Is it time to conduct market research into your brand’s app?

Does it matter how it stacks up against your competitors’ apps?

Of course it matters. Apps are by far consumers’ technology of choice for accessing digital content. Getting them to download your app is like discovering a silver mine. And getting them to use your app regularly is like finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. A successful app can turn the purchase funnel into a water slide: consumers ride down the digital chute to swim in your revenue stream.

Advanced mobile market research tools for evaluating consumers’ opinions about any app are now readily available. Significantly, they are housed inside an advanced mobile research app that meets validated, first-party consumers in the mobile-app space where they’re most comfortable and most easily engaged. The app is Surveys On The Go® (SOTG) from MFour, which puts consumer insights professionals in touch with a mobile research audience of 2.5 million U.S. consumers who consistently give it the highest satisfaction ratings of any market research app - 4.5 stars out of 5 across more than 100,000 ratings posted at Apple’s App Store and Google Play.

Here are some tips on how you can leverage mobile-app research capabilities. 

• Fast-turnarounds are no problem when you’re surveying users of any brand’s app. They’re identifiable by the apps they use, so you can target known app users of any app you want to study.

• Get a thorough audit on your own brand’s app. Are load times fast enough? Does the display and ease of navigation meet consumers’ expectations? Remember, your app’s users are always judging it against their best app experiences.

• Now that you’ve gained intimate knowledge about your own app’s performance, the next step is to replicate the same research to get competitive intelligence on your competitors’ apps.

• Is there dissatisfaction in the ranks of a competitor’s app users? That’s an opportunity, and you can get all the details on what’s making your rival vulnerable on the mobile-app front.

• Does a competitor’s app get higher scores with its users than your app gets with your users? Now you know how much higher you have to set the bar. 

Here’s an example of what a brand can accomplish by upgrading its app. This recent article from Mobile Marketer details how the USA Today Network, a news group of more than 100 local outlets nationwide, achieved significant gains in reader engagement by improving the performance of its mobile website and mobile app.

Identifying and reaching out to first-party consumers by the apps they use opens many other doors to relevant, highly-specific data. And that 100% incidence rate always guarantees you a perfectly streamlined process for the utmost in speed and accuracy. Apps are a great tool for segmenting consumers to gain targeted feedback on any topic that’s relevant to your market research. But more on that later.

As Pew Research Center has documented, consumer insights research needs to be mobile to reach the representative slices of the public that successful market research requires. But there's a deeper layer of understanding insights professionals must master to get mobile right. Here are some tips as you explore mobile research solutions: 

• Understand why “mobile research” is not a generic term.

• Learn the key differences between the two kinds of mobile – “mobile optimized” (also called “mobile web”) and mobile-app.

• Be aware that “mobile optimized” research is traditional online research conducted on smaller devices. It’s a new vehicle for the same old online research environment.

• Consider data that shows consumers' overwhelming preference for the mobile-app environment over the mobile-web environment.  

• eMarketer reports that U.S. adult smartphone owners’ average daily mobile app usage exceeded mobile web usage by a ratio of 5.6 to 1 in 2017 – 145 minutes for apps, and 26 minutes for mobile web.

• This year, the gap is predicted to grow to 6 to 1 as time spent rises 6.9% for apps while staying level for mobile web.

The decisive takeaway is that when you’re talking about consumers inhabiting a mobile environment, you’re actually talking about people living in the mobile-app environment. Asking them to take surveys via the mobile web is tantamount to not using mobile at all.  

To dig deeper into the differences between mobile-app research and mobile-web/mobile optimized research, check out this blog post, “Mobile 101: Why Native App Technology Beats `Mobile’ Optimized.” Or you can set up a one-on-one demo to explore the whole story about how MFour’s mobile-app solutions can meet your own specific research needs. Just click here.

Here’s a statistic consumer insights professionals might consider memorizing: Pew Research Center now reports that 20% of adult Americans rely solely on smartphones for their internet access. That’s up from 13% who reported relying on mobile phones alone in a Pew study in 2015.

Your own data needs to be representative across whatever demographic you’re trying to understand. Which means you need to reach the public where it lives. Just as railroad stations gave way to airports as the main hubs of physical journeys, personal computers are giving way to mobile for consumers' digital journeys. That’s especially true for crucial, traditionally “hard to find” Hispanics, African Americans and young-adult consumers. Reaching out to them on a personal computer for consumer surveys is barking up the wrong device. Data from Pew studies conducted in January, 2018 and in 2015 shows why:

• Hispanics: 35% are now smartphone-only, up from 23% in Pew’s 2015 study.

• Ages 18-29: 28% are smartphone-only, up from 19% in 2015.

• African Americans: 24% are now smartphone-only users, up from 19% in 2015.

• Whites: 14% are smartphone-only in 2018, up from 10% in 2015.

• Age 65 and older: Even among these slower adopters, smartphone-only use is now at 10% of the senior population, up from 7% in 2015.
  

One obvious takeaway is that in order to reach the representative slices of the public that market research requires, it has be done with mobile. But what you need to know is a bit more nuanced than that. We'll tell you why in our next blog post, so stay tuned. In the meantime (or at any time), you can have a personal, one-on-one info session and demo on state-of-the-art mobile research capabilities, simply by clicking here. 

A new equation in research: app-tracking + GeoValidation® = unprecedented data

Targeting the right respondents is crucial to getting good research data, so MFour Mobile Research has developed a new pipeline to push surveys to consumers based on the smartphone apps they use. Hoteliers, for example, can find out what people who’ve downloaded their chain’s reservation app liked or didn’t like about their most recent stay -- from broad impressions to the most detailed particulars about check-ins, minibars and bellhops. Or they can eavesdrop on what a competitor’s app-using customers say about its own amenities and services.

The value of surveying app-users about their consumer experiences extends across all business sectors. MFour’s leadership position as the first and only all-mobile research company means it can infuse app-targeting surveys with even greater capabilities. We power all of our clients’ projects with the most advanced mobile-survey technology. With us, they can leverage the nation’s most effective survey panel – the million-member active panel that uses MFour’s own signature smartphone app, the 4.5-star rated Surveys on the Go.® You get fast, reliable results that fully include typically hard-to-reach demographics such as Hispanics and Millennials.

The app tracker accesses the 50% of our panel that uses Android devices. Knowing the apps they have, we can lead you to a rich, new vein of fast, reliable data. Rather than asking panel members which apps they use, MFour’s app-targeting is based on passive tracking that automatically identifies and verifies the apps they’ve downloaded. This tool becomes even more powerful when combined with another proprietary feature, the GPS-enabled respondent-locator we call GeoValidation®.

GeoValidation® certifies when panelists have arrived at a given retail outlet or other location that’s relevant to your survey. You can then field a survey to be completed on the spot, before respondents have finished shopping, or shortly after they’ve left, while the experience is fresh in mind. So a market researcher seeking insights about a hotel-chain’s customers (or its competitors’ customers) doesn’t have to ask hotel-app users to recall their most recent stay, which may have happened months ago. Pairing app-tracking with GeoValidation,® this study would proceed from a sure understanding that its subjects were current guests, or travelers who had just checked out. To call the resulting data “premium” would be a serious understatement.