Market research: how to perform better research for your brand

i'm gonna make a pretty big claim right now and say that ideal customer work can make or break the success of your business yeah i know i said it and there are a lot of different reasons for that i'm gonna cover those in today's video and i'm also going to share with you how to conduct better market research we no longer need to get on the phone with individual people every 90 days we don't always have the time and the capacity for that now i'm not saying that that's not a good strategy but there are

other more effective ways to do ideal customer research that are actually going to help you in the long run with your marketing hey there and welcome back to the Brandmerry channel i am michelle knight founder and ceo of brandmerry.com and today i want to talk to you about ideal customer research there are two things that we do really well over here at Brandmerry and that is helping you build a personal brand around you and your story and teaching you how to market very effectively to have incoming leads for brand awareness and ultimately converting them to

paying clients more income more impact that is our goal and both of those categories rely on ideal customer research so i know you've heard about it i know you've heard about ideal customer avatar you might even be at a place where you're like i'm so sick of this work all right i get it and i hope that at the end of this video you're feeling revamped re-energized and you have a new strategy to get the feedback and the information that you need to totally elevate your branding and your marketing so why is ideal customer work

so important well at the end of the day you have a business you're selling to someone and that someone you better know who the heck they are or they're not gonna buy from you that's why it's so important and as i've mentioned ideal customer work plays a role in both branding and marketing so from a branding side we really want to focus on ideal customer work to really understand who your customer is at their core so understanding what their big problems are their struggles their goals their aspirations you can even even use ideal customer work

to find out what social media platforms they're hanging out on where they get most of their information other people that they look to for advice in your industry so the branding work on ideal customer work can help you set a very strong foundation for your brand and your business moving forward once you know who your ideal customer is it's much easier to craft your offer to serve them at the highest level you can craft better messaging which is going to play a role in your website copy and your marketing you're also able to better understand

emotional branding which i talk about in this video right here where i share a little bit more on how we make our audience feel and the connection that we create and then in addition to that one of the things that plays a huge role in branding is the art of storytelling and in order to tell great stories as a business owner you've got to know who you're telling those stories to it's not enough to just share stories to share stories we want to share stories that are going to motivate our audience to take action aka

buy our product or our service so from a branding perspective ideal customer research is so important because it's going to set the foundation for everything that you're going to create in your business from a marketing perspective it's all about content when you're thinking of content you want to make sure that you're thinking of content that not only attracts new people to your community but also moves them through the client buying journey i talk about that entire journey that entire process in this video right here we've also linked that below for you and it's really important

that you understand that your content is there to not only let people know who you are build that brand awareness pull them in and attract them but ultimately connect with them leading to the sale so you see why it's so important to understand who you're talking to and ultimately who your business is for and so i want to share with you some updated strategies for doing your ideal customer work but before i do that let's talk about some of the key elements that you need to understand about your ideal customer so number one i recommend

that you start broad and and then narrow it down a bit so this is all about the demographic these are the things that you know about the person that you ultimately want to work with or who your product and service is ultimately for depending on where you're at in your business you might have more information about this individual or you might have nothing and so it's nice to start to pick away individual people if you will and narrow it down by focusing on things like the demographics so what do we know about this person is

this person just graduating from college is this person a working mother who is this person and i'm not recommending that you have to focus on men or women or mothers or not mothers but those are some of the things to start considering what do you know about the individual that you want to work with the offer that you're ultimately creating who is it really designed for that's going to help you narrow it down from everyone which is not an ideal customer to getting a little bit more specific then the next thing you want to do

is answer a few top questions number one is what is the problem they are facing now every single business has to solve a problem this is actually part of the niching down process if you don't solve a problem you're going to have a really hard time selling anything and just so we're clear every product every service can solve a problem it's your job to figure out what that problem is and narrow it down really specific to your ideal customer so let's say that my target market is new moms and i sell a program that teaches

you how to tidy up your house right as a new mom in very very little time the problem is that new moms don't have a lot of time in their schedule they're tired of a messy house it's overwhelming it's weighing on their shoulders not speaking from experience at all and they want to understand better strategies to keep it maintained if you will keep their sanity so the problem is that they want to be able to tidy up their home in a limited amount of time and they don't understand exactly how to do that okay so

