What to Include in a Mobile App Business Plan?

Every great mobile app idea needs a business plan to succeed. 

App business plans are a critically important aspect of determining the business goals of your mobile app that help you organize your resources. 

If your business plan misses a few blind spots, your app is at risk of failing. 

Since writing a business plan for an app is a challenging task, in this blog post we’ve written what you should include in your mobile app business plan. 

Target Audience 

A well-defined target audience is the foundation for planning, designing, and monetizing your app — it lies at the heart of your app business plan. 

Since your app can’t be made for everyone, you need to find a group of people with similar interests, demographics, and problems that your app can solve. 

The major benefit of identifying your target audience is that it will impact all your efforts, from developing app features to marketing and monetizing it. 

To target your audience, you need to include key demographic information that helps you create user personas, such as:

• age and gender
• location
• device
• interests
• other psychological factors

For example, let’s say you’re creating a travel app for solo travelers. 

After researching your target audience, you know such information about them, such as their:

• average age
• spending habits
• interests and values
• marital status
• the devices they use for apps

This gives you enough info to build user personas and help you decide on key app features, and ways to monetize your app.  

Without putting the effort into defining your audience, you risk building your app business plan on assumptions. 

Finding your target audience allows you to make informed decisions as you create your plan. 

Market Research and Projections 

Market research is critically important to determine the outlook of your market and the feasibility of your app business plan. 

You should view market research as the opportunity to obtain a crystal-clear understanding of the state of the market and its emerging trends. 

This will allow you to make accurate projections and goals for your app project, in terms of expected revenue and user growth. 

Since the number of mobile app downloads is increasing rapidly, market research is necessary to curb expectations, understand pricing, and identify new opportunities.

Yearly industry reports, available for download, represent a great source for market insights and data for your research.

According to Allied Market Research, the global mobile app market is expected to exceed $407 billion by 2026, growing at a CAGR of 18.4% from 2019 to 2026. 

This means that revenue opportunities are booming in the app industry. 

In order to understand the state of the market and your competition, or project any emerging trends, it’s imperative to do thorough market research to develop the best app for your market. 

Financial Plan

For your app business plan to succeed, your finances need to be in order from the beginning.

A financial plan determines the overall expenses that go into the making of your mobile app, from developing the app idea to the post-release costs of maintenance and marketing. 

Consider your financial plan a must-have item, indispensable for keeping your expenses in check and avoiding running out of capital. 

The two pillars of your app finances plan are ROI forecasts and the project budget.

Your budget will cover all the costs of development, hiring, marketing, and legal fees. 

On the other hand, ROI forecasts calculate the amount of return of investment can you expect from your app. 

They are great for setting the budget restraints of the project. 

Without a well-thought-out financial plan, you risk being derailed by unexpected costs that will either make you go over your budget or force you to re-allocate existing resources to the detriment of the app. 

That’s why writing an accurate financial plan for your app is critically important if you want to succeed.  

Monetization 

Mobile apps have become a major opportunity for earning vast amounts of revenue. That’s why the business plan for your app needs to entail a monetization strategy. 

An app monetization strategy will outline how your app is going to make money for your business. 

Knowing how your app is going to generate revenue will, in turn, shape all the other steps of development, such as the app’s outline, design, and revenue projections. 

To be successful, you must leverage your app’s strengths and your knowledge of your target audience’s behavior. 

There are many ways to monetize an app. They aren’t exclusive, meaning that you’re free to combine multiple methods to develop a profitable hybrid strategy that suits the specifics of your app. 

The most popular monetization methods are:

• In-app advertising
• Freemium apps with paid upgrades
• Free apps with in-app purchases
• Transactional apps that include service fees

According to a report by App Annie, by the end of 2020, in-app purchases reached over $7 billion in revenue, which is double what they made in 2018. 

After you’ve done research on how your competitors monetize their app and gained an idea of how you can monetize yours, you should commit your monetization strategy to paper.

Marketing Plan 

A well-designed app can’t achieve a lot of downloads without being well-promoted.

The quality of your marketing plan will have a profound influence on the success of your mobile app. 

The way you market your app should rely on data from other parts of the business plan to determine how, where, and to whom you’ll promote your app. 

It should provide an overview of all the strategies you will use to promote your mobile app. 

Those tactics can include:

• social media promotions
• influencers
• ads
• industry-related websites or professional blogs 
• app landing pages

Without a detailed plan in place, you risk your app drowning in a sea of competing apps and failing to reach its target audience.

A survey by Manifest that included 300 businesses has found that 35% of companies spend nearly half of their total budget on marketing, with 21% of them even allocating between 50-70% of their budget on marketing costs. 

Every app, no matter how UX friendly, needs great marketing to find its way to its users. That’s why marketing plans are critically important. 

Conclusion 

Turning a mobile app idea into a proper business is an ambitious endeavor.

Since the process is so intricate, a business plan for your mobile app is absolutely essential. 

In this post, we’ve discussed some key items you should include in it. 

If you follow through with these checkpoints, you’ll have a data-centered approach to realizing your app’s business potential.