What’s the key component that would determine the success of your business?
Well, you might say sales and marketing, operations, customers service, fulfillment, shipping… etc.
While all these answers are correct, they’re only the walls of the house. A house that’s built (hopefully) on a rock-solid foundation.
So if you haven’t built that foundation you cannot put the walls yet.
If you do, they’ll come crumbling down at the first wind blowing…
So what’s a solid foundation and how you can build one?
The success of any business relies upon your capacity to know your market at an intimate level.
What are their fears, desires, hopes, dreams, and frustrations?
What keeps them up at night, what do they dream of, what are their problems…etc.
To uncover all these aspects, wearing a Sherlock Holmes hat will be of big help.
In this article, I’m going to share with you the exact steps that’ll help you understand how you can conduct world-class market research even if you’ve never done such a thing before.
This research is of crucial importance if you want to take the guesswork out of the equation of building a thriving business.
Using its findings, you’ll be able to craft a messaging that resonates with your audience. Granting you the ability to craft high-performing ads and compelling marketing messages that shakes up your audience’s feelings and get them to take action.
And even if you’re outsourcing this to an agency or a freelancer, then you have to be able to judge if what you’re looking at is actually any good.
Let’s dive in!
Step #1: Put your assumptions on paper
As an entrepreneur/marketer you have assumptions about your market.
These assumptions may either be based on real, accurate, factual data. Or they might be the result of
how you’ve interpreted things in the past.
Write down what you imagine to be true about the avatar. From demographic data to psychographics.
Step #2: Gather data to validate/invalidate your assumptions
The next step is to go to the market and see if your assumptions are right, wrong, or in between.
Here are some 3 methods you can use for that:
Look, it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, I promise there is a FB group for it.
Join those groups and see what questions are being asked.
You can even ask what problems people in that group are struggling with.
Generally speaking, if you’re not in a market that’s highly averse to marketers., you’ll get a ton of responses.
Gather all of them, compare them to your assumptions, and see how on/off track you are.
You can take it a step further by reaching out via messenger to the people who commented and dig deeper to uncover even more pain points.
Amazon reviews:
Go to Amazon, look at products that are similar to yours. And analyze the reviews.
Not reviews like “great product love it” because they simply don’t mean anything and aren’t helpful at all.
What you should look for are detailed reviews in which people share why they loved/hated the product.
The best are:
“I loved but I wish if ADDITIONAL FEATURE YOU CAN ADD TO YOUR PRODUCT AND COMMUNICATE IN YOUR MESSAGING”
Or
“…amazing product it helped me with WHATEVER PROBLEM THEY HAD”.
Some marketers advise focusing solely on 3* reviews. I disagree.
I think the number of stars doesn’t matter. What matters is the comment itself and what that person is saying.
Quora:
Quora is a fantastic place where people ask questions and get answers to their questions from other people in the community.
Look at what your customer is asking, what he’s struggling with, and take note of everything.
Little note: In this phase, things can become a hot mess really quickly. To keep it clean and organized. create a Google spreadsheet, and make a sheet for every source of information (ie one sheet for FB groups, one sheet for amazon reviews…etc)
Other places search in Google, surveys, Reddit, competitors’ reviews, forums, blogs, Instagram, FB pages, Youtube…etc
Step #3: Analyzing and identifying the different segments
Once you’ve spent some hours gathering data. It’s time to make something out of it.
This is probably the most tedious part because it requires a lot of bandwidth and analytical skills to analyze that big information mine.
To keep this article short and easy to implement, here are 3 things you should look for:
Pain points: “I was struggling with..”, “I had a problem with”, “How can I..”
Buying criteria: “I loved the product because…”
Other solutions they tried: “l used XXXX before but..”
Once you have all of this
Use it to create an avatar of your ideal customer.
You may have one or many.
Sometimes it’s just the demographics that are different. And sometimes everything is different.
Doing this is paramount to your success because it’ll help you craft relevant messaging that resonates with each segment of the market.
That’s pretty much it for the process of intimately knowing your market.
I don’t recommend (at all), doing all this in one sitting.
Spread this work over a week, 2 hours per day should be enough for you to build a solid avatar (or avatars).
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