Speaker 1: Hey my friend, Adam here, and in this video, I want to share with you five fast, easy, free, but most important of all, proven and profitable market research strategies that you can use right now, and that are going to help you figure out exactly what to do, how to do it, and who to do it for in order to give you and your business the best chance of success possible. Because in today's hyper-competitive business world, identifying, targeting, and then reaching your ideal target market is your business's first and maybe even most important goal. After all, people can't buy from you if they don't know that you exist, and people won't buy from you if they don't know why they should care. And market research is the tool that's going to give you the answers to both of these incredibly important questions. Also, a big thank you to HubSpot for sponsoring this video, but more on that later. For now, let's dive right in. First off, it's important to note that whether we're using the terms target audience, ideal audience, target market, target customers, ideal customers, customer avatars, or basically any other combination of those words, they all pretty much mean the same thing, which is nothing more than a group of customers that you want to reach or sell to. Now, your total market is all of the people that could potentially buy whatever it is that you're selling. In marketing, this is called a TAM. That stands for Total Addressable Market. But here's the thing. Even though this is going to sound completely backwards, you don't actually want to sell to everybody in your total market because everybody isn't the best fit. What you want instead is a segment of the market that you can serve best. A segment made up of customers who want what you have and are happy, willing, and able to pay you for the true value that you provide. And that segment is your target market or target audience, customer avatar, ideal customers. You know the terms. So, if you've ever been frustrated because your customers just don't seem to get it, well, it could be something as simple as you're just going after the wrong segment or you're going after the right segment, but in the wrong way, using the wrong words and messages and offers. Now, this next part is really important. So, I'm going to say it as slowly and clearly as possible. Feel free to pause the video or even rewind and rewatch this a couple of times. Matching your message to your target market is the key to success. And getting this right will immediately make all of your marketing 10 times, maybe even 100 times more effective and more profitable, making attracting new customers and making more sales easier than ever before. But get this wrong, and well, sadly, this is one of the biggest reasons that most businesses fail. And at best, you're just going to keep going around in circles, feeling stuck and stalled and frustrated and overwhelmed, and I want better for you. And this is why one of the best places to start anytime you're thinking of starting a new business or launching a new offer or introducing a new product or service to the market is Amazon. No, not the jungle, the website, and here's why. The fastest and easiest place to get ideas, inspiration, and do research on both your customers as well as your competitors is Amazon or any other online book retailer will do. This is because books typically take a longer time to write and to edit and to publish than most of the other forms of media out there, which means you can be at least a little more confident in the information that's being presented, opposed to say, basing your entire marketing strategy off a tweet that somebody posted at two o'clock in the morning. I'm thinking about starting a DVD rental store. It's going to be huge, bro. But you're not just going to Amazon to browse, you're on a mission, a market research mission, which when I say it out loud, makes it sound like the most boring mission ever. Anyway, what you want to do here is look up books in your market, your niche or your industry and see what the titles are, what the descriptions say, how many reviews there are and what the reviews say. The titles will tell you what topics, angles, and hooks people want to read about. The description of the book is basically a mini marketing message and is designed to highlight the benefits of the book. And you can use this to get an idea for how other people are talking about the pains and problems that your customers experience. And the number of reviews the book has will show how many people care about the topic enough to actually post a review. Read the five-star reviews to find out what people liked and why so you can make sure your business offers those same solutions. And read the one and two-star reviews so you can see what the book missed or what people didn't like. So you can choose whether or not to include those things in your marketing. Another thing that you want to do here, not just with Amazon, but with all of the resources and tools and strategies that I'm going to be sharing with you throughout the rest of this video is start to use that information to put together an ideal customer avatar. Or if you already have an ideal customer avatar, then using the information that you gather and collect and essentially research to compare against it in order to make sure that you continue doing the right things for the right people in the right place. Now, if the whole ideal customer avatar thing is completely new to you, don't worry. It sounds way more complicated than it actually is. And it's really just a fictional, though sometimes real, representation of who your best customer is. And it's made up of all of the things that they have in common. These are things like their demographic details like age, gender, income, occupation, and titles. Geographic details like what city, state, province, or country they live in. And most importantly of all, psychographic details like what are their values, their attitudes, their lifestyles, beliefs, or any groups or organizations that they're a part of. Another thing you can do is take advantage of and download the free market research kit provided by this video's sponsor, HubSpot. So let me walk you through that now. HubSpot's market research kit is made up of five different research and planning templates and comes with a free guide on how to use them in your market research. And we'll help you find out important industry and market factors like the market size and trends, the regulations, gaps in the market, and market demographics. It can help you build a buyer profile with all the things we just talked about like age, gender, income level, lifestyle trends, needs, and attitudes. It'll give you guidelines for competitor research looking at pricing structures and market share and marketing and branding. And HubSpot's free market research kit includes an industry analysis template to kickstart your market research and basically get you up and running as quickly as possible. If you know you need market research but don't know where to start, then start here. As the kit includes an instructional guide, SWOT analysis templates available as word docs or interactive design PDFs, a survey template, focus group template, presentation template, and five forces industry analysis template. So make sure to click the link in the descriptions below right after this video and download your free market research kit today. Next, let me show you another powerful tool you can use to get access to more data and information than you ever thought possible using Think with Google Research. Think with Google Research is a treasure trove of googly goodness. But the two things that I want to direct your attention to are number one, find my audience, and number two, Google Trends. So let's start with find my audience first. If you've ever run Google ads before, then it's going to look pretty familiar as it allows you to look over and dive into different in-market and affinity