Market Yourself: Research
I started off my series in Marketing Yourself with a little self-discovery. After a decent amount of feedback, I realized that not many people understand or know some basic principles of effective marketing such as researching geographic, demographic, and psychographic data. Hopefully this post will give a little insight to what these terms mean and how to use the data for marketing.
Identify your Audience
The absolute first step in the marketing process is to Survey and Explore your target audience to establish your marketing tactics. In this phase you’ll identify your Target Market by asking yourself.. Who specifically am I trying to speak to? and then compare that answer with your geographic, demographic, and psychographic analysis results. Then you will discover your Market Segmentation by defining how you niche the market to speak directly to the consumer you want to target. This is usually figured by looking at the geographic, demographic, and psychographic results, and then simply asking yourself.. What makes you stand out from your competitors in the target’s mind?
Geographic
I’m sure you’ve heard the term “Location, Location, Location!”, so identify that first. Often times defining your Geographic location of the consumer will affect your marketing the most, especially if your business is mostly offline or without a web presence (check out my web development business and our services if this is the case).
Demographic
Demographics are simply the basics that make your consumer such as age, sex, martial status, education, income, race, religion, etc. There are many websites that will easily allow you to research by city, zip and radius to help you identify the ideal demographic in each location.
Psychographic
After you’ve established Geographic and Demographic, you should then analyze psychographics, which are the he underlying things that make your customer who they are (sexual preference, specific religious beliefs, Lifestyle, how they view/carry themselves, etc).
