So many small business owners, coaches and infopreneurs sometimes make the mistake of creating or promoting products and services they’re passionate about without really knowing if there is a market for them. This ends up being terribly discouraging because they’re not sure why they’re not making sales.
It’s actually fairly easy to do your own basic market research to discover what people are hungry and willing to pay you for before you start. Just think of how much easier it would be to make multiple sales if you had a product lots of people wanted. Next, if you knew what price people were willing to pay for it, where the “sweet spot” was, you’d be raking in the sales. Here are some simple ways to gather this information.
Keyword Research
Using a keyword research tool like
nichebotclassic.com, you can open a free account and search for any number of keyword phrases. When you find phrases that have a large number of daily searches you’re onto something. When people search for information it often means they are looking to buy and are targeted leads.
Say you want to create an e-book about “how to improve your diet in 30 days” because you coach people with health and weight issues or you sell health supplements. Find out what phrases people search for who are looking to improve their diet, since these are your target clients. Maybe they search for “help losing weight” or “healthy recipes”. You’ll need to get creative to get inside the head or your prospective customer to find out how they approach the search. Once you find these keyword phrases you can use them to name your report, book or product and use them on your related web pages. If few people are searching for a phrase, that’s a big red flag.
Top Competitor Research
When you do a search for the keyword phrases you’ve discovered as popular, what websites come up in the first page of results? Look at these websites. Are they direct competitors? If not, you may have a phrase that’s not quite hitting the target. If they are competitors, what products are they selling? How do they position those products? What sales language do they use?
By doing some investigation you can get an idea of what people are buying and what type of marketing message is getting a response.
Blogs and Forums
Do a Google search for blogs and forums using the keyword phrases you’ve discovered. Identify the top 5 blogs and forums on the topic and visit them. Take some time to read the posts and comments to see what people are talking about. These can also be places where you start to participate in conversations with potential customers and ask them what they wish they could find, buy or learn.
Social Networking Sites
Facebook and Twitter are great places to do informal surveys of your target market. Do a search on your keyword phrase at
search.twitter.com to see who is discussing the topic.
Amazon
Find out what the most popular books are in your market, niche or on your topic. If people are buying these books, then they are hungry for the type of information that’s in them. Read the reviews as well to find out what people want and what they responded to.
Pricing
The final piece of the puzzle is pricing. Once you have an idea of what competitors charge for similar products or services, set up 2 web pages that are the same, but offer the product at 2 different prices. Direct some of your marketing to send people to one page and some to the other. See where you get the most sales. That’s a simplistic way to find the “sweet spot”. Too cheap is as bad as too expensive. If your price is too low, people will question the value they’re getting. If it’s too high, or higher than the perceived value, they won’t buy. Your price needs to be what the market will bear and you have to prove in your sales message that the value matches the price. If you can create the perception that the value matches the price (and you need to deliver on that perception), you can charge a bit more.
Follow these simple suggestions to improve your sales dramatically.
