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It’s crucial it is for a business to have a solid brand identity in order to stand out and connect to potential customers. When it comes to brand strategy, your first instinct might be to gravitate to making sure the company’s logo pops, or that you’ve crafted a mission statement that is insightful and has an impact that will draw customers to your sales team. Or you might be focused on creating an eye-catching, top of the line website, or making sure you’ve spent enough on Facebook ads to build a strong community. Really, though, at the core of the business, the element that informs every decision is the company’s target audience. Who you’re trying to serve informs every element of your brand strategy, which is why identifying your target audience is the first key step in executing your market research.

Look for Problems and How to Solve Them

If you spend any amount of time researching marketing and advertising, your social media advertising feed is probably full of entrepreneurs selling the next great business strategy, or the next best product to turn your business around and draw in customers, so many customers, more customers than you would ever know what to do with. Which, if you dig deep into every one of their tried and true methods, you’ll realize are built around a single legitimate marketing strategy: identify your customer base. And to do this, you start with two very important questions:

What problem do you want to solve for people?
Is that problem widespread enough that creating a solution to that problem will be a profitable endeavor?

To be clear, it’s ok to have an idea of what sort of product you want to create ahead of time, because chances are, it’s a product you’ve envisioned to solve a problem that you’ve experienced. However, the key difference is that you have to step away from the process enough to allow flexibility in the process that you’re not tying yourself to an idea that cannot be sufficiently branded to your target audience.

Resources for Finding The Right Audience

People are averse to change, so much so that in the household retail space, studies show Americans buy the same 150 items to meet about 85% of household needs. And with only 3% of packaged goods product launches consumer exceeding sales goal benchmarks, it’s easy to see why effective research is crucial to product development and brand strategy. Here are some resources for identifying niche markets, and refining data so that your product can be properly positioned to the market you’re trying to serve:

Google Insights Databoard: Provides very detailed demographic data on consumer browsing and buying behaviors.

Business Dynamics Statistics: Economic data on startups, business closures, and related data to research competition in a specific market

SurveyMonkey: A great resource to reach out to target demographics to survey and assess preferences and to determine how a product or service will be received in current form.

Persona App: An application that helps to tackle one of the major market analysis steps of determining buyer personas in order to envision and ultimately define a target audience.

The Most Important Resource for Identifying Your Audience

Chances are, if you’re reading about how to create your brand and identify your target audience, you’re just starting out as an entrepreneur with an idea, or you’re in the early stages of product development and you’re looking at how to leverage your business into the market. You could also be an established company with an idea for a great new product to expand your brand’s footprint. Either way, this is an awesome and exciting time for your brand, and we want to help you tell your story. You need to partner with established marketing professionals who understand building a brand from the ground up, and our digital marketing portfolio is a good way to see some other brands we’ve helped. Get in touch with the experts at NW Media Collective and let us know how we can help you craft your brand’s presence both online and off.