How To Do Market Research (Market Research 101)

if you want to start a new business launch a new offer or grow your existing business in order to take your sales to the next level then you need to know what's going on in your market and that means market research the problem is that ninety percent of businesses are doing market research wrong with the other 10 businesses not even doing it at all which leads to ineffective marketing campaigns bad results and an overall waste of time and money and energy sitting there wondering why nothing seems to be working but I don't blame them after

all just the term market research sounds confusing and boring and time consuming and expensive I mean can't you just skip the market research part and figure it all out as you go no you see market research is one of the most important elements of any marketing campaign whether we're talking about social media or content marketing or video or email or anything at all but like all things in business and in marketing there's a right way and a wrong way to do it the wrong way is doing market research using old school and outdated and often

incredibly ineffective techniques like running focus groups which are often very expensive hard to get in-depth data from and are prone to moderator bias this is where the person running the group either intentionally or inadvertently injects their own opinions and sways the direction of the group based on the questions and how they ask them so Adam what do you think of our new drink yeah it's uh it's okay I guess so let me ask you then would you rather drink our new drink or be submerged in molten hot lava and burned alive I'm sorry what surveys

are another traditional option but they require careful wording of the questions and even more careful interpretation of the results back simply rephrasing a question from a positive to a negative can completely alter the outcome and the results that you get not to mention leading questions like how awesome is our hard-working customer service team that can skew the responses before the respondent has even had a chance to think much less respond question order and even the description used to talk about the survey can unconsciously prime a respondent in order to give certain answers depending on how

it's worded and how it's presented and don't didn't get me started on trying to read through case studies and white papers and research Reports most of which are far too academic and theoretical to actually work in the real world and even if you do manage to decipher some of the more complicated language while many of the results are outdated the second they're published especially in Faster changing Industries and markets if I'm making this sound bad it's because it is but the good news is that there is a better way a faster way an easier way

you see there are three things you need to know in order for your market research to actually be useful first you need to identify who are the kind of people that you want to attract and to sell to this includes their demographic details their Geographic details and their psychographic details so more on that in just a minute next you need to understand and try to clarify what they say they want this is important because it's going to influence the marketing and the language and the copy that you use in your campaigns but it's not the

whole picture because the next thing that you need to find out is what they actually buy as the old saying goes talk is cheap so simply asking someone if they would buy something is completely different than putting that thing in front of them and asking them to hand over their wallet or their credit card or their hard-earned cash in order to actually make that sale and this is why you need to not just look at what people say but more importantly what they actually do of course for all of this to work and to make

any sense at all we first need to identify who these people are so let's start there with a simple market research framework that I've been using for over 10 years now that always gets the job done the simple five question market research framework I use to help keep me on track is the who what when where why framework and to help me remember I wrote a little market research jingle why I asked these questions so my business doesn't die see at each stage I'm asking who is my market not just who I think they are

but who are the people that are actually the best fit for my business and offer if it's a brand new offer I'll look at my competitors and their ads to see who they're targeting and what their messaging and offers look like I'll show you how to do this in just a minute and if I'm launching a new offer to my existing market then I'll will identify the top 20 percent of my customers and look for similarities in the following three categories first demographic details like their age and gender and income and occupation and things like

that next they're Geographic details like what city or stage or Province or country they live in then finally their psychographic details like what are their values and attitudes and beliefs and Lifestyles next I ask what what are their miracles and their miseries their miracles are all of their wants and dreams and goals and desires and everything they're hoping to obtain and their miseries are all of their fears and frustrations and pains and problems and all the things they're trying to get away from like dinosaurs then I ask when this helps keep me focused on my

ideal customers first I try to see if I can find any life events that may alter or influence their buying decisions things like getting married or getting divorced having a new kid getting a new job or moving to a new city I also try to take a look at what's going on in their day-to-day lives and how this may influence when and where they consume different kinds of content or make buying decisions for example someone working a traditional nine to five job is a very different schedule than say a stay-at-home parent or a Home entrepreneur

and all of these factors need to be considered then I ask where as in where are they present and active online and offline where do they spend their time reading and watching and socializing and engaging a quick Google search for a term like social media demographics will show you what kind of people are using what social media platforms which is going to give you a huge advantage over your competitors and will make sure that you're creating content in the right places after the when I think of why and this is where I'll look at the

