In the last article we talked about defining your target audience, but how do you find out what they really think and believe instead of obtaining social responses based on peer pressure or trying to sound politically correct. Today we will discuss how the right message will resonate with your audience to achieve a higher response rate and make your marketing more profitable and effective.
In this article we are going to go into a little more depth of what a survey is. This is the easiest way to gather intelligence and data on what it is that your market wants.
Here’s a quick and easy to understand definition:
A survey investigates that opinions or experiences of a group of people by asking them questions.
Surveys also help us view things through a specific group of people’s eyes. We put ourselves in their shoes to speak and allows us the opportunity to view the world as they view it.
Now, let me say up front that the value of a survey is dependent on the quality of the questions that it asks. Simply polling people is not going to tell you what they are actually thinking.
How do you know what questions to ask?
The best way to come up with a list of questions to ask on your survey is to start with a goal. We need to know what your objective is with the survey. In other words, what are you trying to accomplish with it? What part of the audiences’ problem are you trying to solve?
Let me give you an example of what I mean by goal in this context.
One goal you could have is to find out who has already read a specific book, or books like it. Then we can seek out similar individuals for our research. Now we can discover what common problems these folks face and try to solve them.
Salespeople, really good salespeople call these “pain points.” That’s an effective way to look at it. We want to eliminate pain from our audience’s lives. We can formulate look at questions that uncover pain points that we may not have considered. Something else that we can look at, is how these people perceive value. Borrowing again from the sales world. We know that building value is crucial to tipping the decision to buy to a “yes.”
For example, in Frank’s book from part 2 of this series, he’s trying to help people lose weight. We might uncover that people want to lose weight not because the scale says so, or it improves their health. They may simply want to look better in the clothes they wear. This drastically alters the marketing messages to this audience.
By knowing this, we could ensure that any marketing efforts we undertake address those concerns. We could say something like,“By following this simple plan, you’ll finally stop dreading the morning routine of staring into the closet and wondering what you are going to wear.”
It could be health, self-esteem, self-confidence, or health. The point is the survey is what uncovers this and gives us the knowledge to address these concerns both with our content and our marketing.
Frank did just this. He learned that his audience was skeptical and feared that no diet would work. This led him to put in his message: “Diets Don’t Work!”
Now, he has their attention. He tells them by studying this plan and implementing a new lifestyle they can finally win the weight loss battle they’ve been fighting.
In teaching tons of good salespeople we know that they are using their conversations with customers as mini-surveys and then crafting a presentation that addresses what’s important to them.
You don’t want to waste time on facts and figures that have no value to your market. You want to collect enough data so your marketing pieces build rapport and empathy just like a salesperson would face to face.