Introduction:
This article is going to show you five fast, easy, free, but most importantly, incredibly effective market research strategies that you can use right now, because, in today’s hyper-competitive world of business, it’s the business that best understands its customer that wins, making market research one of the most important and profitable activities you can do. So let’s get to it. All right, so let’s now discussmarket research.
What is market research?
Market research is the practice of evaluating the potential of a new service or product by interviewing prospective customers firsthand.The word research is baked right into the title, in market research which makes it automatically sound boring. At least, that’s how we used to feel, but when we realise the true power of really understanding your customer through market research, their wants and their needs and their goals and everything they’re trying to achieve, because by better understanding your customer, it means that you’re better able to position your business through market research or your offer as the main, the only, the core solution to their problems, making your business kind of inevitable through effective market research that it’s going to be the only logical choice for your ideal target market. So for that, you need to get into deep market research. And this is hugely powerful, because if you don’t understand clearly in market research, what your ideal target market wants, then it’s really unlikely that you will be able to give them exactly what they want, which means they’re probably going to go to your competitors. So if you want to win your business you need to be an expert market research strategy in hand. But if you understandthrough your market research, and you will know how to do this by the end of this article, well if you do know how to uncover exactly what your ideal target market wants,which can be done through extensive market research and effective market research it’s going make coming up with irresistible offers almost effortless because all you’re really need to do is align your offers and align what your service is or what your products are to your customers in your market research, with exactly what they want. So, to figure out exactly what your customer wants, well let’s get started with Amazon.
How to define your target market and audience?
Now, the reason Amazon is at the top of the list is that it is, by far, the fastest and the easiest way to quickly uncover pretty much exactly what your customers are thinking, what they’re searching for, and most importantly, what they’re actually buying. You see, one of the biggest problems with market research, at least how it’s traditionally done, is that it’s relying a lot on what people say, and what they say is very rarely what they actually do, which is why actions speak a million times louder than words. It is always good to head to Amazon to start market research. Essentially, typing inkeywords during market research and seeing what books are available on the subject during your market research, and then again, most importantly, seeing what books are actually being bought in the market research. You can sort of judge this based on the number of reviews that they’re currently getting. Another good thing about sorting out your topics and your titles based on a number of reviews in your market research is that it’s also going to show you kind of the hotness of the topic or sort of the interesting factor about how interesting is this topic that someone is willing to read the book and then comment on it, either positively or negatively. And there’s gold in both positive and negative reviews we’ll get to it in just a second. So the very first place to start is obviously just taking a look at the book titles themselves during your market research. Now, we are taking a bit of a leap of faith in your market research here in assuming that the author did some market research themselves before they wrote the book, but it’s probably safe to say, especially if it’s an actual published book you can buy a paperback or hard copy version of, that they probably did a little bit of due diligence and they did come up with a relatively strategic title after the market research in alignment with their target market. From there, you wanna take a look at the reviews during your market research. Obviously, the more reviews, well the more people probably consumed the book and, more importantly, were interested or engaged enough to leave some kind of content.
Both positive and negative reviews are going to be helpful here, especially during your market research. The positive reviews are fantastic because they’re going to tell us exactly why readers thought this book was valuable, what their most interesting takeaways were, what the lessons were during the market research, how it helped them in the market research, and maybe some stories or some examples of how they applied it in their own lives. All of this is a gold mine. But the negative reviews that you come across during your market research are just as useful because they’re going to tell us all the places where the book missed the mark. Maybe the reader had a problem that wasn’t addressed, or maybe there was insufficient detail in another area. Well, this leaves the door wide open for you to walk through and essentially solve that problem for the readers. The other beautiful thing about Amazon is that it’s pretty much ubiquitous. Everybody knows about Amazon. Most people have purchased something from Amazon. In fact, if you’ve bought a book from Amazon in the last year, just let me know in the comments section below what book that was, and you’ll start to see really quickly just how quickly how popular Amazon really is. But let me know, I’m really curious to hear. All right, the next tool that you can take a look at that’s both fast and free, and easy is Google Trends. Now, obviously, Amazon is one massive behemoth of data, but another massive behemoth of data is Google. Now, Google Trends is an amazing tool, especially to get that really high level 30,000 foot overview about your market and about different trends and keywords and what’s popular and which direction things are going. Also, Google Trends is incredibly easy to use. You just have to search for Google Trends, then once you’re there, you just type in your keyword and you’re presented with a ton of information. You can take this information and you can break it down based on the country and based on state, based on different timelines. The beauty of this is it allows you to see if your current market or your current topic that you’re searching is either growing in popularity or decreasing in popularity or staying flat in popularity, or importantly if there are different spikes throughout different times of the year.
