Researching Your Target Market Never Ends
“What makes a successful T-shirt business?”- is a question here to stay. Whether you are experiencing difficulty with affirming your online presence, or you have been looking to fill the gaps in your already established business concept, this blog is for you.
Starting a business in the T-shirt industry requires no special qualifications or skills in design or management. Instead, what you need is some serious interest in T-shirts and persistence, once you’ve set out to find what rings true to your customers. Persistence, in fact, is absolutely key! You may have an ingenious business concept and a good bit of intuition for what sells well, but, making sure that you align with your target community as you give them a truly unique brand experience continuously over time is the real mastery in the tee business.
Researching Your Market
A big part of staying in tune with your customer base depends on how hard you’ve tried and how long you’ve spent getting to know your target in the starting phase. Literally, no successful T-shirt company shoots in the dark with new concepts and collections without knowing their target base inside and out before they start planning. This is fundamental to making sure your business will thrive today and in one year’s time. So if you haven’t already analyzed your target market painstakingly, you should start over and seriously look into this until you fill those gaps.
Every time you look at a new heat transfer design, new fabric, or you plan a new marketing outreach your must always consider your customer, and how well their wants and needs respond to your ideas. Always ask yourself whether you deliver merchandise that your target would like to wear and why. A great way to make this into a habit if you are new to the game is to visualize a target personality, who would wear your T-shirts, and create a thorough map of their lifestyle and personal tastes. Wearing T-shirts on a daily basis, of course, should be your starting point, followed by an in-depth profile of the target customer, where they live, how much they spend on T-shirts, where they buy their clothes from, and what their core values are.
How to research your market?
Researching your target customer is not rocket science but it does take some effort and persistence! You can always start simple by asking people for opinions in forums such as Reddit, Digg, or Quora. Begin creating design mock-ups with your heat transfers of choice and check in with locals in your area online or in person. Once you feel like you are really in touch with your customer base, you can continue experimenting with heat transfer designs in real-time. The learning curve will virtually never end, which is what makes the T-shirt business so exciting!
Another way to get to know your customers is to get absorbed into their lifestyle and find out everything about their online media presence. Where they hang, who influences them the most, the language they use, and so on. Check in will all social media channels out there and find where your target customers spend the most of their time and how. Once you have found your niche, it is your time to shine and showcase what you’ve got by tapping onto their personal preferences front and center.
Research Your Competition
Learning about your target market should ideally walk hand in hand with finding out about your competition. You wouldn’t want to spend days and nights discovering a niche and only months later finding out that your marketplace is saturated with brands offering the same products within your area. The good news is that there is always room for more business, provided that you give your customer a unique brand experience and you stay persistent with knowing what they want and need.
If you are going down the heat press transfer way, you could look for competitors who use the same approach or they print directly to the garments. It’s better to be unique in your marketplace, and in case you aren’t, you need to make sure you have an entirely different strategy altogether. Either way, make sure you know your competition very well by investigating their methods, quality, price range, and ultimately everything that makes their brands successful. This will help you once again to get one step closer to your target customer and what their likes are like in real life.
If you want your brand to make it into the T-shirt business, you ought to research, research, research…! Learn about your customers and you’ve got to be prepared to get nosy about what it is that your target really wants. Once you have your brand figured out and you align your unique selling points with your customer demographic, there is nothing that could stop you from making it big, for long.