no matter what you sell i always use the analogy of eggs if i'm making eggs in the morning and my eggs are sticking to my pan my problem is i've got a pan that everything's sticking to i need a new pan so i go out and buy it every single thing comes down to a problem what is the problem that your ideal customer is facing number two is elaborate a little bit more on that problem so what are their struggles with that problem how are they feeling about that problem ultimately where are they now this

is incredibly helpful with marketing because it allows you to connect with your ideal customer and allows them to feel seen heard and understood the third thing you want to start to identify is where do they want to be so they've got these current struggles they've got these pain points they have this problem and what do they ultimately want if they resolve this problem what does life look like for them do they suddenly get to make their eggs in 10 seconds and stop cussing every morning at the pan that keeps sticking all right again not speaking

from experience over here so understanding what is the core problem where are they now and what are those pain points and struggles how would they describe that to you and where they ultimately want to be now the next thing you want to identify is what are some of the obstacles standing in their way so why haven't they solved the problem yet why haven't they done it why haven't they gone out and bought that pan yet what are some of the things that they're specifically looking for that they haven't found another thing that you can start

to explore are the objections so i find that these are incredibly helpful for service based entrepreneurs but if someone hasn't solved their problem just yet they probably have some obstacles standing in their way but what are some objections what are some mindset pieces that they have maybe they think they don't have enough time to do the work maybe they think that they don't have the energy or the capacity to take on something else what are those objections these are incredibly helpful when it comes to selling your product or your service if you can understand these

obstacles and these objections your ideal customer is going through then you can use that in your marketing and the final piece is if they've done anything if they've done the work or they've brought bought a different frying pan or whatever it is why haven't they solved their problem just yet what more are they looking for so these are just some questions that you can start to organize the research that i'm about to give you my favorite tools for into these little categories this is going to help you with your branding and your marketing overall so

let's now talk about i know sorry made you wait but now let's talk about some of my favorite ways to do market research number one is a free tool that not enough people know about that it's incredibly powerful when you think about your own life and your own customer journey with different products and services where do you turn when you need something google we all go to google it is a database of information and the free tool that we love to use is called answer the public what answer the public does is it takes the

information from google and it categorizes it into questions into sub categories so you can go on to answer the public you can type in an ideal customer that you know you can type in a core problem you can type in your industry so you can start as broad as you want and then it will divide it up into a bunch of different webs let's say i type in brand photography i am a photographer and i want to sell brand photography and i bet i want to better understand my ideal customer and what they're looking for

when it comes to brand photography so i can type in brand photography and then it's going to show me all of the top questions and searches related to brand photography with each of those you can actually click and it'll open up another tab and show you the google searches it'll show you the most popular blog posts the most popular websites and you can start to do a little bit of research so you can get as granular with it as you want but what this is really offering you is information on what your audience is asking

so this can go back to what are they struggling with how are they phrasing their problem what outcomes do they ultimately want answer the public is an incredible helpful tool and it's free with a few searches every single month so you can definitely use it to your advantage the next option is one of my favorites maybe yours because you're watching this video right now and it's youtube so youtube again is a search engine platform meaning that people are turning to the platform to look for solutions to their problems and you can use youtube's basic function

by typing in brand photography we'll just run with this topic brand photography and see what youtube is suggesting auto populates so this can be incredibly helpful for finding some of the top searches within your industry further than that you can start to explore some of the top videos and look at the comment section see what people are asking and if it's a really popular video and you're seeing that it has tons and tons of views that's probably a top struggle that your ideal customer is you know dealing with so not only looking at the topic

for the video that has a bunch of views and saying wow okay this must be something that my ideal customer is struggling with if everyone's watching this but also exploring the comment section incredibly valuable for grabbing specific language that your audience is using to piggyback off of youtube another search engine platform that we like coming in at number three is pinterest oh i just love pinterest so much as a marketer it's a freaking gold mine so pinterest uses a very very similar feature because it's a search engine where it will auto populate with the most

popular searches so if you're again going in for brand photography you type brand photography in the search bar pinterest will help you out and tell you the top searches for brand photography it'll just kind of fill in those keywords again another incredibly helpful way for you to start to get content ideas and information from your audience the next one uses another popular platform that we're all familiar with and that is amazon look no matter how you feel about amazon it is where people are buying their books okay and so one of the things that i