segments. For example, if I pick in-market and then business services, I can see advertising and marketing services, business and financial services, business printing and document services, business technology, and a whole bunch of other business-y related services and topics and products that people are interested in. And I can click on any one of these, like say advertising and marketing services, and I can learn more about this audience, including what other YouTube channels they watch, what other purchases they make, what other audiences they're likely to be a part of, and other subcategories within advertising and marketing services that I may want to check out as well. It's a powerful little tool, especially when combined with this next one, Google Trends. Google Trends is another fantastic market research tool, especially to give you sort of an overview or high level 30,000 foot view on a business or topic or industry or essentially anything that may be trending. All you have to do is simply enter a search term, and it'll tell you the level of interest that this topic has both now and in the past. For example, let me type in something random, like say sock knitting in order to see what's going on in the industry right now. Well, according to Google Trends, it looks like a pretty stable topic over the past 12 months with a pretty obvious spike in November, which makes sense as these are probably a pretty popular gift around the holiday time. But we can also take a look at it over different timeframes, not to mention breaking it down by different countries in different states. You can also see any related topics or my personal favorite related queries, which in this case is going to show us the terms crazy sock lady and central knitting machine, which are topping the charts. With the term vintage sock knitting machine showing an increase in interest of 550%. Powerful stuff, and I'm sure I don't need to tell you just how incredibly useful it is to know exactly what people are searching for, what they're interested in, and the exact keywords that they're using in order to find it. Okay, next, let's do a little competitor research in order to dive a little deeper into your competitors and find out if they're really as smart as they think they are. Now, there are two big dangers that you need to look out for when you're doing competitor research. The first is not knowing who your competitors are or ignoring them completely, which is inexcusable and for lack of a better term, just silly. After all, even if they're doing most things wrong, well, there's still lessons to be learned. And the second danger is copying them completely, which leads you coming off as a second-rate version of them. And 99 times out of 100, people are just going to want to go for the original version. So with that said, here's how you do competitor research the right way. First off, you need to make a list of your competitors and group them into one of four different groups. Number one is direct. These are people that sell what you sell to who you sell. Next is indirect. These are people that sell what you sell to a different group or different segment of the market. Number three is colleagues. These are people that sell something different to who you sell. And number four is futures. These are people that sell something to people who will eventually become your target audience. For example, if you sell running shoes, they may sell walking shoes or books that teach people how to run. Once you have these lists, you want to start diving into their content and their website and their social media profiles. What do they offer? What do they talk about? And how do they talk about it? Are they cheap? Expensive? Fast? Slow? Boring? Strange? Interesting? New? Novel? Shiny? Tasty? You need to know what's out there so you can know what they're doing and how you're going to differentiate yourself from them, but also so you can see what's working and what's not. So here's the deal on that. While I never advise judging the success of your business or your marketing campaign on vanity metrics such as likes and comments and shares, they do provide at least a small level of value, at least insofar as figuring out what their audience likes and enjoys, what content they want to see more of and less of. That said, an important point here is that there is a very big difference between buyers and non-buyers. And you want to make very sure that you're basing your business and marketing decisions off of people that are actually willing to pay and buy whatever it is that you're selling. Not just with likes and loves and hugs and high fives, but with money because that's how business works. So let's talk about that next. Now, full disclosure, if you're in the early stages of launching a new business or starting a new company, then this next part isn't going to apply to you yet. But, and this is a big but, I cannot lie, it's still something that you want to pay attention to. Because moving forward, you're going to want to know what to pay attention to and what to be able to ignore in order to give your business or your startup or new company or whatever it is that you're launching, the highest likelihood of success possible. And if you happen to already have a business with current or previous customers, then you, my friend, are sitting on a gold mine. So here's how to make the most of it. First, look through your previous and existing customer database and rank your customers from most profitable to least profitable. Then take a look at the top 20% of your customers and look for any common trends or themes or characteristics. For example, are they all women or all men? Are they all between the ages of 20 and 30 or 40 and 50? Do they all buy the same thing? And if so, what is it? Then once you have this information, dig deeper by seeing if you can talk to them and ask them a few questions about their needs and why they chose you and what they love most about your business. After all, they are your best customers. So it only makes sense to use the answers they give you to build more specific marketing content and messages around them. Of course, if you don't have the option to talk to them or you don't have any customers at all yet, there's still another incredibly powerful market research tool that you can use right now in order to get nearly instant feedback. So let me walk you through that now. Originally popularized way back in 2007 by author Tim Ferriss when he wrote The 4-Hour Workweek, he advised using Google AdWords in order to test different headlines and different descriptions in order to find that mythical and magical winning combination. Essentially running a split test with different Google Ads, trying to figure out which title got more clicks and then using that as the title of the book, which is what gave us The 4-Hour Workweek and not what was originally proposed, Broadband and White Sand. Well, my friend, good news. This tactic still works today. Although my personal preference is to use Facebook ads or Instagram ads as this not only allows me to test simple text, but I'm also able to test out different images and different graphics as well as different videos if I want to go down that road. Not to mention for most people just getting started out with online advertising, Facebook ads are typically just a little bit easier to sort of ease into than Google Ads. But if you want to know one of the best marketing strategies out there, well, I've got a little secret to tell you. A little secret that's going to allow you to influence and persuade and guide your customers in whatever direction you want. All by tapping into powerful sales and marketing psychological triggers and cognitive biases that work no matter what business, market or industry you're in. So to show you exactly what those are and how you can use them today, I've put together this video right here. So make sure to check that out now and I'll see you in there in just a second.