The Fierce Business Babe Podcast Ep 80: Methods of Market Research

In today’s episode we are going to go over market research and why it’s so important. I’ll go over example questions to ask and my favorite ways to conduct market research. I personally do this every day.

Methods of Market Research

By: Melissa Lin

Market research is crucial to businesses and business owners everywhere and something that I personally do inside of my business every single day. You heard that right, every single day we do Market Research in our business. Now the reason I do this is I want to know as much about my potential and my ideal clients as possible. For example, right now it's a Thursday morning. It is about 9:26 in the morning and I want to know exactly what my potential clients are doing so that I can start to speak to that in my content. You can start to speak to them in your content as you start to do more and more market research in your own business.

So for example, an ideal client for, let’s say, my Fierce Business Academy, right now in this moment, at 9:20, 9:30 in the morning on a Thursday. She's probably at work, sitting in her cubicle, completing a few daily tasks for her 9-5, but secretly has her business Instagram or her Facebook pulled up in a browser that's hiding on the computer screen behind all her work stuff. She is silently getting into her clients on Voxer or maybe on Trainerize or a Facebook group, wherever her clients are while nobody is watching. So, how do I know this? How do I know exactly what my ideal clients are thinking, what they're doing at this very moment? Because market research, and because this is exactly what I was doing when I first started my business years ago.

My business is all I could think about when I was in my nine-to-five, so market research is gold for your business. So I want you to write this down if you can. Pick up your favorite notebook, market research is gold for your business and it brings you so much value it’s almost insane how much value it can bring you. I don't want you to feel overwhelmed if you're thinking “Wow Melissa, you do market research everyday? Are you crazy or like a maniac on a mission! How are you doing that? It's going to take so much time.”. It doesn’t. It doesn’t take as much time as you think. I’m going to give you a few methods that are very, very quick and once I start to go through some of those methods, you’re going to be like “wow, I can definitely do that today. I could do that tomorrow. I could do that this week”. Start with maybe once or twice per week and slowly start to do market research. I’m going to give you some tools for how you can really build relationships while doing market research at the same time.

So now let's go into the why. Why market research? Why is it so important? So you want to know your ideal client. You want to know what they're going through in this very moment and what they are struggling with. What are some of the phrases that they use, what are their dreams, what are their pain points, their pleasure points and more so, you want to know this stuff so that you can really connect with them in your content. If we don't know these things about them, how can we continue to create content that's going to grow your relationships with them to further that relationship and create that trust factor. Things such as current trends, for example, the internet and social media, things are constantly changing so quickly. You want to make sure that we keep up with the interest and the demands of our clients or customers and communities that we have. If you're creating a new program or service, Let's do some market research first to make sure that this is something that your audience is really looking for. Maybe you have a draft of your program. Great! Put a few beta clients through to test it out. For example, anytime I put a program together, I give it to a few of my current clients and have them go through it and get feedback so I can make it the best thing and improve it. Not every program or passive income offer is going to be a winner and that's okay. That's why we do market research. That's why we test things. So for example, my caption capsule. It is an amazing tool. It’s something I created for myself personally to use. It has got hundreds of different headlines for you to choose from to create posts and it's got over 80 different call to action for you to choose from depending on what you're wanting to do. Whether you're wanting to sell, or engage, or grow and this took time to create. I created it for myself and then I created it for my clients to use and it went through a few iterations before I put it out to the public because we were testing. We were doing market research and things like that.

So now, I want to go through some different ways to conduct market research. I think that if you're still reading, you're agreeing with me that the market research is important. Now, let's go into the how. This is always the big question. I want to go through some different ways and all the things I've done and still do. They’re definitely my favorite ways to conduct market research.

Method one

This is what I like to call creating surveys. Client surveys. They're great, not only because they help validate your service idea of your product idea before you create it. But it also helps you validate that the problem you're wanting to sell, that you think is a big problem, actually is something that is needed in the marketplace right now. It helps you determine that a problem you want to solve is what you should be doing. If you're wanting to create a program and you're going to spend weeks and weeks creating and building this incredible program, you want to make sure it's something your audience is actually looking for. Your market research is going to give you a very clear idea of what your ideal client does want and a very clear idea of what they don’t want and both of those things are very important. So when it comes to creating the survey, there is a little bit of tech stuff behind the scenes to do. However, if I can do it and I'm not the most tech person, you can do it. I can promise you that. Personally I've used Google forms for surveys. We do lots of surveys in our business as well as with our clients and then market research surveys all of the time. So we like to use either Google forms or typeform. And so I'm going to go through a few steps really quickly for you, and then some example questions that you can ask for a survey. So the first thing that I highly highly recommend is start to create a list of maybe ten people who fit your ideal client profile, who you believe have the same problems you can help them fix. You have to create a list because we've got to send your survey to someone or maybe use your email list. You could put it into a Facebook group, but we won't have an idea of who this is going to be going to so then we want to create the survey or Google forms/Typeform and start to ask questions. Have a list of questions in there. What they've tried? How do they feel about certain things?

Then reach out to those people on your list and ask them to take your survey. Then, the most important part, Actually analyze the survey responses. Analyze the findings because what you might find is what you thought they were struggling with, is not actually what they are struggling with at all and that's okay. We want to know what it is and what it is not, to help as you're building your programs and your different services for them. You really want to verify whether those things do or do not line up. So here are some example questions and remember these are just example questions. You can create any kind of question that you feel to be valuable for you and something that you really feel you want to know. Some examples, if you're a business coach, something you might want to ask in a client survey:

How long have you been in business for?

What are you currently working on?

Where are you currently at in your business?

What are you working towards at this moment in your business?

