Before moving forward with any marketing strategy for your jewelry brand, you must know your target customer or at least be able to make an educated guess about who your target customer may be. We explain how you can get to know your customers better – and why knowing them matters.

The truth is that you don’t need to hire an expensive market research company to answer the question, “Who is my target customer?” Even if you’re a new jewelry business, and you haven’t sold one piece of jewelry, you still have all the tools you need to know your customers better than anyone else. Furthermore, the longer you stay in business, the more information you’ll be able to capture about your customers – and the better you’ll know them moving forward.

Before you use one or more of the tools we mention below, you must first decide what you want to know about your customers – and what information will help you market better to them. Typically, a jewelry brand should want to know things like age, income, shopping habits and motivations, style preferences, brand affinities, and general interests.

Once you have the right information, you can use that information to guide decisions you make about your marketing, including which social media platforms to use, what kind of models to include in photoshoots, and what tone to use in the copy, among other things. Get started by trying some of these free or low-cost tools for preliminary market research:

Survey Your Customers

Did you know you can create a free survey with a tool like SurveyMonkey? Ask the relevant questions in a short survey and then send it to your email subscribers. If you want to ensure that people take the time to answer your survey, then offer an incentive like a gift card or free piece of jewelry to a random winner. If you want to make your survey more fun and casual, consider using Instagram Stories to poll your followers. Polling is an excellent way to engage your target audience and involve them in your business decisions.

Review Google Analytics Data

Are you looking at your Google Analytics data on a regular basis? With Google Analytics, you can learn many things about the people visiting your jewelry brand’s website, including their geographical location, their age, their gender, the language they speak, the devices they’re using to view your site, the pages they visit, how they found your website, and more. If you’re simply ignoring Google Analytics, or you haven’t even installed it on your site, then you’re missing a big piece of the puzzle.

Leverage Facebook Audience Insights

In an effort to push its advertising opportunities, Facebook created a tool called Audience Insights. This tool allows you to view information like demographics, pages likes, location, and more for three different groups of people: people on Facebook (the general Facebook audience), people connected to your Page or event, and people in Custom Audiences you’ve already created. Though it may take some time for you to get enough data to see information about people connected to your Page, you can still take advantage of some of the more general insights in the meantime.

Observe Your Competitors

If you haven’t already taken the time to observe and study your competitors, consider doing it. Your ultimate goal is to steal market share from your competitors, so you’ll want to know who those customers are. It’s basically impossible to access confidential sales and market research data from your competitors, so you’ll simply have to use what’s available – and their social media platforms are a great place to start. On Instagram, for example, scroll through their follower list and make observations about the users you see there. You may also want to look at the comments on Instagram posts to see the types of things that people are saying about your competitor’s photos.

Use Your Intuition and Experience

Your intuition and experience may not be exact as science, but you should have a general sense of who your customers are, especially if you’re a jewelry brand that’s been in business for six months or more. As the owner of the jewelry business, you’ve likely interacted with customers and had the chance to get to know them better. While you shouldn’t rely solely on intuition and experience for market research, you can use them as supplements and allow them to guide you when the data seems incongruous or doesn’t make sense.

Now that you’re equipped with the right tools, you should also be aware of the limitations of market research. If you’re just starting out with it, you should know that a small sampling of customers may not accurately represent all your potential customers. Furthermore, as your product assortment grows and changes, you may want to reconsider your target customer and perform market research on a semi-regular basis, since what was true six months ago may no longer be true. That being said, taking the time to try to understand your customers is much more important than ignoring them and simply hoping that someone will buy your jewelry.