One of the major keys to great design is knowing who you are designing for. Here’s my process for nailing a client’s target market.

When it comes to meeting a client’s design needs or creating a new idea for a design, you should always make sure you know your target market. A target market is a specific crowd of potential clients or consumers, which you are aiming to market your products or services to. Creating a creative brief is a great way to stay organized and on-top of your messaging. A creative brief is an outline for a creative project you are producing, which is basically a map of your target market. 

Here are the resources I use to design for a particular target market.

Target Demographic

Identifying your target demographic is key to designing on-brand content. When you identify the audience’s demographics, you’ll be able to determine the tone and messaging you’ll want to use in your design. Age, location, gender, stage of life, interests, values, and beliefs are all useful pieces of information to obtain. The demographics will give you a clear vision of who your ideal target audience is.

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Create A Persona

Your ideal audience comes to fruition by making a client or consumer persona. Imagine you are the client or consumer looking for a particular service or item. This is the time to fully understand the target market and how your design will function for them. So, when you design the product or a website for someone’s services, you are taking the journey of comprehending how someone will perceive the information.

An example of a persona is: Sally is 43, lives in Orlando, and owns a small party planning & decorating business. She is in need of a marketing agency to boost her website up, so she can produce more leads. She spends most of her days trying to figure out how to get more clients to book. When the persona is specifically created, your company becomes easily identified by your consumers.

Now you have yourself a better understanding of your target audience because you created a persona and took the journey of figuring out who your consumer would be.

The Actual Design

Now that you have created a target market and persona, you have a strong brand vision. The creative brief you’ve come up with should match the design in hindsight. If the company wants to appeal to a younger crowd, they might want to go with modern fonts, bolder colors, and trendy design elements. If they want to target an older crowd, they might want to use traditional fonts and softer colors that aren’t as harsh on the eyes. 

The colors, fonts, images, hierarchy, and content you choose will have a big influence on how the product or website is perceived. The content must match your vision and be on-brand with your company’s values. You constantly need to remind yourself who you are designing for to ensure you are maintaining consistency.

Competition

Always keep yourself updated on your competition, what they are doing that works and what isn’t working. You want to use this information to your advantage to better market your website and/or products and services. Take pointers on their design, social media engagement, hierarchy, user design, content, and layout, and see how their message gets delivered. You never want to copy another company, but it’s a good idea to stay up-to-date on trends in your market.

Never start a design without knowing who your target market is. It’s like starting your car with no gas, you won’t get anywhere! If you’re in need of any targeted design, South Street & Co. can help! Fill out the form below to set up a 30-minute consultation!