What is working? What is not working?

What are you actually struggling with at the moment?

How can I support you?

By asking those open ended questions, you are really going to gather that market research. So here's some more examples, and you can definitely tweak these questions so that it fits your Niche. Here's an example for if you are a Health Fitness or Wellness Coach you can use to ask in this market research survey:

What are your health and fitness goals at the moment?

What is working and what isn't working?

You see that same question. We can use it for Business coaching, Health coaching, any kind of social media, love coaching, life coaching.

Why do you want to make a change?

What is your long-term dream?

This is what I love to ask.

Where would you like to be X months from now? 3 months from now? 6 months from now?

Where do they want to go?

What lifestyle are they visualizing? What's that dream, that Vision?

Those are some things you can start to ask in your market research surveys and be very particular. If you know what your point A and point B is in your program. So for example, my first Business Academy, point A, Where people are before they come into the academy is they want to start their business, maybe they have a few clients, but they feel very overwhelmed and unsure of what to be doing, what the steps are.They feel they need to spend 10 hours a day on social media.They feel the need to know 10,000 followers to even start their business.They think that they can only charge $20 - $50 a month for their programs because no one is going to pay for them because haven't been in the industry long enough. They need a hundred free clients and they are just overwhelmed with information overload. That is where my ideal clients are right now, before they start my program and then my point being, once they finish my program, they got their foundations put together, they know exactly who their target audiences are. They have their program and their service created. Yes, we create it together. You've nailed down content in social media. You've now mastered sales and you’re continuing to master those skills. You have your first few clients and you’re working towards your 5K months. And so what you can do is asking your market research surveys some of the questions of that point A that I mentioned. Are they actually there right now? And then point B, is this somewhere they actually want to go? because you feel that it is, you are telling yourself in your head “yeah, that's where they are point A to point B”, but verify with your market research. Now let’s roll right into method number two.

Method Two

Facebook groups. Your own private Facebook group is a great resource, people are joining my free Facebook group daily and in order for them to join my free group, which I give tons of value in, I go live every week I give tons of content. I love doing hot seat coaching and coaching thread throughout the month. However, to get into my Facebook group you are going to answer some market research questions. See, right there on autopilot because they’re answering market research questions for me. We were conducting market research on autopilot completely hands-off and what this does is gives me great ideas to create content that's truly going to serve them and really help them. It also gives them an incredible experience in my free Facebook group. You can also utilize other Facebook groups and it's a great resource as well. You can ask simple market research questions as a post and people will go in and respond and all of those responses are great great items for you to use in your market research that you're conducting. Really utilize that other audience as your current audience. All of it is so so valuable. Remember, market research is gold for your business.

Method Three

Your current data and current analytics. If you're in your business, or maybe you're just starting your business and you want to do some market research. There's so much data you can be looking at. I don’t want to overwhelm you, so if you're just starting don't stress about the data too much, but you can look at so much data. So if you're not sure what's currently working or not working in your business, you can take a look at your numbers. My team and I are looking at our numbers every single day, our company metrics, our launch metrics. We’re always looking at these numbers. Take a look at the numbers. Data will tell you so much. So for example, like what blog post, if you have a blog, are getting the most interest? What pages are getting the most page views? What Instagram post gets the most engagement? Which ones have the most comments or the most likes? Your numbers tell you a story. I can go and look at my podcast downloads and see which ones have been favorites for my audience. I can see what content my audience loves more by which episode content is getting the most downloads whether its about email lists, or market research, or starting your business, or sales. All of that data is so important. You can go and look at your Instagram posts and see which ones are getting saved or bookmarked the most. It is so cool to see that stuff. You can go to your website and see what pages are being looked at the most. If you have a page all about freebies, is that getting hit? If one of your sales pages gets viewed over and over and over. If you have a Pinterest, you can look at those analytics, you can see which pins are being saved the most, which pins are being clicked the most, all of those things.

Method Four

Instagram polls and Instagram question boxes. So we are really going to utilize a tool that social media provides us right there. They are providing it for a reason, they want us to use these tools and I love doing market research this way because number one it is easy. It's also fun and creative. And you get immediate feedback so you can see who's looking, who's answering your polls, you can immediately reach back out to them and ask more questions. You can also utilize the questions box feature the same exact way. For example, I use the question boxes during my Q&A podcast episodes to hear what my audience wants to learn about and what questions they have on specific topics. That's market research to see what my audience really wants, what they're looking for, what they need help with and how I can better serve them by answering those questions. Now, let's go into another method.

Method Five

Market research calls. Maybe you don't want to do a survey. That's okay. You can ask a few people to hop in a quick 15-minute market research call. Where you ask your market research questions live whether on the phone, or on a zoom call, interact with them, build a relationship and then give him some value after. I personally love to save all of my market research data numbers and information. Look at the data and utilize the data. I love to save it because it's stuff that I can always go back to and see whatever things that people are struggling with. I can go and create content around that. You also can utilize Market Research in your business and use it to speak their language in your content. That's what's going to draw them in and continue to build those relationships with them, create your programs and offers and so much more. Remember your market research is gold for your business.

I want to give you an action item: Go and conduct some type of market research this week and send me a DM, Let me know. I would love to hear about your experience.

Topics we cover include:

Know your Ideal Client
It doesn’t take as much time as you think
Current Trends
Survey Creation
Example questions
Data & Analytics

And so much more!

Times to check out:

(5:16) Know as much as you can about your potential clients

(7:30) How do you do this every day?

(9:05) Current Trends and where to find them

(12:25) Create a Survey

(15:00) Example questions

(18:57) Current Data and Analytics

(22:40) Market research calls

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