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Do research. Build a Business Plan for Success”
How To Conduct Market Research For Your Business
One of the biggest mistakes any internet marketer can make is to fail to understand their market. Before you start spending all of your time and money dedicated to one target niche or product, you need to do some thorough market research.
Don’t even begin to create a business plan until you’ve done the following
#1 Keyword Research
Keyword research is the first step for most online marketers. It helps you understand what people are searching for online and what words they’re using. There are numerous tools that can help you to do this research, including Google’s own AdWords Keyword Tool, a free and paid tool from Wordtracker and a popular software program called a Market Samurai.
It takes a little practice to learn to do keyword research well but knowing the most commonly searched terms, will help you target the problems that people are facing.
It also means that you can optimise any content that you create. Helping it rank in the search engines.
#2 Know the problems
When you know the problems that people are facing in your target market, you can create solutions. Solutions sell!
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- Look at the questions people are asking and why they’re asking them.
- Look for the places your target market hangs out, like forums or Facebook groups and lurk there.
- Watch the discussions that take place and the questions asked.
If there are problems that people could viscerally talk about, you’ve just found a great opportunity to provide a solution.
Amazon Best Sellers
#3 Paint a Portrait of Your Customers
It helps to paint a portrait of your ideal customer in as much detail as possible. This isn’t necessarily a visual picture though. Some people do that, but one that describes little details about them.
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- What are their demographics such as age, gender, occupation, where they live, etc?
- What’re some of the lingoes that they use?
- Do they tend to have similar interests or hobbies?
Write it all down. Some marketers even keep this list in front of them whenever they write anything for or to their customers.
#4 Who Are Your Competitors?
Know your enemy. Well, they aren’t really your enemy, but you need to have a full understanding of who your competitors are so that you know just what you need to do to be successful..
Identify your biggest competitors by looking at who else is selling solutions.
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- When you search for answers to the problems that your market has, what are they selling?
- Where are they selling it?
- What kind of language do they use in their sales copy?
- How does one competitor differentiate themselves from another?
- What are the prices of their products and what kind of backend sales do they do?
You can become a customer of some of your biggest competitors and literally stock them by learning their sales process and the types of emails and follow up that they do. This will give you ideas on what you can do to compete with them.
While it can take what seems like a lot of time, market research can save you from sinking a fortune in time and money in a doomed venture.
The more market research that you do from the start to understand your market, the less risk you face
Continue to the next video How to Pick Your Business Model.
