The main interests of the target audience may include entertainment activities, vacation places, literature, favorite movie genre, etc.
• Values: It is important to define what is important for your target audience, like environment protection, longevity, communication, self-development, etc.

Step 4. Find Fictional Prospects in Real Life

It is important to find the fictional prospects online from different offline events like master classes, entertainment events, sports competitions, meetings, conferences, etc. These can be your family members, coaches, colleagues, neighbors, acquaintances, etc. This can be managed online by searching the different keywords and using keyword research tools to find your target audience. Google can help locate the key comments and reviews of these prospects on social media platforms, forums, image boards, online communities, blog aggregators, review platforms, video streaming services, and events. It becomes easy to revise the target audience criteria based on the information from these fictional prospects in real life.

Step 5. Create Your User Personas

It is the time to create the audience’s fictional user characteristics like in-market behavior, psychographics, demographics, preferences, etc. These user personas help create mobile apps, adjust user engagement strategies, tailor marketing messages, etc. It is important to update the user personas monthly to eliminate non-trending data. Some of the quick tips for creating user personas are:

• Keep it focused on the content only.
• Include all the information required in the app.
• You can keep the ratio of in-market behavior, psychographics, and preferences to demographics at 80:20.
• Adopt the storytelling strategy to humanize the user persona.
• Highlight the key problems solved by your app.
• Ensure all these key points are clear to the key stakeholders.

Step 6. Iterate and Revise

Last but not least is finding the target audience after the release of the first version of the mobile app. All you need to do is to collect customer feedback from suggestions received by the support team, complaints, user reviews on app stores, etc. It is easy to receive the first-coming data from user engagement metrics like average session length, cost per acquisition, conversion rate, retention rate, number of downloads, etc.

The difference between the information from these channels and the already created user persona profiles helps fill the gap for the targeted audience. Selecting the most efficient acquisition channels and revising the target audience profiles becomes easy.

How to Find the Target Audience for a Mobile App?

After going through the process, here are some key methods to find the target audience for a mobile app.

1. Mark Sherrington’s 5W method

This is used to segment the market and determine the target audience. It includes answering five simple wh-questions. the list is below-

• what?- what is your service/ product that you are offering to people.
• who?- who will be willing to subscribe to your services/ buy your product.
• why?- why would somebody use your particular service/ product and not others’?
• when?- when will people want to buy your product?
• where?- where should you advertise your service/ product so that people will buy it?

2. Spectrum with Opposite Traits

This is a method you can use to know more about their target audience. What does that particular group of people like or dislike? What do they usually find buyable? In this method, one usually makes a spectrum by choosing traits that their target audience doesn’t interact with as of now, but they might in the future. Then put that trait on the Spectrum and score it.

For example, suppose you are selling new earphones. In that case, that might mean that your target audience might be more into technology and related stuff or if people might support small upcoming artists or not, whether they want to influence others, how woke they are, etc.

3. Average Check Size

This method can guess your target audience’s average income. One way you can guess their income is by only checking what they buy from you. You can see how much they spend on your mobile app and how much they must earn to spend that money. You can even check what time they are checking your emails, filling out your surveys, or even buying from you. Further, you can check what job/ vacancies pay that much and determine your target audience’s demographic using internet services. This will help you design and set prices for your services/ products better for the future.

4. HALO Strategy Spreadsheet

The popular author Sabri Suby of the book “Sell like crazy” has offered a Halo strategy worksheet to organize different findings like Google searches, exploring current customer base, conducting competitor analysis, etc., on a spreadsheet. 

5. Online Survey Tools

The online survey tools help the team to get in touch with the determined target audience. There are a lot of methods by which one can do the same. One way is to conduct interviews, one on one. It will help you to get first hand feedback about your app. This is going to be time-consuming for sure as you will be getting in touch with each of your customers. One of the most commonly used tools to get feedback online is online surveys or polls. One can do surveys on Google forms and send them out to people or just post them on social media. It will give you feedback pretty quickly, and it is less expensive.

6. Marketing Campaigns

Last but not least is the effectiveness of the different marketing campaigns in determining the target audience for your mobile app. These include creating advertising landing pages, social media advertising campaigns, digital out-of-home advertising, etc. All the campaigns help your team to get an idea of the customer behavior on the fly only without waiting for the end of the marketing campaign.

