Knowing your market and audience should be top of the list for marketers. Market research will tell you where to go and how to get there. You may think that you know your audience inside out already, however, it is always good to keep yourself up-to-date as consumer trends and behaviours are constantly evolving. Quite often marketers are surprised to learn what their target audiences really think of their brand.
Digging Deeper
To help you find out where your brand, company and product stands in relation to your target audience and market, follow below pointers to get started.
1. Customer Insight
Knowing what, how, where and why is of the highest importance to the development of marketing strategies. Customer insight should dictate the tone of voice, marketing channels, content and other brand messaging marketers need to use to successfully reach out to their audience and promote their products.
This is where audience segmentation comes into place. It helps to define the approach to different types of audiences and so maximise outreach.
2. Market Trends
Having an understanding of the market the business operates in, helps marketers get ahead and stay ahead of their competition. The analysis of market trends is most important to companies that want to continuously grow despite the uncertainty of the economy, especially in a post-Brexit UK.
As the famous saying goes, keep your friends close but your enemies closer. In most cases, a competitor analysis and audit highlights opportunities marketers can capitalise on to differentiate their brands.
This is absolutely crucial when competing in highly saturated markets that are affected by Brexit.
4. Internal Capabilities and Resources
So, your analysis has revealed that you’ll probably have to change the angle of your marketing collateral and produce more content. However, do you have the resources to do that?
To find out you will need to conduct an internal audit. Do you have the capability to produce everything in house or do you need to outsource some or all activities?
Getting Under the Skin of Your Market
Marketers who use multiple tools to analyse and identify key insights are six times more likely to increase their profitability, and five times more likely to increase their customer retention2.
1Quote on image: Statista, 2016
2Forbes Insights and Turn, 2015