Trajectory of Customers
Planning out how you’re going to get more customers is a tough one, but it's necessary. You can’t build a successful company if you don’t have any customers. You need a plan on where they will come from, how you will market it and most of all how you will retain them.
Target
You need to figure out who your customers should be. This should be done well before you even start developing your product, however, if it's not you must do this now. You need to work out the target audience for your product or service. This must be as precise as possible, and it certainly can’t just be everyone because then you will attract no one. The key is to narrow the customer base down to as small as possible because this allows you to direct the marketing to that group and focus on them. A person aged 20 and another aged 60 have very different interests so targeting both will get you neither. You need to decide what age group you're looking at, what type of person, their interests, why they need it, and what problem it will solve for them.
When you have this ideal target in mind you’re ready to start marketing!
MVP
Ideally, you want to get the word out that your new app is coming out. People won’t use it if they don’t know it exists. The best plan once you’ve set your release date and you’re rapidly approaching it is to get stuck into marketing. The most effective form of this would be online marketing, that could be Facebook, Instagram, whatever. You need to look at what platform your target customers use. If your app is targeting professionals then maybe LinkedIn is the best place. You could be targeting teenagers so some of the newer platforms might be better such as tik tock or Snapchat.
Platform
The goal is to find what social platform your target audience is on and then go there. You can set up advertising budgets on all these major platforms which allows you to set a budget of how much you want to spend each day and then you can customise the targeting of those advertisements based on the target customers. You might be targeting people on Facebook, you can then set such things as age ranges and what they like so that your advertisement shows up only on peoples feeds that might use your app. You might have an application that targets women aged 40-60 years old, Facebook allows you to target age ranges so that these are the only people that see this type of content. This kind of advertisement is extremely powerful and done the right way can convert a huge amount of people.
Another way would be to get it into the hands of people who have large followings on these platforms. These people are called “Influences”, they have large followings and for the right price they will make a post or a video on them using it which can reach millions of people. This can be a fantastic way to get a huge amount of eyeballs on your application. You can quite easily explode with the number of users overnight!
Retention
You might have a lot of users, you might only have a few but the main goal is to keep them coming back, keep them using your application or service so they spend more money or watch more advertisements, however, your business model works. If you had a dating app you might have lower retention that a game for instance, so its all about working with your business model. Finding out ways to keep your customers using your product. The longer they use it the more money you make.
One of the best ways to do this is with daily rewards or a badge system, this keeps people logging into to collect rewards or keep a streak going. This won’t work for all applications but it will work for a few. You might have a To-Do application, this app will hand out rewards for completing tasks or continue a streak if you complete all your tasks each day. These small things keep people opening your app or visiting your website each day.
Another way to retain users is to listen to their feedback, this allows you to see what needs improving, where the bugs and what new features people want. If you listen to the community around your business you will find people will trust you more when they know that you listen to them. A big trend in the video game industry is to rush out games and then either not fix them because you’ve already got the money or do it so slowly that people don’t care anymore and leave but it doesn’t matter because you got their money. These companies have some of the worst reputations and people will outright refuse to buy their games because they know each time they release a new one it will be next to unplayable. This creates huge distrust with your customers. They’ll become less likely to forgive you when you do screw up unintentionally and won’t have that same brand loyalty that a business can survive off.
Take for example Apple, they are by no means the best company when it comes to putting out fault free products, but they have an insane loyalty built from years of delivering good quality products. They’ve built a premium brand and when a new device isn’t up to scratch yes they get in trouble but people still come back because they know that Apple will most likely try to remedy the situation. This builds trust with your customer, its the same for a mobile app. If you treat your customers like actual people rather than cash machines you will build loyalty that will stand the test of time and that you can lean on when times are tough. People will be much more forgiving when you break the entire app on a release by accident but acknowledge the mistake and then promptly fix it.
Furthermore, listening to your customers will also build that trust. Its human nature to like someone more when they listen to them. You will find the same in your life, if someone truly listens to you when you say something then you will want to be around that person.
Market, Grow, Retain
You need to market your application, you need to get it into the hands of as many people as possible as early as possible. Once you have them you need to keep them. The best way to keep a customer is to treat them like a human being and listen to their concerns. Fix your mistakes promptly and never try to make a quick dollar at the expense of your brand. Your brand is key to a successful business.