The real secret to understanding your ideal customer is research.
Research is invaluable when planning your business, writing a blog post, creating products for your business, or communicating with prospects and customers.
In fact, almost every aspect of your business will benefit by taking the time to understand the wants, needs, and desires of your ideal customer.
Understanding your customers will allow you to connect with them on many different levels emotionally, relate to them, and provide better help and support.
Once you understand your customer’s motivations, their wants, needs, and desires, along with their struggles and challenges, then it will allow you to create better products and solutions to help them.
These solutions can be in the form of free content like articles, videos, podcast episodes, lead magnets and freemiums, paid products and reports. It can be information products, online courses, content for a membership site, coaching programs, plus with other types of free and paid content.
By understanding your customers, it enables you to earn more money by providing solutions to help them overcome their biggest challenges.
Research helps you:
- Understand “Who” your customers are.
- Determine the wants, needs, and desires of your customers.
- Create new products that fill voids in the marketplace.
- Understand your competitors/business and the products they offer.
- Create a unique selling proposition in the marketplace.
- Helps with your company’s branding.
- Communicate with your customers more effectively
- Understand your audience and who you are targeting more accurately.
- Develop and deliver a compelling message when communicating with your customers, such as blog posts, videos, podcast episodes, and email.
- Determine what medium to choose when communicating with your audience, such as Facebook, direct mail, AdWords, email, etc.
Today, understanding your customer has never been easier.
The more time you spend during the research phase, then the better understanding you will have of your customer, the better your marketing will be, and the more revenue you will earn.
15 Ways to Identify Your Customer’s Wants, Needs and Desires.
1. Search Facebook’s Audience Insight For Similar Pages.
Look for similar pages that Facebook suggests.
Gather demographic, geographic, psychographic, behavioral, and social data that Facebook provides on similar pages.
2. Search Facebook Graph Search for Similar Pages.
Write down the similar pages that Facebook suggests. These pages and websites can provide a lot of information about your ideal customer.
3. Look For Facebook Groups
Join groups and scroll through the conversations and see what topics and challenges people are discussing. What problems do they have? Write them down.
4. Search Amazon For Books In Your Niche.
Look at the Table of Contents for topics in the niche. Look at the back of the book for copy that may give you insight into the book and challenges of the audience.
5. Amazon Reviews – by reading the reviews about a product it can give you insight on what people like about the product, and more importantly what people do not like about the product.
6. Search Google for blogs, websites, authority figures, niche tools, and for other similar sites in the niche.
Search your keywords in quotes. Ex: “growing roses”, “RV camping”, etc.
Look for paid ads and notice the copy and the landing pages of the ad.
Look for the section on Google Search that says, “Also searched for….” Write these names down and do a Google search for them?
7. Search https://lists.nextmark.com/market for media cards in your niche.
Look at the media card to learn about the people purchasing.
This can give you information on what the niche is purchasing, price points, audience size, how often people rent the list, demographics, plus much more information.
8. Look at your competitor’s websites
- What products are they selling?
- What words are they using to sell their products?
- What price point are they selling their products?
- Who are they targeting? What pictures of people do they have on their websites that can give you clues?
- Signup for their e-newsletters. How are they communicating with their customers? What messages are emailed?
- Purchase their products. How was the experience? How did they deliver the product? How can you improve on their product and their customer experience?
9. Visit Blogs in your Niche
Look at the Bullet Points of Sales Pages. What challenges do they reference? What problems are they mentioning? What solutions does the product solve?
What topics do they talk about on their blog?
Do they have a podcast? What topics do they talk about on the podcast?
Do they have videos on their site? What are the topics of the videos?
10. Interview Customers
Customers can give you a lot of insight into their experience with a product or service, and what their needs, wants or desires are.
11. Talk with Customer Service
Customer service can provide a lot of insights about customer’s thoughts about a product or service. What they like/dislike about a product, was the product returned and why, what complaints do they have about the product, etc.
12. Interview Other Authorities in the Niche.
Talk with other people in your niche. Interviewing people can be done on a podcast, through email, at conferences, talking on the phone, over lunch or coffee, etc.
13. Surveys- Surveying your current prospects & customers can give you information about their thoughts feeling and opinions.
14. Google Alerts– can give you a lot of information on current events in your niche.
15. Magazines – are niche focused and normally are organized by topics each month. They can give you insight into a niche.
- What are the headlines on the cover?
- What type of articles? Article topics? What type of content?
- Look for topics in the table of contents. What problems does the content address? What solutions does it offer?
This can give you ideas for creating your own content, blog posts, podcasts, etc.
16. Online Forums-
Online Forums can provide a lot of information about problems and challenges that people are having. An easy way to search forums is to sort them by topics with the most posts and comments. The more engaged an audience is on a topic, then the more demand there is for that topic, and the bigger the potential problem.
Understanding your customer is invaluable and will improve your business and your bottom line.
You just learned how to use 16 Free online methods to understand your customer. Now you can help them more effectively, address their needs, and serve them better.
Remember, the more you know about your customers, then the more you can provide solutions and serve them.
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