Good marketing is about being very clear who it is you are trying to sell to. It’s about knowing your target audience well. If possible get inside their minds and learn the triggers that will motivate them. The more insights you have about your potential customers the better.
Discovering insights doesn’t have to be difficult. At my advertising agency Red Rocks when we got a new client or were pitching for a piece of business, we would always start by putting our ‘insights’ together. These insights told us the core messages we would build our campaigns around. To learn these insights we would find people who represented a typical customer for our client and ask them questions. Sometimes we brought them together as a group and asked them their thoughts in a discussion type format. Other times we would go out and about and ask people on location, in a shopping mall, at an event or typical situation (such as kids at a skate park if you were selling a new brand of scooter like MGP).
Example questions for ‘insight’ survey
If I were to launch a new business planning tool and wanted to gather some insights from the small business market, here are some questions I might ask:
- What do you love about owning your own business?
- What do you like least about owning your own business?
- What is your biggest frustration as a small business owner?
- On a scale of 1 – 5 (with 5 being excellent) how would you rate your confidence around business planning?
- What aspects of running a business are you most confident about?
- What aspects are you least confident about?
- What topics in the area of business education would be most useful for you right now? Please list your top five.
- Which of the following method for learning would you prefer? Book/Live seminars/webinars/video seminars/ipad app/other (please list)
When you ask such questions of large enough groups of people you start to see some trends happening. Themes will appear and from the themes come your insights. If enough people are telling you the same frustrations, you know you have an opportunity to fix this for them with your approach.
From the desk of liber8yourbusiness. Business mentors and experts in small business exit strategies. Based in Wellington, New Zealand.