Instead of Guessing, Maybe We Should Just Ask!
The key to serving your clients - and making stacks of cash - is to know a bit about them so you can serve them well and often.
How do most marketers operate today?
They build a list, write an email, and blast it out to the whole list hoping that someone on the list wants what they’re offering. Of course, there’s so many problems with that approach, it’s laughable.
But I’ve been guilty of it too.
As your list grows, staying in touch with everyone to find out who they are and what they need is nearly impossible. But with simple surveys, and a simple analytics tool available to everyone, you can uncover amazing information.
Today’s blog post is about that process.
Let’s start with the survey
After discussing the campaign with Jen, we honed in on our goal with the survey until it made the most sense. We came up with three goals:
- Find out what niche(s) most of our community is working to provide the right kind of training.
- Understand the kind of marketing tools/techniques that people were using to sell their products and provide training on those and the tools they wanted to know more about.
- Offer a $100 coupon to apply against our product catalog to entice more people to take the survey and to make sales as they see other things in the cart they want.
Jen started with 2 questions because we wanted to keep it as simple as possible.
Question 1: What is your primary niche?
Question 2: What are your primary marketing tools (to make sales)?
But because we wanted to know a little more, we dug a little deeper.
Question 1a: What is your secondary niche?
Question 2a: What are the 2 marketing tools (to make sales) you'd like to learn more about to implement in your business?
The survey looked like this:
Then we began analyzing the results
The key was to make it easy and painless with no personal details. And to make sure the coupon was being delivered automatically so they could redeem it immediately.
When completed, it was a simple, multiple-choice survey that automatically fed the answers into a Google Sheet - a free tool everyone has access to.
As of this writing, we had 311 responses.
And we’re learning things we hadn’t expected to learn - as you always do if you monitor your investigative processes from inside and outside the process.
So far, we have enough numbers to give us good trends.
Some of them confirm what we thought; others did not.
For example, the top five marketing tools/techniques were:
- Email marketing
- Social media
- Blogging
- Affiliate marketing
- Video marketing
I think the surprise to all of us was the interest in Blogging as a selling tool.
Next, we looked at the primary niche
When you’re creating promotional partnerships, the question most often asked is: “Who is your community and what do they like?”
That’s a tough question to answer if you have a large community. So, again, we have to ask.
These percentages did confirm one guess. When asked that question, I always answered that about 20% of our community is interested in the “Make Money Online” niche. And the rest were in other business niches. That was true, but I wasn’t sure at all what businesses the other 80% were trying to build.
- Self Improvement was huge with 13%
- Health and Medical was 8% and if you added in Diet and Fitness, we would be over 11%
- Local Marketing Agency was nearly 8%. That shocked me.
- And Finance / Investing was almost 6%. Another shock.
So, what does that tell me?
Business building tools and training fundamentals in the “Make Money Online” niche will apply to nearly everyone in our community. But we can also niche down and offer self-improvement or health to a smaller segment and be really well targeted.
What did the secondary niche tell us?
This question helped us identify future trends.
As people mature in their businesses, the niches become more focused. Often, the secondary niche is the passion niche and business people evolve into that.
The surprising trends here were:
- Make Money Online dropped by half from the primary.
- Self-Improvement rose to the top with the same percentage numbers holding steady as a major focus of a lot of people.
- None with more than 10% told us that a ton of people haven’t thought about it, or they are completely focused on the primary niche.
- The big surprise was that Ecommerce doubled from 3 to 6%. So, there’s substantial interest in growing that.
What can we learn from this information?
Now, we have a much better understanding of our audience and should be able to target them much better with tools and techniques that help more.
This information forms a basis for our decisions on:
- Training product creation
- Affiliate offers
- Webinar presentations
- Email language
- Target market segmentation
- And better Message to Market Match
I hope you found this helpful. Let me know in the comments if you’ve done anything like this in your business or if you think it would help you create better segmentation and better customer experience going forward.
**** In the time it took to write this post, our survey responses increased by 1/3. Lesson? Make sure you create your survey with a specific time frame in mind to accept results and don't jump to conclusions. Luckily for us, our percentages stayed the same so we can continue forward with our initial hypothesis.
David Perdew is the CEO and founder of NAMS - the Novice to Advanced Marketing System. He’s a journalist, consultant, and serial entrepreneur who has built one of the most successful and fastest-growing business training systems online today called the MyNAMS Insiders Club.
The Novice to Advanced Marketing System is a step-by-step system focusing on Team, Training and Tools to help novice to advanced business people build a Simple, Scalable and Sustainable business.
He took a year off in 2003 to personally build a 2200 square foot log cabin in north Alabama where he and his wife and two dogs and a cat live on 95 acres of forest with four streams and 60-foot waterfall.
The NAMS team includes his daughter, Jen, who is an email marketing and automation specialist. Jen runs the day to day business and is one of the primary trainers in our MyNAMS Insiders Club.
Let me know: Are these kind of articles helpful to you? Would you like to see more real world analytics?
Loved this email and I appreciate you sharing this. I always enjoy your Saturday emails.
You have to love the numbers David. This goes to show how important the survey can be, thanks for sharing your results.