deeper drives and the motivations behind why someone would benefit from my offer and ask questions like what are the benefits that they're hoping to get out of this and why are these benefits important to them in the first place now I appreciate this is a lot to think about especially if this is your first time working through something like this but it's things like this that really separate the amateurs from the pros and can mean the difference between marketing that connects and marketing that just gets ignored so now that we've got that covered next we

need to uncover what they say they want and for that there's no better place to turn than to the search engines the best way to find out what people say they want is to take a look at what they're actually searching for and there's no better place to do that than with our trusty old friend Google and if you're feeling extra ambitious then a little bit of extra help from Google ads Keyword Planner goes a long way too but let's start with Google first for this example I wanted to use something completely random and obscure

to show you how this market research can work for pretty much just about anything so I chose sock knitting as a side note little did I know how not random and not obscure this Niche actually was turns out that sock knitting is a pretty big industry but you'll learn more about that as we go on so step one head over to Google and type in your main keyword for me this was obviously sock knitting and then take a look at all of the auto suggestions that pop up after your main keyword in this case I

can see that we've got terms like sock knitting machine and pattern and needles and machine for sale and kit Loom and size chart books antique things like that how relevant some of these terms are is obviously going to depend on whether you're sock knitting business is more product or service based but still a pretty good start and if I find a suggestion that I find particularly relevant I just have to keep typing to get even more suggestions for example if I decide to type in sock knitting pattern I can see all of the suggestions that

Google's offering based on what other people have searched for things like patterns for beginners and Co-op and PDF and circular needles all sorts of other things I have no idea what they mean but I guess that's the point of market research after all now I could Click on each of these terms individually in order to find out their overall search volume but another faster and better and certainly more thorough way of doing this is to use Google ads Keyword Planner so let's do that now first log into Google ads and choose the Keyword Planner and

then click discover new keywords then just type in your search term for me again this is sock knitting and I've chosen to select the US and Canada as my overall search pool and then Google hands over a list of over a thousand different keyword ideas as well as their search volume and their competition that I can sort through and use to make further decisions and apparently I can see what people are searching for I can see if there are Trends and seasonality I can check the overall competition and apparently sucked ending is a pretty competitive

industry so that's what people say they want but more importantly what are they actually buying and to find that out all we need to do is head over to the world's largest online retailer Amazon one of the fastest easiest and best places to get ideas and relevant data on what people are actually buying is with Amazon and the process that we're going to do here is going to look pretty similar to what we just did on Google so the first step is to head over to Amazon type in your search term and see what comes

up now the first thing that you can do is see what Amazon suggests in their autocomplete which surprisingly looks kind of similar to Google I mean we've got terms like sock knitting machine and needles and book and Loom and kit and so on for now though let's just stick with our main keyword of sock knitting and hit enter the books and book titles will tell you the topics that people are most interested in and because a book takes a lot longer to write than a blog post or social media post the words they use in

the title The subtitle and the descriptions are typically well thought out and designed to appeal to the target audience the reviews are another great place to mine for data looking at what people liked and didn't like about whatever they bought lastly you can't see exactly how many units were sold of anything but you can try to make a rough guess based on the number of reviews any single listing received another thing that you can do depending on your business your market and your industry is to take a look at your competitors and see what ads

they're running now this is going to be trickier for some Industries like sock knitting than it is for others like say health and fitness but it's still important for you to know how to do this so let me walk you through it now first head over to Facebook and type in the name of your industry or even one of your competitors now I'll admit it did did take me a while to find a good knitting example but I did finally find one for us to take a look at the Facebook page is called we are

Knitters and to see their ads all you need to do is Click over to their page scroll down until you see the section called page transparency and click see all you can see that they're running ads so click go to add library and then all of their ads will appear before you and you can do this with any and all of your competitors who are running ads on Facebook or on Instagram what I like to do here is look through each ad paying special attention to the ones that appear to show up again and again

as well as the ones that are closer to the bottom of the page which indicates they've been running for the longest amount of time in general it's pretty safe to assume that the longer an ads been running the more profitable it is compared to other ads after all otherwise why would they continue to be running it but that's not always the case so make sure to do a little bit of due diligence of course all of the market research in the world doesn't mean a thing if you don't have a solid marketing strategy to actually

go out and apply it all so to help you with that I've linked up a video right here with some of my top marketing strategies so make sure to check it out now and I'll see you in the video and when you're broad you're boring and everybody just ignores you and you sound like 99 of the other businesses and marketers out there saying the same things like we offer higher quality and we offer better service and all of that stuff that everybody's