Google Trends will also provide you with related topics and related searches to give you even more content ideas especially when it comes to market research. So really, between Amazon and Google Trends, you will be off to a really really good start. They’re both free, and easy. But that’s not enough, and it shouldn’t be, right? Because you really wanna dive deep into your customers’ psychology, into their mindset, and into their actual behaviors, what they’re looking for and what they’re buying. This is why one of the other tools that everyone love is something called Ubersuggest. Ubersuggest is both a free tool and a paid tool if you want to upgrade, but definitely, just get started with the free version and you’ll see just how powerful it is. What it allows you to do is do some really deep keyword research into your topic and into the niche that you really wanna dive into. For starters, it allows you to see the total search volume on the keyword, which basically shows how many people are actively searching for the topic that you want to talk about for your market or for your industry. You can also see the competitive ranking of the keyword, which is going to allow you to really discover, well how many of your competitors are trying to go out there and capture this keyword or capture this market as well? One of my favorite things though is that it shows you the cost per click, or estimated CPC, of just how much it’s gonna cost you if you were to run an ad against this keyword, which allows you, again, to see, all right, if we want to run ads for my market or for my business, this is what I’m gonna need to spend per click. Plus, if you keep scrolling down, it’ll give you the additional keyword and additional content ideas, so definitely worth checking out. All right, moving right along to customer database mining.
Now, if you already have a business and you’ve already got a customer list through your market research, then you are sitting on an absolute target market research goldmine. Essentially, what you wanna do here is you want to go through the customer database of your market research and you want to arrange your customers in order from least profitable all the way up to most profitable. From there, what you wanna do is you wanna really focus on the top 20% of your most profitable customers that you found out in the market research. These are the ones that are providing the most revenue or the most profit for your business, but also keep in mind how fun they are to work with and how enjoyable it is to deliver the service for this group of customers. Once you’ve got this group and you’ve 80/20 your list from your market research too, especially run the Pareto’s Principle against your customers, well you wanna focus on that top 20% and you want to look for common themes and characteristics and sort of similarities between those customers during your market research to see if you can identify any trends that really make them specific to the rest of the customers. For example, is this group primarily women or is it primarily men? Is it primarily people in their 20s to 30s, or is it people in their 40s and 50s? Is it people that buy a certain type of product or service, or a different type of product or service? Well, once you have this information, it’s time to dig even deeper with something we call customer conversations. What you want to do here is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Really just pick up the phone, have a chat with your customers as a part of the market research, find out what their problems are and how your businesses help to solve them, and really what they’re looking for next. All of this is going to give you incredibly valuable market research. Next up, we have Facebook Ads. Now, let us appreciate, this one is not free, but it can be done for very inexpensive, as little as a few dollars a day. And any investment you make here is going to pay off in the long run by making sure you’re doing the right things for the right people.
Essentially, this strategy was popularized back in 2007 with the release of “The Four Hour Work Week” by Tim Ferris, where he advised using Google AdWords in order to split test different book titles and different taglines, in order to find out the winner. Well, fast forward to today, and this strategy is just as relevant, if not more. The main thing when comparing Google Ads to, say, Facebook Ads or even Instagram Ads, is that not only can you split test different headlines, different topics, and different calls to action and things like that, but it also gives you the opportunity to split test different creatives, so different images, and different videos, and really dial in on exactly what your ideal target market wants and what they’re going to respond to. These are the advantages that you can get during market research. Plus, Facebook Ads, in general, are a lot easier to get started with for a brand-new beginner to an advertising platform than Google Ads. So if you’ve never run ads before, this is a pretty easy place to start. Anyway, the key here, and really what you want to take away from this, is that it’s going to give you sort of an amplified or accelerated way to put your message and put your offer in front of your ideal target market, in order to test, in order to gauge their response and which offer or which message is going to best resonate with them, which one is going to get them to take action. Obviously, this is incredibly powerful, because you will be able to get feedback before you have to create a webinar or a sales page, or even create the offer itself. You can really just put it out to people and say, hey, do you want this? If they say yes, then great, you keep going. And if they say no, well, at least you know now at the very early stages, rather than after building out an entire marketing funnel or an entire offer.
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