So you have this great thing. This great product or service that you know makes a big difference to the lives of your potential customers, fills a gap in the market, is great value for money etc. It is the bee’s knees. It is the cat’s pajamas. It is the kippers knickers.
Nothing is quite so frustrating as giving your potential customers everything you think they want only to hear the sound of crickets when you ask for the sale.
There was a key word in that previous sentence. You may have missed it. The key word was “think”. What you THINK they need. It is easy to make some pretty wild assumptions about your market. You think you know them. You think you have what they want. You think you understand everything you need to about them. You are them right?
99% of the time you’re not your target market. They’re different to you. You have the solution and they don’t. You may have been like them once before so you can put yourself in their shoes to a point, but you’re not them now.
I was my target market for many years. I was trying to create an online course with no clue. I could not figure out how to get my course selling. It was incredibly frustrating until I moved the pieces around to create a plan that worked. I can remember my pain and frustration of the past really well, but I can’t specifically remember every pain point I had. I now know how to do the stuff that my target market are getting stuck on. It is easy for me so I forget that it was once hard.
I held a live webinar for Create Your First Online Course a few months ago. There were 96 people registered for the live webinar. Despite a full pre-webinar series including workbook and reminder emails only 12 people showed up live. ARRGHHH!
Now I know it is difficult to get people to watch a webinar replay, my sales usually come from people on live. I made 4 sales that day so although it was $1988 in revenue it could have been so much more. Imagine if 30 people turned up instead of 12!
Why don’t you just ask them?
I spent hours trying to figure out how to get people to attend live. I asked peers what I had done wrong. I went back over everything with a fine tooth comb.. and then finally…. I asked the people who mattered!
My market doesn’t like live webinars. I was giving them something they found difficult to fit into their schedules. Most of my Create Your First Online Course market have full-time businesses or jobs, they can’t just turn up live to a webinar. Does this mean I will never do live webinars? Nope! I will test them against other methods to see what gets the best results!
All I had to do was ask!
Since the big realisation that just asking people what works for them I have gone nuts with it. I now have a lot of 3 to 4 answer questions scattered around in my marketing and it is working a treat! I can see exactly what my market want and then give it to them! I ask everything from where they’re at in their business right now through to why they didn’t invest in my product or service.
There is a trick to this though! You can’t simply ask “why didn’t you buy this product” because you will get a lot of “it’s too expensive” type answers. Price has very little to do with a buying decision. The buying decision is about value.
You can see from my examples above I didn’t ask “why didn’t you turn up to my live webinar?”. I asked what their preferred method of content delivery was in the Facebook poll and what stage they were at in the questionnaire.
Never, ever, ever, ever ask your market about price. If you simply ask “what price would you be willing to pay” you’re setting yourself up for massive problems. You need to be more strategic with your questions. Price is not something you outsource! You can read more about that here.
I use Thrive Quiz Builder to embed questions into my site. I love it! It is so easy to use and it keeps people on my website, it doesn’t take them away to an external link. I am also getting quite fancy at the moment and connecting that quiz to my email service provider so I can send very specific content based on the answers people give. You could use Survey Monkey too though. There is a free version to get you started.
If you have your own Facebook business page or group you can also start a poll. If you’re going to start a poll in a group that doesn’t below to you make sure you check the group rules and be careful about asking questions in groups that are not made up almost entirely of your target market. You will get a whole lot of feedback from the wrong people which is a really bad idea!