How to Find Out What Your Customer Really Needs

This method isn’t a shortcut, but it will tell you exactly what your customer really needs – and what she really wants to buy.

You’re going to have to go where people are that are interested in that topic and, likely, fastest way to do it is to run advertising, and get people to become subscribers, and ask them what their needs are.

Now, is that a lot of work?

Yes.

Is it any different than the due diligence that you would put into opening up a pizza joint? If you were going to invest $100k of your hard earned retirement money on a pizza joint, would you spend a month or two doing research in town? Would you spend money every night, you would eat pizza at a different restaurant, and you would take notes about what you liked about the restaurant and what you liked.

Do Real Market Research

Internet business is no different. There’s this idea that we can just jump online and in 24hrs we can have our business up and have all our answers. It’s just not true! It’s just as hard to start an online business as it is to start an offline business.

Now, there may be lower barriers to entry. It may be something you can do from home, instead of going somewhere. It may be something you don’t have to invest $100k in a brick and mortar building and a lease. But, it’s just as hard, if not harder to build that online business. People talk a lot about the failure rate of offline businesses. Have you looked at the failure rate of online businesses? Why is it so much higher? Well, because it’s difficult! And, it’s not as easy as so many folks make it out to be.

Don’t this step off. Don’t say you’ll just buy someone else’s report. Get the results yourself. I genuinely believe that. It’s really easy, you go over to Google AdWords of Facebook ads and you run 3k visitors that are interested in my topic to an ask page. And that ask page is going to ask them a few questions. And it’s going to get their name and e-mail address. And, in exchange, you’re going to give them a cheat sheet or something, in your niche.

Setting Up Your “Ask Page”

So, you’re going to have to create some kind of a cheat sheet. This training’s not about giveaway’s and cheat sheets, so I won’t go any deeper into that. And, you’re going to run what we call an ask page. And, by the way, give credit where credit’s due, Alex Mandossian taught me this; I think he invented the concept.

At the top of the page you either offer a cheat sheet, or you offer to solve somebody’s problem for them. And, you just do it for free. You’ll solve their problem for them for free. Or, you give them a cheat sheet. And, what you’re going to do on that page, you’re going to ask them for a name and e-mail address so you can put them on your e-mail list so you can communicate with them a few times back and forth. And then you’re going to ask 3 questions.

I like to use Glen Livingston’s questions, and Perry Marshal also uses them. They’re printed in Perry Marshal’s book 80/20 Marketing. I’m going to give you kind of a reduced, boiled down version of these 3 questions. You’ll ask these 3 questions on your ask page.

Question 1 is – What is your single biggest challenge in … whatever the topic is. So if you’re looking for people that you’re wanting to find out is there an unmet need in the dog training niche. You’re going to run an ask page that says download, and folks, this isn’t about giving you the highest level, highest quality copy writing headlines right now. This is conceptual here, download free cheat sheet, how to potty train your dog in 3 days. To download it, please fill out the form below.

Name, e-mail, question 1. What is your single biggest challenge in potty training your dog?

The 2nd question is, how difficult has it been to find an answer to this problem? This is the Glen Livingston twist.

The 3rd question is. What would it mean for you if you could solve this problem?

And, what’s going to happen is, if you run this traffic from Adwords or Facebook ads, you may get 500 subscribers. And, 170 of them will fill this out.

So, you’re going to get 170 people that are going to tell you what their biggest problem is. You’ll probably find that 90 of them have a very similar problem. 50 of them have another problem. And the rest of them have some scattered problems. This tells you the unmet needs of the marketplace – start building out your products on these.