5 Simple Components of a Successful Mobile App Strategy

A strong mobile app strategy is an absolute necessity for companies just getting started with custom mobile app development or those looking to revamp or overhaul their existing software. Put simply, it’s the best way to ensure your app is doing everything you want it to do—both for your company and for your current (and potential) customers. 

A mobile app strategy is similar to a digital product strategy, but more specialized to consider the mobile platform at a deeper level.  To ensure your strategy is as effective as possible, we recommend five essential focus areas of mobile app strategy: building your business case, understanding your market, defining success, building a roadmap, and developing a launch plan.

1. Establishing a Business Case 

A mobile app should be a successful part of a larger business plan. As such, before you can get started, you need to understand what it needs to accomplish. Key questions that all stakeholders involved in the project should align to include: 

• What problem does this app need to solve for your customers? 

• What is in scope and out of scope for this project? 

• What are some key objectives this app is designed to accomplish for your business? 

If a key objective of your app is to be profitable, you will also need to explore different mobile app monetization strategies to determine the best ones to meet your goals.  

Per Statista, advertisements are currently the most preferred form of monetization in apps, especially in the US. Interestingly, global markets saw more utilization of paid apps and in-app billing (i.e., subscriptions or in-app purchases). 

Maximizing ROI from mobile apps requires balancing revenue generation with user satisfaction. Overburdening users with banners, pop-ups, and other ads can cause frictions that ultimately drive users off the app—and potentially onto competitors—so it’s important to consider the pros and cons of different monetization strategies before deciding on the right one.

2. Understanding the Market for Your Mobile App Strategy

A knowledge of the market your app will function in is a crucial part of building a successful mobile app strategy. Some of the best ways to explore your market include: 

• Talking to project stakeholders: There are many people in the company with different views on what success means in your market. Understanding their perspectives and incorporating their feedback is a great first step in building your mobile app strategy. 

• Reviewing customer service feedback: Customer service teams often have loads of valuable information about what customers are wishing for. Don’t ignore this valuable source of input.  

• Analyzing market research: This could be existing, purchased research or custom research designed to answer questions for your project. Focus groups, user interviews, and custom surveys can all be great ways to learn more about your market. 
• Studying your competitors: You should review everything from their ratings and reviews to the actual experience using their mobile apps. What is working or not working? Where are there gaps in what’s currently being offered? 

3. Defining Success for Your Mobile App Strategy

With this work done, you’ll want to be sure that all stakeholders, from developers to adopters and testers, are aligned around a mobile app strategy with a uniform definition for—and measures of—success. 

That comes from analyzing certain factors key to the development process, such as: 

• Reach: Does the app target a global or more specific target? 

• Audience: Who is this app for? What are their unique needs and habits? 

• Performance: Which quantifiable metrics are most important for evaluation? 

• History: How have previous app versions (or related software) performed? 

• User valuation: How are users valued? Which actions do we want to elicit? 

• Loyalty: What distinguishes a loyal (or otherwise valuable) user? 

Once you’ve explored the information available to you, you’ll want to align on how you will measure success for your mobile app. If stakeholders are having trouble agreeing on what success looks like, A North Star Strategy workshop can be a great way to get everyone on the same page. This type of workshop helps guide a team through the process of determining the most important metric for success. 

4. Building a Roadmap

With clear goals and metrics in mind, you can start prioritizing features that will manifest your vision more efficiently – this applies to both development and ongoing UX. 

It’s also important to consider industry-specific trends and expectations. For example, the features that make a good banking app change over time as users now see functions like instant check deposits as basic rather than the exciting development it once was.  

To that end, an effective mobile app strategy needs to be proactive, considering all of the possible features and prioritizing them into the ones that will help you best achieve your business goals in the short and longer term. While it can be tempting to want every possible feature for launch, creating a roadmap can help you understand what your users need most and what can wait for future releases. 

5. Developing a Launch Plan

Even the best mobile apps can’t succeed without a go-to-marketing or mobile app marketing strategy. This strategy needs to include a few key things including: 

• A thorough understanding of your target personas 

• A timeline of launch activities 

• Key messages for each phase of your launch 

• Enablement planning for how you will roll out your product with important internal teams like customer service and sales 

• A channel and distribution plan that considers the best ways to make your target personas aware of your mobile app and its benefits  

The best mobile app marketing strategy will cover your launch planning and also a mobile app engagement strategy. It’s important to consider how you will retain users once they become users of your app. 

Bonus Step 6: Revisiting Your Current Mobile App Strategy 

If your team has a mobile app strategy in place, it’s important to assess it regularly to determine whether it’s meeting (or on track to meet) its defined goals. This is vital to your overall mobile app management strategy and should happen continuously. 

One of the primary goals of regular review is to identify areas for improvement and innovation. For example, you may discover that a new feature is not garnering users’ attention. That can lead to prioritizing customer experience in the next round of updates, identifying whether the issue lies within the functionality itself or its positioning—for example, how users navigate it. 

Spotlight: Integrating the Latest Mobile Technology Trends 

Part of staying ahead of mobile technology trends is making conscious decisions about which new technologies to integrate. You should consider how a specific function or tool like artificial intelligence (AI) will impact your users. 

To return to the example of financial institutions and their software, forward-thinking banks leverage generative AI to optimize customer journeys. This is an effective mobile app strategy because they use cutting-edge predictive analysis to answer users’ questions and provide real value instantaneously—and critically, cost-effectively. 

Optimize Your Mobile App Strategy 

Effective mobile app strategy starts with planning and defining what success looks like. At Hexaware, we help companies across industries plan for, develop, deploy, and manage software that meets their customers’ needs and maximizes ROI. 

Get in touch today to learn more about what an effective mobile app strategy can do for you.