Please Note: The content and opinions expressed in this article are purely my own – I have not received any commissions or sponsorships for publishing the following content or links, nor have I used AI to write any parts of this article.
If you’re just getting started developing your business’ marketing strategy, one of the first items on your to-do list should be creating a plan for how you will develop a deeper understanding of your target audience over time - one of the most important goals of marketing.
This can be a great technique to implement immediately after selecting a primary target audience for your small health or wellbeing business, as it means you can get started collecting information on your audience right away, before moving on to other marketing techniques that work best when you already have some existing audience research to work with.
Audience research (also known as market research) is a term used to describe the information a business collects on the members of its target audience. Businesses of all sizes can do this in order to help them learn about their audience on a deeper, more personal level, which greatly increases their ability to tailor their marketing content and materials to their audience, dramatically increasing its effectiveness.
An audience research routine outlines the techniques your business will use to learn about its target audience over time, and describes how often each technique will be used.
By creating a routine around your audience research, your business will develop healthy, awareness-building habits that allow you to continue to build upon your existing knowledge of your target audience over time, little by little, as new customer insights come to hand.
Planning out exactly how your business will gather information about it’s target audience will help you integrate audience research into your team’s daily, weekly and monthly business tasks – a healthy marketing habit that will help you stay ahead of the curve when it comes to delivering products, services, and a customer experience that resonates.
To keep things simple, I encourage my clients to focus on collecting six different types of information about their target audience:
The first five types of information can be incredibly useful when it comes to crafting marketing content that is tailored to your audience, and the last type, ‘use of media’, helps you to understand which media channels you should be using to distribute your marketing materials.
By directly referencing these insights, including prioritising marketing and advertising via the marketing channels your audience uses most frequently, you’re ensuring your content is relevant and your marketing budget is being used efficiently.
