Market Research is the task of understanding your customers needs and wants. Finding and researching your customers will hone in on the services and products that you offer to the world. Market research will validate your idea, find people who are buying, and refine your offering. This is one of the MOST important steps in starting a business; without this step, you’re pretty much burning time and money. You’re going to want to almost get to a point where the client says “shut up and take my money!”
Listen To the Podcast Now
As a business owner, you’re going to need clients and customers. There really isn’t any way around it. You can’t operate a business on zero sales. Market research is a tool that will guide you to identifying EXACTLY who is willing to buy what you’re selling. The difficulty for most people is actually finding that group of people. I generally break market research (finding and researching your customers) into two sub tasks; finding customers and reaching customers.
You’re going to want to do what is called “market research”
- Who, specifically, are you going to be facing (niche, market, clients, customers)
- What is the problem that you’re hearing the most often
- What are they willing to pay
- Is it sustainable
- Where do they hang out
Finding your customers, what their pain-points, and understanding the value of your services is going to give you that head start that you’re looking for.
Finding and researching your customers is a shortcut to having people pay for whatever you’re selling. You’re able to accurately know what your customers and clients are willing to buy.
Finding Customers/Clients
If you’ve already identified your industry where you’re wanting to plant your flag, then you’ve already made an awesome head start. If not, then you need to sit down and specify who you’re wanting to sell to. Specifically, you want to finish this sentence: “Oh, me? I help __________ to _________ which saves them a lot of time and money.” You’re then going to fill in the blank of one thing you do to a single group of people that helps them save time and money.
That “group of people” piece is now your identified customers and clients. Now we’re going to start identifying where your market lives.
The main tools that I personally use is Reddit.com, Meetup.com, and LinkedIn.com. This is the first step to finding and researching your customers.
Reddit is a forum style website that has millions of users and thousands of communities. One of these communities are going to be exactly your client base. On Reddit’s homepage in the upper right corner, you can search for what’s called subreddits. These are the specific communities where your clients and customers live. For example, if you were a web developer who works with non-profit animal shelters, you would want to more than likely search for the ‘animal shelter’ subreddit. Within a few days or hours of using Reddit, you’re be able to identify at least 3-5 subreddits that focus on your niche. This may be one of the easiest places you’ll use when finding and researching your customers.
Meetup.com is a site that lists communities that line up with who your customers are. You can even find people who have similar tastes, ideas, or industries. Let’s say you’re that web developer that wants to find non-profit animal shelters. You could search “animal adoption drives” or “animal lovers of Atlanta” to find people who have similar interests. Then you can hone in on where and when they congregate. There are dozens of topics or groups or industries that meet all over the world and the States.
You can think of LinkedIn as a social network for professionals. You can join specific communities within LinkedIn, connect with similar professionals, or target specific people in specific companies. LinkedIn has a very extensive search option that lets you find almost exactly who you’re looking for. You can pay for their premium level account and open up even more options for finding that specific client or audience.
Other locations where you’re going to find customers include…
- http://www.hunter.io Hunter.io is a researching site that lets you know emails of companies. If you already have a name of someone in a company, you can grab their email address.
- http://www.slack.com – You can join a Slack channel specific to your targeted industry and jump in on the conversation
- Referrals – If you’ve already worked for/with (including professors) someone TELL them that you’d love for them to refer you in the future. Be specific about what type of client you’d like to be referred to.
- Networking Face-to-Face – Go to free trade shows or join an organization that has your target clients. It’s gonna take some practice doing face-to-face conversations, so don’t feel like you’ve failed your first time out.
- Guest Posts – Contact blogs that you follow and offer to guest post. It’s a win-win for both as you get to show what you can do and they get additional content. Finding and researching your customers may become easier after guest posting because they will start coming to you.
- Contact people/organizations/business direct – Use LinkedIn to search for people in a particular field or matches your criteria. Use your local Chamber of Commerce to find companies in your area or demographics. Heck, even looking at Google search results for contact information may work.
Researching Customers/Clients
Now that you know where your customers are, you can then start to research what you’re trying to sell them. You want to validate what you THINK they want to buy to what they are REALLY willing to buy. This is the second part of finding and researching your customers.
Send out a quick survey to people that you’ve met or collected. Its a lot more effective if you have a phone conversation and talk to your person you are surveying. You can have notes, follow up questions, and get on a personal level with your audience. This does take a lot more time, but you’re able to have a more effective outcome.
https://trends.google.com/trends/
Want to see what is trending right now on Google and compare that with other things? You can use Google Trends to find keywords that are popular within your country/region. You can also see how long that trend word has been popular. Remember “Snuggies”? You can now know what the trend for that search term would be.
Social Media
Get onto Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to search for what you’re attempting to offer. Pay attention to what people are talking about and don’t be afraid to jump in! You can always ask questions about specific topics. After a while, you’ll be able to read between the lines.
Other places you can go to research include…
- http://www.reddit.com Sub-Reddits specific to your industry
- https://stackexchange.com/ – A list of communities where people ask specific questions. Perfect for collecting common, popular, and hot problems.
- https://feedly.com/i/welcome – Feedly is an aggregator of websites that funnels everything into a single dashboard. You can subscribe to a bunch of websites that give you up to date content that you can consume in a single location. You will get a better understanding of what is commonly being said across your industry.
- Mailing list – Create or join a mailing list to collectively gather people who will be your potential clients/customers. You can then interact with this gold mine to get ideas or questions answered.
- Conferences/Tradeshows – You can’t beat the ‘heard it from the horse’s mouth’ effect. Hit the pavement and attend shows or conferences that are specific to your niche. You’ll be able to rub elbows with your clients and get a direct quote of what their problems may be.
Conclusion
Don’t be downhearted if you think you’re taking a while finding and researching your customers. What you’re actually doing is refining your niche and zeroing in on your customers and clients. I would honestly spend about 40-60 hours of effort to find and research your customers. If you can understand what your audience is thinking, what their pains are, and a way to help, you’re ready to position yourself as the expert! The next step is to then register yourself to make sure you’re legally covered.
Share your thoughts
One Reply to “FHS 2: Finding and Researching Your Customers”