This is a short post about how to find the best audience for your current product or product you are developing. Consider these things before optimizing and doing any final touches on your product or service. Let’s dive right into it.
Put yourself in the shoes of the customer
Trying to put yourself in the shoes of your customer can be hard. It comes easier if you are one of the people your product is made for. Understanding the needs of the customer will help you create and develop your product or service around the needs and wants of the customer.
If you discover a need yourself, you can make the product for yourself first. Then think, who else might have the problem and do their needs differ from yours somehow?
Go customer first, then make the product
By figuring out, what is your desired customer base, creating the product will become easier. And if not easier, at least it will be more likely to be a success among your customers. Selling kittens to people who are allergic to cats might be a hard business model to get to work. However, providing a long-term friend (cat) to lonely people could work better. Just as an example.
You can have some kind of prototype of the product, and after deciding on your desired customer base, you can start to shape it to be perfect for them. When developing the product, think about how customers will be using it. Why will customers buy it and what is the value they will get out of it.
Find a problem, then solve it
By finding a problem in your life and learning how to solve it, is one of the ways to find new business ideas. After learning to solve the problem and making it commercial, think about who might have that problem as well. They can be people like you that share a common interest, hobby, or life situation.
More about how to find new business ideas can be found in this post.
Think about narrow segment / segments
Creating and marketing a product becomes easier when you know exactly who your targeted audience is. It could be defined by sex, age, place they live in, hobby, interest, or really anything, that is common to those people.
By defining your audience in different ways, you can narrow the segment even more. For example, your audience could be men who are over 50 years old that enjoy golfing.
When you have a clear segment on who your product is made for and marketed for, it makes targeted marketing much easier. It also will reduce marketing costs because people who are not in your desired segment won’t be marketed to.
Customer surveys
Making customer surveys is another good way to get inside your customers and potential customers heads. Getting feedback for your product or service is one of the most valuable assets you can get from your customers.
Customer surveys are a tough one. If you asked people 200 years ago what kind of a car they wanted, they would have said horse. Nowadays, cars have pretty much replaced horses, even though people didn’t know they needed cars. Not all products are the same; every case is unique.
Think always how serious you take what customers say they want. Think about what they need, read between the lines, and don’t try to make your product for everybody. If you try to please everybody, you could end up pleasing nobody since your segment is too wide and it is hard to find audience to focus on.
Final words
The smaller your customer segment is, the easier it is to market and develop the product. When you know exactly, who will be using it, why they use it and how they use it, developing will be much easier.
Marketing part will also be easier, when you have already made the product for that exact group of people. You will know better, what kind of marketing will be effective on them.
Hopefully this was helpful, have a nice day.