Market Research is SO Important — But You Don’t Have to Pay Big Money for It!

Did you know that you can pay marketing companies massive amounts of money for marketing, but you can do it yourself? Plus — here is an even bigger secret, the majority of the marketing companies who are charging top dollar, aren’t even doing the research needed to identify the correct market space for your business.

I cannot tell you how many network meetings I sit in and how many new business owners I talk to, they have no idea who their ideal client is. The first step is figuring out who this is — your client avatar.

You can google search client avatar for different businesses, and you can find client avatar sheets that you can fill out, but get as specific as possible. Oftentimes, I’ve done worksheets like this, and I’ve just written out a story of my client’s routine. What time he gets up, where he goes, and what he does: He stops at the coffee shop, he reads the newspaper, etc.

This gets you crystal clear on who your client avatar is. If you don’t know who you desire to have, as a customer, you’re never gonna find them. When you are ambiguous you’re like throwing spaghetti on a wall and hoping something sticks, right?

But when you dial this in and focus on the ideal attributes of clients that you want, the more you attract those rockstar clients. If you do not know your client, you cannot market to them, you absolutely cannot do this.

Now that you’ve defined your top client, interview 50 of your top clients and ask them questions like:

What would you expect?
What were their pain points?
Why did they need your services?
What did they get online in search for Google?
Were they doing YouTube searches? If they were, what were the phrases that they were using?
Once you get that data, build a spreadsheet, and write out common themes and patterns that you found within your market research, Evaluate that data and you can pivot your business accordingly.

By doing this, you are doing market research.

After struggling with my own marketing here at Modig, I finally asked a marketing company why they weren’t doing market research. I said, “You’re willing to take thousands of dollars from me each month, and you have no idea what’s going to work or not work?”

Here’s what he said to me — He said, “We find the winnable words”. I said “Well, how do you find the winnable words?” , and he’s like, “Well, it just takes time”.

I was like, “Hold up. So you’re willing to take my money for three, six months a year, and you’re gonna just wait six plus months before you actually have the winnable words?” And he’s said “yeah, that’s how we figure it out”. I asked why they weren’t doing market research and he told me that unless a company has massive amounts of money, it was impossible because it’s just way too expensive.

And I thought to myself, hold up, because I had just got done doing it myself, because I was so frustrated/ I literally put my business on pause and stopped taking on new clients for two months. All because I thought, if I don’t get crystal clear about this, I’m gonna keep banging my head against the wall trying to figure out wasting money, time, effort, energy, all of it on strategies that don’t work.

And quite frankly, this is how I learned the marketplace.

The marketplace did not even know that divorce recovery was a thing. Every single person that I interviewed had no clue that that divorce recovery was even a thing that was an option. So I was faced with this strategy of educating an entire market about divorce? Divorce recovery? What’s the timeframe that’s going to take? What’s the expense now that I know this about them — that they don’t even know, they’re not searching for divorce recovery, which is what all of my marketing companies thought they were doing, right?

But this is not the case. Until we know what the market is looking for, hunting, and wanting, we have no idea what to do with our marketing dollars, where to spend our energy, or where to put any of our efforts.

If you aren’t quite sure what you should do next after learning about your market, message us over here at Modig Leadership and we can help guide you and your team in the direction of success!