What are the best practices for ensuring your trend research is relevant to your target audience?

1 Define your research objectives

Before you start looking for trends, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your research. What are the specific questions you want to answer, the problems you want to solve, or the opportunities you want to explore? How will the trends help you create or improve your products, services, or marketing strategies? Having a clear research objective will help you focus your search and filter out irrelevant or misleading trends.

2 Know your target audience

To ensure your trend research is relevant to your target audience, you need to know who they are, what they want, and how they behave. You can use various methods to gather and analyze data about your audience, such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, social media listening, web analytics, or customer feedback. You can also create personas or segments to represent different types of customers and their needs, motivations, and pain points. By knowing your target audience, you can identify the trends that matter to them and resonate with them.

4 Evaluate the impact and feasibility of trends

Not all trends are equally important, relevant, or actionable for your brand. Some trends may be short-lived fads, while others may be long-term shifts. Some trends may be niche or local, while others may be global or mainstream. Some trends may be easy to adopt or adapt, while others may be challenging or costly. To ensure your trend research is relevant to your target audience, you need to evaluate the impact and feasibility of each trend. You can use criteria such as relevance, novelty, growth, durability, scope, and compatibility to assess the potential value and risk of each trend.

5 Align the trends with your brand values and goals

Finally, you need to ensure that the trends you follow or adopt align with your brand values and goals. You need to consider the ethical, social, and environmental implications of each trend and how they affect your brand reputation and trust. You also need to consider how the trends fit with your brand identity, personality, voice, and message. You need to avoid trends that contradict or dilute your brand essence or promise. You need to choose trends that enhance or complement your brand differentiation and positioning.