How to define and reach your mobile app target audience

From mobile ads to social media marketing, there are several ways to reach the audiences most likely to be interested in your app, brand, or product. However, with over 5.5 million apps available for download from the Google Play Store and iOS App Store, competition is fierce across all verticals. This makes it more important than ever to segment your mobile app target audience and find the most effective ways to reach them. In this guide, we cover everything you need to know about defining your target audience and share best practices to optimize your targeting capabilities and impact.

Even the world’s most unique products have to find the thread between a product’s value and the audience that can benefit. You should consider your target audience from the very beginning of your app development because it will inform your mobile app’s features, UX/UI design, and how you plan to monetize your product.

Taking time to accurately define your target audience will enable your app to scale faster. Moreover, you can gather data and learn from behavioral trends to increase the efficacy of your targeting. For example, audience segmentation tools allow you to create lookalike audience groups so that you can target users similar to those who have proven to be the most valuable.

Several targeting methods exist within digital marketing, so it may take a bit of trial and error to find the one that works best for you. These range from focusing on broad user groups to highly personalized, individualized segmentation.

At the broader end of the spectrum—and popular choice among app marketers—a multisegment targeting strategy refers to advertising campaigns that cater to multiple segments across a target audience. A concentrated targeting strategy (sometimes referred to as “niche targeting”) focuses advertising efforts on one particular segment, while a micromarketing strategy (sometimes referred to as “micro-targeting”) is a precision form of targeting that involves an app hyper-personalizing its ads or messaging at the individual user level.

1. Understand your product’s value

The first step in defining your target audience is to have a comprehensive understanding of your product. The point is to go beyond simply listing your product’s features—you need to ensure that you are questioning how your mobile app is valuable to different types of users. This includes questions such as:

• What does my product do?
• What makes my product unique?
• Why should users be interested in installing my app?

Your target audience will be any users who can gain value from your product, so these are important questions to ask from the very beginning. The answers will also be informed by market research and user behavior over time, but this is a smart way to lay a foundation for how you plan to generate installs and revenue.

2. Conduct market research

Market research is a critical step toward defining your target audience. This will reveal what your competitors are offering users—both their shortcomings and where they have been successful. By learning the pain points of your competitors, you gain insight into what makes your mobile app valuable by comparison.

In addition to researching your competitors’ products, you should also learn how they are targeting users—if possible—based on this activity. This ranges from how they operate across social media channels to the customer service provided in-app.

3. Identify your target audience’s demographic

Identified through market research and data analysis, your target audience will be a group defined by demographics and interests. Note that the kind of demographic information you can access will depend on the location of users and their consent statuses across frameworks. Here are some of the most important factors that will shape your target audience:

• Location: The whereabouts of your audience will play a factor in behavioral trends and user interests. This can affect everything from the popularity of your app vertical to the average mobile usage and spending habits. Depending on the purpose of your app, this can be as accurate as a single region, country, state, county, or city. **Read more about **location-based marketing.
• Age range: This is another important factor that can shape your app’s design, features, and monetization model. Generational groups are a smart way to target by age.
• Gender: Even if you want to target all genders for your mobile app, you may want to use this as a defining factor for segmentation. This enables you to target each gender differently.
• Language: Localization is a smart way to scale your business. Usually tied to your target audience’s location, the language availability on offer will make an impact when reaching your growth target. Localization also goes beyond language translation and considers the unique preferences of the culture and market.
• Interests: It would be pointless to spend your marketing budget advertising to users who are highly unlikely to have  interest in your mobile app. Your target audience should be defined by those who have a proven interest in products relevant to your company. This aligns the value of your mobile app with users who can make use of those benefits. A user’s interests should also be considered when designing your ad creatives.
• Devices: You can also target by the type of device. For example, this is essential if your product is only available on Android or iOS.
• Familial status: This can be useful because marital status and a user’s family setting will change the way they spend their time and disposable income.
• Occupation: Your audience’s occupation will affect factors such as their income and mobile app usage. This should be considered when creating your app’s monetization model and determining ease of use.

4. Build user personas

Once you know the demographic you want to target, you should consider the behavioral trends that are common for that audience. For example, location, age, and income will all affect the way users spend time on their devices and the way they spend their money. This can inform your targeting and allow you to connect with your audience according to their habits. There will be more than one type of user that you want to target, so a one-size-fits-all approach won’t deliver the best results. Instead, you can develop user personas to define different types of users and map their typical user journeys. When developing user personas, you should also consider psychological demographics (where consented) such as:

• Personality traits: Even after narrowing down your target audience by demographics, this user group will have a variety of personality traits that can be used for more accurate targeting.
• Values: What is important to your audience can be used to convey the advantages of having your app. For example, a shopping app may want to highlight the benefits of their discounted products to audiences seeking cheaper alternatives to luxury products.
• Behavioral trends: This includes how much time your target audience spends on their devices, the type of apps they use and how much they will typically spend per app. Behavioral trends are also important for setting benchmarks that let you know how your app and user acquisition are performing and where there is room for improvement.

5. Start advertising your product

Once you have considered the steps above, you will be ready to start advertising your product and testing what works for your audience. When advertising your mobile app it is important to be adaptable based on your analytics—even if the results are unexpected—and continue a data-driven marketing approach. While running campaigns, you have an opportunity to learn more about customer preferences and understand how you can optimize your product to provide greater value.

You can also engage with your audience and gather user feedback to get more detailed insights into how your product and marketing strategy can adapt. For example, you can engage with users on your social media channels to learn what they like and dislike about your app. You can also introduce a feedback form so that users can make suggestions and share their pain points while using your app.

1. Use a measurement/analytics platform to learn more over time

Once you have categorized your mobile app target audience, you can gather data and deep dive into analytics to learn more. By measuring performance, you can gain valuable insights into what works for your target audience and what doesn’t. Mobile analytics shows how users engage with your mobile app, including installs, session time, retention rates, and churn, as well as insights into how much value they are driving via metrics like return on ad spend (ROAS). This empowers you to optimize the channels and campaigns you’re allocating budget to, and ultimately scale your app growth. Analytics should always be approached with a data-driven mindset.

This analysis is most impactful when working with a mobile measurement partner (MMP), as you know the attribution data you’re receiving is unbiased and real-time. An MMP like Adjust can also be leveraged to  create lookalike audiences for enhanced segmentation and targeting. For example, Adjust’s Audience Builder automates the process of segmentation, enabling you to build, download, and share customized user lists. You can set conditions to segment users and create group lists to share with partners for retargeting and A/B testing.