The app market is growing every day, and some niches are harder than others. Before you invest hundreds of hours into coding and designing your app, it would be wise to do some competitor research.

Competitive research is about learning more about the apps that you’re up against so you can have a better strategy for mobile app marketing. This research should help you to improve your product and to understand what needs to be done to beat them.

It’s not enough to just have the best app; you also need to be able to market yours better than them. Competing against an existing company is difficult and to win you’ll need to be far better than the competition. Toronto Internet marketing is about having the information you need to form a preferred strategy.

Search for the Apps

The first thing you want to do is to search relevant keywords in the Google Play and Apple iTunes app stores. This research will help you to see how competitive the search is and to find other competitors to study further.

Make sure that you consider different regions. Toronto Internet marketing will be focussed on Canada, but other areas matter too. Although it’s likely that most of your users will be in the same country as you, consider other countries that speak the same language.

Download their app

Obviously, you should try using their app. This hands-on research is crucial to app development. You might find inspiration in a feature that the competitor has, allowing you to make changes to your design and create a better product.

While you’re on the download page in the app store, you should take a look at what they are using to promote the app. What kind of images do they use? Is the main keyword in the description? How could you improve the product page?

Read the reviews

Reading reviews from customers is critical. The positive reviews help you to get an idea of what the customer likes, but more importantly, it helps you to understand what they prioritize.

No app is going to be perfect, but prioritizing and developing a certain feature of the app might make it far more useful to customers.

Secondly, you’ll be able to learn from negative reviews. These negative reviews give you a better understanding of what ruins the app for a client. It could be as simple as “it crashed,” which you clearly should prevent, but it could be about the layout or lack of certain features.

Check out their social media and blog

Promotion of an app is just as important as its quality. Go onto the companies social media profiles and their blog to see how much effort they are putting into promotion.

You might not be able to beat their app for functionality, but perhaps you could destroy them with promotion.

Read their update notes

Finally, make sure that you read their update notes. This research will give you a glimpse into the team behind the app, and it could lead to you getting a better idea of how they are updating and improving their product.

Update notes also give you information about how actively the team is working on the app. It’s far easier to compete against companies that aren’t always updating and improving their app, whereas it’s more difficult if they are making weekly updates.