The final step is to formally ask your market to take a survey in order to better understand their challenges in the niche.
TIP: You can make it easy to distribute your survey and collect the results by using a tool like SurveyMonkey.com.
The key to a good survey is to make sure you’re not asking leading questions. Elsewhere, we’ve talked about how to create questions that don’t bias the reader. However, another important point to make is that sometimes you can inadvertently bias your survey takers simply based on the ORDER you ask the questions.
For example, if you ask your participants a bunch of questions in a row about money (how much they make, how much they spend in the niche, etc.), they’re going to have money on their minds for the rest of the survey. If you start asking them how much they’d pay for a particular solution in your niche, you may get low-ball answers. That’s because survey participants are suddenly very aware of their niche spending habits – if they perceive those habits as too extravagant, then they may decide right there while taking the survey that they’re not going to spend as much money in the niche.
So, how do you get around this problem of the question order inadvertently leading the subjects to particular answers?
One of the best ways to do this is by randomizing the order of the questions. That means that when Suzy comes to take the survey, she’ll answer questions in one order. When Joe take the survey, he’ll get the questions presented in a different order than Suzy. When Manuel takes the survey, the order of his questions will be different than both Suzy’s and Joe’s survey. If you randomize the order for all your survey takers, then you won’t get results that are biased due to the order of the question.
Go back to the money example above. If the money questions are randomized in the survey, then subjects won’t be so acutely aware of their spending habits (because you’ll get them thinking about other facets of the niche). And you’ll get better, more accurate answers.
Here are examples of questions to ask:
- What are your greatest problems/challenges in the niche?
- What solutions have you tried?
- Have those solutions worked for you? If not, why not?
- What do you like best about the solutions you’re currently using?
- How would you improve the solutions you’re currently using?
- What is your [niche relevant] goal?
- What sort of products do you need to achieve this goal?
- What sort of information do you need to achieve this goal?
- What features would you like to see in a (niche-relevant) product?
Be sure to also collect demographic information from your audience, such as age, gender, where they live and all the other data points we talked about previously.
The reason this is important is because your niche market may have slightly different demographics than the ones you uncovered via Pew Research or other scholarly sources.
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And here’s something else…
If you get enough surveys, you may be able to start creating different customer avatars based on your different market segments.
For example, let’s suppose you sell weight loss solutions to women. You may realize one segment of your market consists of new moms who want to lose the baby weight, while another segment consists of middle-age women who are struggling with weight loss because their metabolisms are slowing down. Once you know you’re serving two distinct segments of the market, it’s going to give you a better idea of how to better connect with your prospects. You may even segment your lists into these two groups (such as by offering two different lead magnets, each of which could appeal to a specific segment). You could then create content and products that are aimed at these two different segments.
Bottom line: the more you know about your audience, the easier it will be for you to connect with them and influence them!
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