Define Your Audience
Knowing your target audience is the key to a successful business, this will be the base of how you come up with ideas to communicate your product to the public successfully and make definitive decisions within your business.
What is a Target Audience?
A target audience is a group of people that would be interested in buying your product. Businesses usually segment their target audience base upon peoples age, gender, where they live etc. Knowing your target audience doesn't mean your products won't appeal to anyone else, it just helps set a clear vision of how to market your product in a way that relates to your audience.
Who Does Your Product Appeal To?
You will already have an idea about the designs and products you'll be selling, next you need to list the features of your products and why they make them appealing. Then simply match these to lifestyles they would benefit and fit in with. If you're selling stretchy clothing like leggings, this may appeal to dancers or just sporty people as this type of clothing is beneficial for them.
Market Research
Market research is the best way to find out about your target audience in detail, getting an idea of the personality you are going to appeal to. People are drawn to things they feel are relatable. Before starting any research, you need to determine what information you want to be able to draw from this and have a clear idea of what outcomes you want to have. Here are a few types of market research you could do...
Primary Research
Primary research is research you conduct off your own back. A clothes shop like Topshop, for example could include in a survey, the question 'how often do you go shopping?' Giving them the knowledge of people's shopping patterns, so they can determine when to release new products, keeping it new and exciting for people every time they go shopping. To provide clients insight into your brand, pair words with any image. Here you can tell a narrative, explain a product feature, or introduce a new campaign.
Surveys
Surveys are asking your audience basic questions, so you can get straight forward answers. This is a good way to find out demographic answers such as, gender, age, job status or marital status. You may be thinking why do I need to know this basic information? For example, knowing someone's job title gives you an insight to what they earn, which will help when deciding on prices.
Secondary Research
Secondary research is research that already exists, for you to read and come up with your own conclusions. This would be useful for someone who has quite a wide range of audiences that would be hard to narrow down when looking for people to ask to answer surveys. This type of research is useful for finding out actual data such as peoples buying trends, or a certain location's overall household income.
A way a clothing business could use secondary research would be to search how their audience finds out about clothes, giving them ideas on how to advertise to their target audience in a way that they will come across. For example, if your audience is young you will know social media would be a good way to grab their interest.
Getting a General Persona of Your Audience
A persona is how the character of someone is perceived by others. It's a general overview of what your customer likes and dislikes. Create a generic persona that covers most of your audience. Think about gender, age and interests. Using that generic persona, you can start to think, ‘how can I impress this person'? As your business grows and you collect more market research you will be able to come up with different personas that can be targeted specifically.
What Conclusions Can You Pull From This?
After you have completed enough market research it will be time to pull it apart, look at the information you've gathered and how it will help your business. Knowing your audience will guide you in how to advertise to them. You want to speak in a way people can understand. If your audience is young, most young people find a lot of products they desire from the internet.
Therefore you know to reach out to them through advertising online, with not a lot of text to read as this would probably put young people off. Images are interesting, customers being able to see what they could have before they buy will capture their attention.
Overall your main aim is to know what inspires your target audience to go out and buy something and what that something is.
