Running a business without a clue about your audience is both stupid and irresponsible. As a business, you offer products to paying customers and the only way to actually make them relevant and interesting is to learn about your audience. You can’t be a trendsetter if you don’t know your audience and you can’t take a boneheaded approach by simply forcing your way into a market and trying to be relevant.
Consumers love it when businesses tailor their products to the needs of their audience, so here are a couple of smart ways to learn more about your target audience.
- Research your competitors
The first place to look is your competition. Their social media pages, website, reviews and general opinions are a fantastic place to look at what your target audience wants from your competition. If you position yourself correctly, you could essentially correct everything that your competition is getting wrong and overtake them as a leader in the industry. This takes a lot of effort and you need to scour the internet to look for opinions regarding that company, but it’s one of the simplest ways to learn more about your audience.
- Get on social media
Speaking of social media, it’s also vital that you get on platforms like Instagram and Twitter so that you can read feedback and discussions about the types of products and services that you offer. This will help you gather information about what your audience wants so that you can tweak your services and products to what is considered a good standard for the market you’re targeting.
- Conduct targeted research
Targeted research is also very important. For instance, you’ll need to look at beauty product research if you want to create beauty products for such a large and diverse market, and you should always separate research by categories such as age groups and location because there are many factors that could present you with fascinating statistics that could provide insight into your market segments and their shopping patterns.
- Look where others have failed
Similar to the first point of researching your competitors, you can also examine the smoke and debris that’s left over by the failed attempts of others. For instance, maybe an idea of yours failed in the past and you’re reluctant to try and revive it. There’s a good chance that your competitors did something wrong such as offering poor customer service or overestimating their abilities, so you should examine all the news articles and social discussions regarding that failure so that you can correct their mistakes and create something that aligns with consumer interest.
- Don’t follow your assumptions
Lastly, don’t just assume things about your audience and follow those assumptions to the end. You should challenge them by considering what you could be misunderstanding, where you could improve and also what you can change to make your brand speak to your audience. Don’t start your business with preconceived notions of what your audience wants and be more open to change so that you’re more attractive to consumers.
