What strategies are the best to use for identifying the target audience and their preferences?
Topic summary
The discussion explores strategies for identifying target audiences and understanding their preferences.
Key Recommendation:
Direct engagement through interviews proves surprisingly effective. Rather than relying solely on analytics, asking potential audience members directly yields valuable insights.
Suggested Approach:
- Start with educated guesses based on industry knowledge
- Use tools like User Personas to formalize understanding
- Conduct short, non-sales interviews with potential audience members
- Focus on identifying key challenges and openness to solutions
Important Note:
Interviews should be conversational, not sales pitches. Many people willingly share information about themselves and their needs.
This low-tech method has been successfully implemented both internally and with various clients, despite initially seeming too bold or simplistic.
We’ve experimented a lot with this, and you might be surprised how much information you can learn by just asking. It’s usually best to start with some educated guesses, and build out from there. If you know your industry really well, you can jump straight into tools like User Personas. If you’re really not sure, try putting together a short interview script (not a sales pitch - this is important) and reach out to some people that you think might be in audience. A lot of people are quite happy to talk about themselves and you can often identify things like what challenges are most important to them or how open they are to a solution like the one you hope to sell after determining your target audience. This is an activity we have completed for ourselves, and helped a variety of our clients complete as well. It may sound pretty low-tech and may be a little too bold for some people but it really does work.