Identifying Your Competition
There are two types of competitors: direct and indirect. A direct competitor could be considered anyone who offers the exact app that you provide to the same target audience. So, in the previous example of applications that help you name your baby, there are at least 30 that do the same thing. An indirect competitor is someone who offers a similar app but targets a different audience.
So, if you look at the games category on the App Store you will see thousands of games. Some are geared to younger kids while others are clearly geared to a male audience. Regardless, they may be your competitor especially if someone is just looking for any game to play. An example of this is shown in the next image:
Identifying your direct competitors is important as you finalize your decision about your app’s unique messaging. It reduces risk, time, required resources, and expense when planning a marketing strategy. It may be more profitable to carefully target a specific segment of a category where the odds of success are greatest. So, posting an app in the category Lifestyle and focusing your animal-related app on residential customers that spend a lot of money on their pets can be a very good marketing approach.
Finding your competitors takes some effort. Because the number of apps is so great, the easiest way to search for your competitors is to go into the App Store and use the “Power Search” function. You can search by unique category or search all categories. Search for your app type by starting with the All category enabled.
The App Store does not display the number of pages for the app type you search on. Most of us are used to seeing “Page 1 of 10” in search results, for example. The App Store simply displays a “next” button. The reason for this perhaps is to give all apps a more level playing field of being found. As searches go, most of us quit after two or three pages. If we see that we are only on page 3 of 15, we may be inclined to give up at that point. If we don’t know how many pages there are left, we may keep clicking to the next page. This is only the author’s supposition.