Another way to find out what your audience wants is asking them directly. Here are three ways to do it:
- Use Written Surveys. Use a tool like SurveyMonkey to create your survey. Then distribute your survey across your niche, including:
- Sending the survey to your mailing list.
- Posting your survey on social media.
- Distributing the survey in niche groups on Facebook.
- Asking your partners to share your questionnaire.
- Advertising your survey using pay per click marketing or Facebook ads.
You’ll want to examine your survey-takers pool carefully to make sure you haven’t inadvertently surveyed a biased sample.
For example, if you distribute your survey in one place – such as in a very targeted Facebook group – you might believe that your audience is rabid about a particular kind of product. However, perhaps the truth is that yes, that particular segment of the audience is rabid – but it’s also VERY small. So, if you invested a lot of time and money creating a product for this market thinking you were going to sell a ton – but you sold a tiny handful because the actual audience is smaller than you thought – you’d lose money.
Point is, be sure your sample is an accurate representation of your audience.
- Utilize Informal Methods. You can spend time talking to your market to better understand what they want. Examples include:
- Asking questions in social media groups.
- Posting casual questions on your social media platforms.
- Talking to members of your niche offline (e.g., at niche meet ups).
- Creating a focus group to get insight into what your audience wants.
3. Use Sales Tools. With this method, you don’t ask your prospects about what they want. Instead, you try to sell certain types of products to them and see if they respond favorably. Here’s how:
- Create a “lite” version of a product. The idea here is to quickly create a stripped-down version of the product you have in mind. For example, if you’re thinking about creating an app, you might develop an app with limited features to see how it sells. Or if you want to sell a video course, you might offer an “overview” video course on the same topic.
If people respond favorably to your lite version, then there’s a good chance they’ll respond favorably to your full version too. (And better yet, you’ll have a list of customers in place who’re very likely to purchase your full product.)
- Sell a related affiliate product. For this method, you don’t have to spend a single second creating a product yourself. Instead, promote an affiliate offer that’s as close as possible to the product idea you have in mind. If this affiliate offer sells well, then your product will too (especially if your product is superior to this affiliate offer).
- Set up a “fake” sales letter. Here you don’t have to use someone else’s offer, nor do you have to create a product at all yourself. Instead, all you have to do is write the sales letter for the product you want to create. Except when people click on the order button, they won’t be taken to an order form. Instead, they’ll land on an opt-in page that tells them the product isn’t ready yet, but if they join the list they’ll be notified of when it is ready.
You’ll then look at how many people click on the order button and join the list, which will give you a really good idea of how popular the product is likely to be.
Take note: in all three methods mentioned above, the sales letter can have a big impact on conversion rates. You may start thinking that there is no demand for the product, when in fact you just have an ineffective sales letter. That’s why you’ll want to make sure you use a high-converting sales letter. In the case of your own product, it’s worth the investment to hire a professional copywriter (especially if you’re not knowledgeable and skilled in this area).
Bottom line…
The key to doing product research is to use as many of the above research methods as possible. The more you research your idea, the more confident you can be of your results.
Note: in some cases, you may notice that a fad has taken hold of your niche. If you invest all your time and resources into chasing this fad, you’re going to end up with a product that’s very likely to get outdated quickly.
On the other hand, you may notice that evergreen products (those with time-tested solutions) don’t have that crazy burst of sales as the fad/trendy products.
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So, what to do?
Here’s a potential solution: create a product that has mostly evergreen components, and then include some trendy components to boost sales. One of the best ways to do this is to create an evergreen main product, and then include related trendy products as bonuses.
The big benefit of riding the coattails of a trend using your bonus package is that it’s very easy to change your offer when that particular trend becomes outdated. In fact, you can even swap out the bonuses for a new set of bonuses that capitalize on the next rising trend.
Point is, you never have to change your main offer. Any time and money investment you make in creating the main product will pay off, because you can sell the main evergreen piece for years to come. And yet you can also enjoy that sales burst by creating “trendy” bonuses. It’s the best of both worlds!
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