Uncovering the Varied needs of your Target Audience: Product Promotion in Marketing

The ability to effectively handle the product aspect of marketing plays a critical role in the success of any company desiring to rise to the top of its industry. Without a complete understanding of the product along with the price, promotion, and place(4ps), a business will be left behind by its competitors and eventually fail.

Considering all things, the product appears to be an essential element of the 4ps. If you don’t have a product, you cannot set a price, promote a product, or reach a customer with an offer designed to fulfill their needs.

Fulfilling the needs of customers via product or service is what it’s all about. In fact, a strategy for uncovering the needs of customers is imperative if you are going to produce a product designed to reach the right people. Without an understanding of the needs of your target audience, you will certainly not be able to satisfy them.

Uncovering the Needs of the Customers

The biggest mistake many start-ups make is attempting to sell a product without a thorough knowledge of the needs and wants of the target audience. They believe that introducing their product into the market place is enough to build a sizable customer base.

However, to discover the needs of your target audience so that you can launch your product to the right customers, you must master the demographic of the target market. Such knowledge includes your target audiences:

• Identity
• Location
• Size
• Age
• Gender
• Diversity
• Income level
• Structure
• Trends
• Characteristics.
• consideration of your brand
• brand intention
• attraction to the brand
• competition

When a company has a knowledge of the full demographic of its audience, it is ready to position and launch its product to the right customers.

Researching and acquiring the knowledge of the demographic isn’t a one or two-day activity. It must be down always due to the ever-changing nature of a target audience. Strategies for researching your target audience include:

• Observation
• Customer feedback
• Social media
• Surveys/questionnaire
• Interviews
• Records review
• Research

Observation

One form of gathering significant data on your target audience is through observation. Go where the competition is and observe how customers interact with the product. Get a mental estimate on the number products sold and the frequency in which they are sold.

Customer feed back

One of the best ways to discover the needs and wants of your target audience is to ask them. You can do this either by face-to-face communication. Go into an area in which you think your product or service will be accepted and talk to the people. See how they feel about the items you are offering.

Other ways of getting customer feedback include surveys or even questionnaires. Pinpoint the area in which you are interested in introducing your business. Send out or distribute surveys to see what people think. this approach to customer feedback may be time consuming but the activity is worth the effort.

Interviews

Select a specific group of people to study. Elicit their feelings about your product or service offerings from loyal customers, if that’s possible. You might not have a customer base consisting of several thousands of people. However, a dozen loyal customers can provide some unique ideas of how to improve your product or service.

The interview approach is similar to soliciting peoples’ feedback. But the group is more intimate than random strangers off the street.

Social Media

Social media has made it possible to research your target audience via Facebook, Twitter, Pin Interest, LinkedIn and a variety of other platforms. Don’t be afraid to become a part of theses social networks. The benefits are vast. For example, you can follow the comments and responses of the target audience you desire to attract.

Customers are always talking about how they feel about a product or service. You will discover how hot or cold an item is on the market.

Attack the Books

Plan old research can be one of the quickest ways of gathering information on your target audience. Case studies hold a treasure chest of marketing wisdom. Looking up a rival company’s records, discovering how quickly it has grown and how powerful its customer base is will go a long way in giving you an idea of what you have to do to achieve outstanding success in your industry.

Here's the bottom line. For the sake of presenting the best possible product or service to your customers, you must take priority in understanding the needs and wants of your customers. If you ignore such significant undertaking, you will end up like countless others failed businesses which are no longer in existence. The competition wins because it has a masterful knowledge of its target audience.