Do You Know What Your Audience Wants?

Written by Lesley Spencer Pyle of Entrepreneur.com

Defining your target market and converting it into a customer base can be an expensive and time-consuming process. Part of the process involves identifying the goods and services you can offer that will attract customers and bring a return on your investment. As your business grows, it's important to stay in tune with your customers by identifying their changing needs early on, before your competitors have a chance to react.

Asking your audience whether you're meeting their needs is an important step in determining whether you're hitting the target. "Obtaining feedback from my customers is critical to the success of my business," says recipe planner Karen Patterson of Lily On the Fly. "My current customers provide the best insight as to the usefulness of my product. They also offer suggested enhancements, which has led to one of our very popular new products, 'create your own recipe card.' Feedback has also contributed to our inclusion of the average meal size and calorie counts."

Getting suggestions is important. Be careful, however, not to have a kneejerk reaction to all requests made by current or potential customers. Always evaluate feasibility with your current resources and return on investment....