Studio & Entrepreneurship
This weeks lecture with Dan Perry, the digital strategist at Metier Digital spoke about identifying gaps, targets and audiences. Dan goes into great detail about the plan to find your audience and how to market your product and service. There are some useful tools that were suggested for analysing data to help information on the audience and learning how to engage with the customer. Marketing is important to any product and service, which using the right tools and platforms is vital to how we can push the market through meaningful stories and engaging with the audience through social media platforms. Social media is today’s tool in finding audiences by creating profiles that may appeal to 100’s or 1000’s of followers that give you channels to work on engaging with your consumer through stories and survey questions where data and content will become key in succeeding your product or service. Dan really talks about giving value to your audience, whether it’s to do with content or the product you provide. It’s about gaining trust and having empathy for the people that will be part of your brand that believe in your product. You can create community not by demographic but within groups made within Facebook where everyone can be miles apart but seconds away from creating a conversation and experiences. This strategic thinking can lead to developing unique customer experiences where you can create an emailing list in which you can give unique content which is specific to the customer and an opportunity in getting more people into the product.
Startups are a UK leading independent, online resource for anyone starting and growing a business. A very useful resource that has tones of information in helping to start the beginning of any business that outlines the basic plans to develop a startup.
A very simple but effective tool to plan your ideas to the strengths and weaknesses that you may want to address for future obstacles if you clearly identify the problems at this stage. It also makes everything more challenging because of the competitors out there, you can compare your idea to theirs where you can make your venture unique and understand your audience in more detail to have a successful service or product.
The Arts Council published a document on audience development and marketing which structures the simple process in defining and finding out about your audience. A section on ‘Why is audience development and marketing important?’ was an important section in how to understand your market target and what is important in developing audience reach in reaching existing and new audiences that will bring new opportunities and partnerships. There are a series of bullet points that can help you understand your target market by answering some questions around the subject so you pursue new avenues to reach out to your audience.
Workshop Challenge
For this week’s challenge, I chose to go with the idea of a subscription service that will help those who would like to grow their own vegetable and herbs in their own homes whether they have space that is too small or large enough to be an Olympic swimming pool. I wanted to go with this idea as it will be an opportunity in making changes in people’s lives through a number of factors from your wellbeing and making an impact on the ecological welfare of our environment.
My research has stemmed from looking into my competition and understanding a subscription service that will be the success of this product and service. This will be a challenge in looking at the entire model as a process in designing every part of the plan from administration to creative packaging so every sector gets treated fairly and stays on par throughout the process. There were two competitors that stood out for me that is ‘The Stem‘ and ‘Pot Gang‘, these are services that bring experiences, products, expertise and communities together to make people enjoy the fun of growing and taking care of plants and crops. The Stem focus mainly on plants and gardening which they have a couple of vegetable and herbs start-up kits for people to enjoy. Pot Gang are mainly a vegetable and herbs subscription service which is very much like what I’m looking to do. Both businesses show me the pros and cons of their services, which is great from a learning point. Pot Gang has this unique experience of a service that gives people the opportunity in experimenting with the seeds to grow. They’re relentlessly encouraging with their content and happy to give advice on their products to help sustain a culture in growing crop in every household, but I find they don’t go that little more beyond in being in touch with their audience. I feel this is where the gap is for my product where I can make more engaging content and build on pop-up stalls to connect with communities up and down the country to get people to be part of a project that will benefit the audience and environment. I believe there’s more to push in making people change their habits and have little patients in growing their own crops.
The Report
