Market research

Another way I collected information on my target audiences likes and dislikes was by creating an online Poll on my blog to ask viewers questions which would help me with the construction of my magazine by answering my questions to suit their preference. The only downside to this was that if any respondents had answered incorrectly or felt they needed to put a certain answer, then it would make my Poll less accurate and give me false information. However, I think all the people i did get to answer these questions did so truthfully and according to their taste. I made sure i got a similar amount of males and females and i also made sure i got the majority of them who fell into my age range to cater for my target market to get a proper reading to allow my magazine to be appealing to both sexes. I also made a point of answering all the questions as it gave me another teenagers point of view and an opinion from my target market.

The first question i asked was 'What age range do you fall into?' and the answers were:

This response showed i asked two people who weren't in my ideal target market but were likely to consume the magazine occasionally. I asked the majority of people who were my target audience because this would give me this best reading and show me the information i needed from them.

The second question was 'How frequently do you buy magazines?' and here are the responses:

These responses show that the majority buy magazines to cure boredom on long trips or to almost catch up with what's happening in the music world every now and then which tell same i must use terms that my target age understand and make the text easy to understand and relate to as customers usually will want to buy it as a one off rather than a subscription. It also makes it more important to make a website address because teenagers now a days have all the latest gadgets and can get on the internet anywhere instantly.

The third question i asked was 'What do you think is of most importance in a music magazine?' and i got these responses:

These responses show that balance is essential and you can't over fill a page with images or text but must keep a fairly even balance in order to keep the readers interest in the page and obviously what's in the text is just as important to keep the readers attention. I will definitely try to incorporate this into my magazine as its obviously of high importance.

My fourth question was 'What genre of music do you listen to?'. These were the answers i got:

This shows that the people i asked all listen to music within the genre I'm targeting which further validates these responses and makes them even more specific to the type of people that would buy this magazine. This question links to the previous one showing that people who like chart music think that a magazine looks best when it has a balanced layout with text and pictures.

My final question was a simple gender question to show I had asked almost 50/50 males and females to show no bias and that i had considered both when making my magazine.

Creating this Poll was a big benefit to me in later stages as I referred to it to make sure my target audience would be happy with the content and how it's balanced between pictures and text.