There is a process through which I work with every new design client.
With every new project I work on and every new client, there are a set of questions involved to give me an in-depth understanding of the business I am working with.
Through time I have tweaked these questions and worked with them constantly for them to be fit to help me in the best way to gain a better understanding of their business, brand and mission.
Here are the questions that are involved;
Who is your Target Audience?
-Their demographics
-Their Psychographics
What are the Top 5-7 Adjectives that describe your brand?
What is your Brand Voice?
What Goals do you want to achieve and why?
After all the formalities, I send a set of homework questionnaire to the client. And all these questions are there to help me as a designer as well as my client.
It helps me by giving me immense clarity and insight into their business, their objectives, what the business needs to overcome plateau or the problem it is facing.
It helps my client as well by helping him be clear towards what actually his business needs. Sometimes, what they think is the solution isn’t what is going to solve the problem. It might be a good ad campaign or something else wherever they think they need to rework their logo.
So this phase is beneficial for both of us.
If you are running your own business you need to ask these questions yourself for laying a strong foundation for your business. And if you are a designer you need to add these questions into your list so that you can ask your client the next time you have been presented with a project.
Who is your Target Audience?
Your target audience is the group of people to which you want to market your business or services. You need to consider the demographic and psychographic in order to reach to your particular audience.
Demographics-
These involve the statistical or measurable traits of people.
This will help you to figure out not just who has a need for your product/services but also who will be more likely to buy your product/services.
While figuring it out you need to answer the following factors, and while answering these factors take as much time as possible to hit the bullseye.
Age:
Gender:
Location:
Income:
Education:
Occupation:
Marital/ family status:
Ethnicity:
Psychographics-
This information can represent the buying behaviour, habits, hobbies, values and opinions. These traits are not directly measurable.
Habits:
Hobbies:
Goals:
Interests:
Pain:
Fears:
You can only reach your target audience effectively when you understand both their demographics and psychographics. The combination from both the sets of data makes a bigger picture and which can form your buyer persona-a detailed picture of the people that you want to reach or connect to.
To go beyond the surface, I would suggest you write a target audience biography. It will help you attract the right people you are after and to serve them in a better way, once you an intimate understanding of your target audience.
What are the Top 5-7 Adjectives that describe your brand?
This exercise is to understand the underlying emotion of the business, rather than what is involved? or what it does?
This is determined by how the business will make people feel.
The best brands are very specific in what emotion do they want to draw out of their customers by clearly defining their own personality. The brands who become successful knows exactly how to evoke a certain emotion or to elicit a response from the people they want.
It is a common saying that people like to do business with people, not with logos, brands and businesses. That’s the reason you need to portray your brand as a personality for it to be more dependable and effective.
What is your Brand Voice?
It is about how would project your brand’s personality through the communications and uniformity in your message that you will use to convey your message to your target audience. This will further help the brand to get close to the target audience that they want to reach.
It is very important to at least develop a few guidelines around your brand voice from the very beginning. Which encourages cohesive communication to the customers. It also helps in effectively reaching your target audience and better consistency throughout the whole customer journey, which is responsible for a customer to become faithful to the brand.
This should be consistent in all the brand communications, whether it is the e-mailer, ad campaign, social media post or a blog.
What Goals do you want to achieve and why?
One of the most important things you need to do is to define what your objective and goals are and why do you want to achieve those goals. And you need to answer them very smartly by envisioning the success that you want to have after achieving those goals.
This question will help me dive into the problem that you want to solve as a designer. Sometimes what happens is client often come to me with their solution that they think might solve their problems but sometimes the solution that they seek is very different than they think it is, so this process gives them another chance to reiterate their solutions. As a designer, you need to understand the problems better to give best of the solutions from your knowledge.
