- In this video, I'm gonna 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 their customer
that wins, making market research one of the most important
and profitable activities you can do.
So let's get to it.
(upbeat music)
Hey there, my name is Adam Erhart
and welcome to the channel,
the number one place for entrepreneurs
to learn proven marketing strategies
to grow their business online.
All right, so let's talk market research,
and I appreciate, this is definitely not the sexiest
of all of the topics out there.
I mean, even the word research
is baked right into the title,
which makes it automatically sound boring.
At least, that's how I used to feel,
until I realized the true power
of really understanding your customer,
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
or your offer as the main, the only,
the core solution to their problems,
making your business kind of inevitable
that it's going to be the only logical choice
for your ideal target market.
And this is hugely powerful,
because if you don't understand,
and I mean really understand,
what your ideal target market wants,
then it's really unlikely
that you're gonna be able to give them
exactly what they want,
which means they're probably gonna go to your competitors.
But if you understand, and you will know how to do this
by the end of this video,
well if you do know how to uncover
exactly what your ideal target market wants,
it's gonna make coming up with irresistible offers
almost effortless,
because all you're really gonna need to do
is align your offers and align what your service is
or what your products are to your customers
with exactly what they want.
So, to figure out exactly what your customer wants,
well let's get started with Amazon.
Now, the reason Amazon is at the top of the list
is because 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.
This is why I love heading over to Amazon
to start my market research.
Essentially, typing in my keyword
and seeing what books are available on the subject,
and then again, most importantly, seeing what books
are actually being bought.
You can sort of judge this based on the number of reviews
that they're currently getting.
Other good thing about sorting out
your topics and your titles based on number of reviews
is that it's also gonna 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 in just a second.
So the very first place to start
is obviously just taking a look
at the book titles themselves.
Now, we are taking a bit of a leap of faith 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
in alignment with their target market.
From there, you wanna take a look at the reviews.
Obviously, the more reviews,
well the more people probably consumed the book
and, more importantly, that were interested
or engaged enough to leave some kind of a content.
Both positive and negative reviews
are gonna be helpful here.
The positive reviews are fantastic
because they're gonna tell us exactly why
readers thought this book was valuable,
what their most interesting takeaways were,
what the lessons were, how it helped them,
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 are just as useful,
because they're gonna tell us all the places
that 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 I'd like to suggest
you 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 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's 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.
So really, between Amazon and and between Google Trends,
you're gonna be off to a really really good start.
They're both free, both 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 I absolutely love
is something called Ubersuggest.
Ubersuggest is both a free tool and a paid tool
if you wanna 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 total search volume
on the keyword, which basically shows how many people
are actively searching for the topic
that you wanna talk about
or 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 I wanna 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 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, then you are sitting
on an absolute target market research goldmine.
Essentially, what you wanna do here
is you wanna go through your customer database
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 that top 20% of your most profitable customers.
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,
especially run the Pareto's Principle
against your customers, well you wanna focus on that top 20%
and you wanna look for common themes and characteristics
and sort of similarities between those customers
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 I call customer conversations.
What you wanna do here
is pretty much exactly what it sounds.
Really just pick up the phone,
have a chat with your customers,
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.
All right, next up, we have Facebook Ads.
Now, I appreciate, this one is not free,
but it can be done for very very inexpensive,
as little as a few dollars a day.
And any investment you make here
is gonna 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.
However, I like to do a little bit of a tweak on it
and use Facebook Ads instead of Google Ads.
Here's why.
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 gonna respond to.
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 wanna 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're gonna 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.
All right, the next piece of the puzzle
is on really mastering those marketing basics,
so the next thing you're gonna wanna do
is check out the video I have linked up right here
on business marketing basics.
So check it out now, I'll see you in the next episode.