started doing really early on in my business was starting to explore book reviews so finding books that were related to my industry now i totally understand this might not work for everyone um with all of these take the ones that will best serve you in your industry and run with them you don't have to use all of them but this is a really helpful one especially if your industry typically has very specific topics in books related to what it is that you do so let's say i am focused on marketing i can go to amazon

i cannot i can type in marketing and i can choose the book option from the drop down this is going to show me all the top marketing books i'm going to look for the ones that have the most reviews because that's where the information lies i can then go to that book i can read a little bit about it you know what was the general you know idea of the book scroll down and start reading the reviews now the positive reviews are nice but what you really want to focus on are the negative reviews what

did people say did they say it was too simple did they say that it didn't answer this question did they not like it because of x y and z this is going to give you more information about what your audience is looking for and a possible gap that you can fill in your content creation okay i've got three more i told you i had a lot of information for you in this video i've got three more options for you the next one is all about community forms now i'll be honest with you i don't use

this one very often but i've had a lot of clients who find success and use them for themselves as well so it's just like a natural extension of their day-to-day the community forums think of reddit is a great example of this where you can go type in a specific topic whether it's a specific problem that you've identified for your ideal customer your industry as a whole something that you specifically do right so personal branding would be a great example for my business type that and see what people are talking about see what types of questions

individuals are asking this is a really helpful tool for getting very specific language for your ideal customer in addition to that and one of the platforms that i'm a little bit more familiar with and comfortable on are facebook groups now i am not suggesting that you go into every facebook group and you just start asking random questions exhausting outdated we don't need to do that anymore facebook has a search function so you don't have to do all the outward posting and choosing a cute pick for you know for attention we just get to go into

the facebook group that we know is full of our ideal customer that is key you don't want to be in a facebook group that's not related to your ideal customer at all go into this free facebook group or paid if you're part of those as well and go into the search bar start typing in very specific keywords to the things that you offer your industry your problems and see what questions come up this does require a little bit of digging like well most of the things that i've shared with you today i never said ideal

customer work is easy it is work after all but it's going to pay off in the end and start to see what questions individuals are asking whether that's a single post or actually in the comments i have found gold mines in facebook groups before in fact i'm going to be sharing with you how i map out 90 days worth of content that video is actually coming out next week and one of my favorite places to find content ideas are facebook groups they're just i have no desire to engage in them but i will use the

search bar and just browse around a little bit from time to time and the last one i'm going to share with you is really helpful if you already have an audience now you don't have to have a huge audience you don't have to have thousands of email subscribers or fans on instagram or whatever you use to classify an audience for your business although i recommend that that's your email list you can have 10 15 100 people it doesn't matter but this tool is really helpful for getting really specific information from people who have already said

yes to your brand and those are surveys so every 90 days-ish i will put together a survey for my audience and ask very specific questions like what are you struggling with right now remember from beginning what is your number one problem that you're facing what are you looking to do within the next 90 days all right what would you love from me if i could create one piece of content that would help you what would that piece of content be and that's incredibly helpful for getting specific feedback from your audience making open-ended questions so you

can get very specific language and then using that to create your content moving forward so no matter which one of these options you choose i hope that you see that there are so much information waiting for you on the internet that you can spend a little bit of time every 90 days in your marketing or you know with your branding in the beginning to sift through some of the information and get specific with your ideal customer what i want you to really remember from this entire thing is that i focused on specific language it's not

enough to assume what our audience is saying we really want to use the words that they are using to describe their current struggles to describe their problem to describe where they ultimately want to be that is going to help you with your marketing it's going to help you with your messaging it's going to help you with your consistent income as a business owner if you liked this video give it a thumbs up what do people say smash that like button i'm not going to do that give it a thumbs up leave a comment below let

me know which of these topics you're going to use moving forward or something that really stood out to you from this video i also want to invite you to join me for a brand new marketing class that i have put together just for you it's all about mastering your marketing so how can you show up build brand awareness build brand attraction build brand connection build consistent revenue without relying on social media check out the link below or go to brandmerry.com/marketing to sign up for this free training next week i'm going to share with you how

to use the information we talked about today to map out 90 days worth of content you don't want to miss that so make sure you're subscribed to the channel have an amazing week bye