It’s essential that you know what’s important to your target audience and how to reach them. Lee Frederiksen provides 3 ways to conduct research to help you gain a decisive advantage over the competition.
3 Strategies for Researching your Target Audience
The first of those is drawing on what you already know. It’s important to be able to harvest the information you have about your target audience from your internal organization already. Now, if you are an individual and you’re the entire organization, write it down. But if you have a team, get them together and kind of document the insights that you already have, the hypothesis you already have about your target audience.
The second way, and this is one that’s often overlooked by people, is to go online and search about your target audience. What can you learn from them from what you can find in a Google search, in databases from associations, and a variety of secondary sources? And you’ll find that that begins to either validate some of the things that you thought about your audience internally or throw some of them into question.
The third way, and is perhaps the most effective way, is to actually do some research on your target audience. Ask them some questions about topics like how do they go about finding information, what are their key challenges they’re facing. And I think you’ll find when you put these three sources of information together, you’re gonna get a much finer grain understanding of your target audience.