Where Can I Find the Targeted Audience? 

After going through the key methods, it comes down to the spaces where you can find the targeted audience for your business app. Some of these places include:

1. Google Analytics: It is easy to target the users from a specific interest and keep an eye on the customized home page increased conversions. Google Analytics offers to create a target audience for users who converted recently, users who converted frequently, and users spending large time on the website and targeting all these within optimized limits.
2. SEMrush: The “Audience Insights report” of SEMrush is the perfect help to find the targeted audience. It helps collect insights from the least evident competitors, widen the partner’s collection range, review media partners, estimate media reach, etc. Some of the other activities include comparing placements against competitors, selecting favorite social networks, researching regional markets, defining niche leaders, monitoring market dynamics, etc.
3. Social Mention: It is a dedicated social media search tool that offers a single stream of information by aggregating user-generated content from global users. Hence, it offers a real-time brand monitoring tool that helps businesses find the targeted audience. 
4. Audience: It is a dedicated tool that helps businesses identify relevant audiences, discover actionable insights, and inform strategies aimed at business growth. It offers a free report to transform business decision-making, discover new opportunities, understand the audience, etc.  
5. Typeform: It offers audience-friendly forms and surveys using the built-in form and video libraries to offer a sleek interface for the audience. It offers surveys that feel less like interrogations and more like conversations and help businesses find their target audience. 
6. AnswerThePublic: It offers quick and direct insights from the customers and hence helps businesses channel their strategies. The aim of this tool is to discover the hidden niches and unexpected insights to offer a competitive edge to different campaigns.
7. Google Trends: It analyzes the top search query popularity on Google from different languages and regions. It uses the graphical representation to compare the search volume of different queries over the period.
8. SurveyMonkey: It offers different free surveys and hence can be used to approach the target audience for your business. This software is equipped with numerous survey templates and offers customized survey types also.
9. Statista: There is no match to Statista when it comes to collecting consumer and market data. It offers verified statistics on more than 80,000 topics from more than 22,500 sources from more than 170 different industries. The data thus generated can be used to channel the search for the target audience for any business.
10. Google Keyword Tool: Last but not least is the powerful Google Keyword Tool. It offers all the necessary details about the trending short and long-tail keywords which can be used by businesses in managing ad targeting campaigns.

Example of Determining the Target Audience for a Mobile App

Let us understand the top examples of determining the target audience for leading applications from different segments:

1. Zomato- Food

About: Starting as the top restaurant discovery and search platform, Zomato has emerged as the top online food delivery platform. It is operational in 3 countries globally and has a database of more than 1.4 million restaurants. App users can quickly order food from the restaurant, and the Zomato delivery executives ensure that the order reaches the user on time. 

Target audience: Zomato targets two different sets of customers between the age of 18 to 335 years of age who’ve access to a smartphone and use different apps. These are customers looking to order the food at their homes and the ones who want to dine out. Further, it offers special incentives to customers who want to dine out with the Zomato Gold Program. Some of the popular target audience sets include people occasionally eating outside, people who don’t have space or time to cook, students ordering food in hostels, working professionals ordering food in offices, etc. 

Marketing strategies: The top marketing strategies used by Zomato include:

• Paid advertising: Zomato targets keywords related to the name of restaurants, ordering online, food, etc., on Google Adwords. The search ad campaign is accompanied by different Google Display ads to catch users from third-party websites or applications. Not to miss are the Instagram and Facebook ads run by Zomato.
• Social media marketing: Zomato has a large number of followers on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. It uses different posts to keep its followers updated on different channels. Some of these types include:

• Sarcasm: It shares different sarcasm thoughts on social media channels to gain the attention of its followers.
• Fun: It relates to the food habits of the users as the company shares infographic images which gain the attention of a young audience.
• Comparison: Zomato takes the full leverage of choices and offers comparison posts to engage different followers.
• Current affairs: Zomato has taken the lead when it comes to attaching current affairs with the marketing campaigns. 
• Trendy: Last but not least is the trendy social media marketing posts from Zomato. All these posts promote the content, and users comment on it and view it again. These posts help Zomato stay in touch with the audience.

