How Analyzing Reviews of Competing Apps Can Boost Your Marketing

If you're building an app, there will always be other apps that offer similar functionality and compete with you for downloads and users. It could be a direct competitor competing for the same users, or just a similar app with a few overlapping features.

What if there was a way to learn more about the users of these competing apps? Learn what they like about the app and why they use it, what they don't like about it, and what features they wish this app had.

You can learn all that by reading the app's public reviews. Just by reading reviews, you can get a lot of ideas for what to build, what to avoid and how to market your own app.

Learn what to build

Many times reviewers mention features that they wish the app had. This is, of course, an excellent opportunity to learn about features you can implement yourself. It's possible that the app's creator either doesn't want to or can't build this feature. They may simply have other priorities and are not interested in working on it. This is a good opportunity to think about whether that is something you want to build. If many users request this feature, maybe it could even become a main offering of a new app that targets these users specifically?

Also, look for features that users mention as likable. Do you have these features as well? If you do, maybe these are features that you should emphasize in your marketing. After all, if it's mentioned repeatedly it's also likely that other users also search for them when looking for a new app to download. Features that are specifically mentioned as likable will also provide insight into common use cases of the app and the target audience.

You can also look for what reviewers complain about. Can you build something that fixes their frustration and gives them what they want? Even if you don't come up with a new feature, at least you now know what users don't like and what to avoid.

If the reviews of a popular app mention bugs, unfriendly UI and a slow app, it could be an opportunity for improvement. It likely means that this app is doing a good job with marketing and satisfies a real need users have, but the app itself can be improved upon. You might be surprised how common this is for very popular apps. It just goes to show how marketing is a more dominant factor than the quality of the app, like it or not.

Marketing material

Positive reviews that mention what the app does well can highlight which features are the most popular. If your own app has one of these features, maybe you can emphasize it more in your marketing? It could be worth trying to put these features on your first screenshots.

Try to look for keywords and phrases that the reviewers use to describe these features. If these features are popular, maybe you can try to rank higher for these keywords or create a paid campaign for them. New users are likely to look for these features and use these keywords when trying to find an app.

Reviews can also mention questions or common confusion. This could be an opportunity to answer these questions with your marketing or try to write content for SEO.

Analyze your own apps

If you have an app, you should read your users' reviews and analyze them for the same things I've mentioned above. You are probably already notified about each new review that you receive. However, it can be helpful to take a step back. Consider analyzing all your reviews from the past few months as a whole to identify common patterns, frustrations, and complaints.

Let's analyze the reviews of a real app

In my next post, I'm going to choose a popular app and analyze its reviews. Let's see what we can learn from these reviews and try to find all of the points I've mentioned above.

Conclusion

Analyzing public reviews of a competing app can offer invaluable insights for various aspects of your own app. Do you read other apps' reviews? What are some of the things you learned? What are some other methods you use to analyze competing apps? Let me know in the comments.

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