Staying in touch with your target audience is an important factor in creating your marketing plan. By knowing exactly what’s going on with them, you understand them better, and as a result you can provide the solutions to their challenges right when they need it.

Sometimes the solutions you’ll provide will be free, such as an article, a blog post, or an answer to a question on a social network. Not everything you do for your target audience should be a paid service. People need to get to know you and test your work first. They will be more likely to pay for your product or service once they have had a chance to "try before they buy" and trust you.

To position yourself as the expert in your field, you have to completely know the problems your target audience is facing as well as the solutions they’re looking for. The only way to know these things is to do your market research.

Consistency is key here. You’re not going to know everything you need to know by conducting a survey once or twice a year. You should be doing your homework weekly, or even daily, if possible. At the very least, it should be carried out monthly. Regular market research will enable you to stay abreast of recent trends and industry news so you can modify your offerings to address your target audience’s current challenges.

It can be tough to manage a market research campaign, and it definitely seems overwhelming at first. But the good news is, the process is actually easier than you think. And it can even be fun!

The secret to doing your market research without fail is to create a system and follow it. A lot of entrepreneurs get stuck when it comes to crafting this system though. It’s almost as if you need a system to create a system.

But you shouldn’t skip this step, as following a system lets you implement a market research campaign easily and methodically, review your results, and follow up with some sort of action such as offering a new program, conducting a teleseminar, or writing a blog post.

Polls and surveys that are branded with your company logo and colors can easily garner the information for you and provide feedback and direction. Perhaps after an event you will always send out a survey for feedback to those who attended. Or, before you write a post, you will launch a poll via email or social media to find out some practical current data about the subject.