• Search engine optimization (SEO): Zomato uses strict SEO techniques and has blocked different SEO tools to scan them on their website. It uses more than 816,952 keywords and attract 6,713,882 monthly organic traffic. Some of the top SEO techniques include:

• Backlinks: The domain authority of Zomato is increased from 12,274172 unique domains and 233 backlinks from high authority domains. The leading keywords ensure that search engines show these pages.
• Keywords in URL: Zomato creates web page URLs using the top keywords. It helps them rank their website as search engines get the pages matching to user’s search query

2. Netflix – OTT

About: It started as an online movie rental offering platform in 1997 with 925 available titles and around 30 employees. Currently, Netflix has created a customer-friendly platform which offers self-setup, different gift cards, social media channels, improved customer experience, etc.

Target audience: The company focuses on its target audience of smartphone and other smart device users looking for top entertaining content. People were bored of the usual entertainment means and hence are slowly switching to on-demand entertainment services like Netflix.

Marketing strategies: Netflix takes digital marketing quite seriously due to the emerging competition. Some of these unbeatable marketing strategies include:

• Different campaigns: Netflix run different campaigns to keep users engaged on the platform and updated about recent releases. Some of the popular campaigns include “The Spoiler Billboard”, including spoilers of different shows, “FU2016”, including the launch of House of Cards, and “The Censor’s Cut”, including an advertisement for Narcos Mexico in Thailand.
• Social media optimization (SMO): Netflix works dedicatedly on different social media optimization techniques for their Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook channels. It tweets 14 times a day on average and is popular for witty replies and comebacks. It has more than 6.8 million followers on Twitter. Instagram has 19 million followers. It goes with the posts without hashtags and choices in behind-the-scenes bloopers, interviews with actors, behind the scene clips, etc. The Facebook account of Netflix has a different story, with 90% of posts being videos and the rest photos. These videos include a sneak-peek into shows, clips from movies/ shows, interviews with actors from upcoming movies, etc. The images include simple text posts about current TV shows, movies, funny memes, GIFs, image sharing, etc. Further, Netflix’s Facebook account has more than 61 million followers.
• Search engine optimization (SEO): It uses dedicated search engine optimization to improve brand presence and ensure organic traffic. The SEO techniques used include off-page and on-page strategies. Further, Netflix uses an international SEO strategy to earn organic leads on a global stage. It is made possible using high-potential keywords which can top on the list of different search engines. 
• Email marketing: Customer onboarding and nurturing are best managed by Netflix’s email marketing campaigns. All the new customers receive dedicated content recommendations and ideas to explore the platform. The customer experience is enhanced with creative email marketing campaigns which delight and engage the customers. 
• Website development: Netflix’s website is one of the user-friendly websites liked by global customers. The website is designed using an algorithm which recommends more content based on the customer data. Further, every page of the website is optimized for improved customer experience. The different personalization features offer customized pages to the users with optimized content using the actor’s name, director’s name, title, etc.
• Personalized content marketing: Netflix offers personalized content, including different TV movies or shows which are liked by different customers globally. This personalization strategy comes from an advanced algorithm which keeps an eye on the user history and arranges the programs accordingly. 

3. Spotify- Music

About: It was introduced in the year 2006 and since then has emerged as a market leader in the music streaming industry. It enjoys more than 34% share in the music streaming industry and has more than 155 million subscribers. Spotify has more than 345 million global users and is leading the way for online music streaming users.

Target audience: Spotify targets young and adults who love to enjoy the latest music collections. It works on all leading operating systems for different smart devices.

Marketing strategies: Spotify uses a strategic digital marketing strategy to lead the way for sales. Some of these marketing strategies are:

• It started as an invite-only app to improve the exclusivity of the app among the audience.
• The dedicated customer experience is managed by leveraging user data and high-end machine learning technologies.
• Spotify offers the freemium version in which users don’t have to pay for the services but contribute to the ads viewing revenue stream.
• The company has made numerous strategic deals with different music labels and publishers to improve the brand reach globally.
• Spotify is well-known for creating emotional advertisements to pressure people to subscribe to paid services.

4. Paytm- Finance/ Wallet

About: Pay Through Mobile or Paytm is the leading finance business focusing on financial services, e-commerce services, and digital payment services. It is available in more than 11 languages and is used by more than 20 million retailers nationally. The leading Paytm services include event bookings, movie bookings, travel bookings, utility bill payments, mobile recharges, etc. 

Target audience: Paytm has successfully partnered with more than 3 million merchants across India for online payments. Hence, customers were requested to complete payments using Paytm codes only.

Marketing strategies: Paytm has emerged as a leader in online digital transactions. Some of the top digital marketing strategies of Paytm include:

• Social media digital presence: Paytm stays highly active on social media, shares exclusive content focusing on young users, etc. It has more than 30 lakh likes on Facebook, more than 4 million followers on Instagram, more than 7 lakh followers on Linkedin, and a subscriber base of more than 4.65 lakh on YouTube. 
• Marketing campaigns: Paytm runs different marketing campaigns like MBA contests, Mumbai Dabbawalas, automatic start of the month message, mobile soldier games, Facebook Live, etc. All these campaigns are aimed to attract the target audience and adopt different strategies for the same.
• Cashless transaction scheme: It started the “Scan any QR to pay using Paytm” campaign for cashless transactions in more than seven languages. It was launched after the innovative campaign “each one teaches one.” 
• Event sponsorships by Paytm: The company is widely involved in different events, tournaments, etc. It is the official sponsor of the Indian cricket team, which gives them immense exposure globally.
• Offline communications: Paytm never fails to attract the target audience with their different offline communication using television, transit media, newspapers, etc.
• Catchy content: The company comes with catchy content for every situation. During demonetization, it came up with the slogan “Paytm Karo”, which gained much attention from the subscribers.

5. BYJU’S- Edtech

About: BYJU is the leading education technology company powered by Think and Learn Pvt. Ltd. It is used by more than 50 million students nationally and offers the best learning from the top teachers about the subjects. The year 2020 was the busiest three months for the company during the COVID-19 impact.

Target audience: BYJU targets different students from grade one to students aiming to crack different exams like IAS, CAT, JEE, etc. The target audience includes more than 260 million students in K-12 and 35 million students in higher studies. 

Marketing strategies: Some of the top marketing strategies of BYJU include:

• BYJU’s regional campaign: The company has started its first-ever campaign in the regional language- Kannada using different partners. BYJU had further created different ad films in regional languages. 
• Free access to live classes: BYJU has offered free access to live classes from the best teachers during the COVID-19 lockdown. It has earned the company great branding and improved subscription.
• “Keep Learning” campaign: It showcases the Indian cricket team launching the new jersey with BYJU’s logo. The team pitched and spoke about their inspirations and emotions to continue learning daily.
• Targeting parent community: BYJU’s started an exclusive video marketing campaign, “Come Fall in Love with Learning.” It has worked wonders in breaking the myths about technology and ensuring that parents support technology in learning.
• Targeting student community: BYJU has started an early learning app and partnered with Disney to trademark Disney stories, digital worksheets, educational games, etc., for students. It has further partnered with top celebrities like Shah Rukh Khan as brand ambassadors. All these strategies had long-lasting impact on the students.

Wrapping Up

With 71% of the app user churn occurring in the first 90 days of app download, it is highly essential to keep track of the app metrics. The first step here is to find the target audience for your mobile app. It is easy to understand the importance of searching for the target audience, followed by the quick steps to do it. It includes exploring the current user base, finding competitor app’s users, setting preliminary target user profiles, finding fictional prospects, creating personas, iterating, revising, etc.

The six different methods to find the target audience for any mobile app include Mark Sherrington’s 5W method, Spectrum with opposite traits, Average check size, Halo strategy spreadsheet, Online survey tools, marketing campaigns, etc. The different places to find the targeted audience include Google Analytics, SEMrush, Social Mention, Audiense, Typeform, AnswerThePublic, Google Trends, SurveyMonkey, Statista, Google Keyword Tool, etc. Not to miss are the quick details of the top-ranking apps like ZOMATO, BYJU’s, Paytm, Spotify, Netflix, etc.

If you are looking to build or market a mobile app then our app development team can help you. We at Emizentech have experience of building, launching and marketing mobile apps for clients globally. So, if you ever need professional app developers do get in touch with us.

Frequently Asked Questions about finding a target audience for a mobile app