What your Target Market Really Wants and Values

Hello, amazing entrepreneurs. It's Kimberly Hobscheid with Entrepreneurs Rocket Fuel and I'm excited to share with you a really cool tool and technology that you'll be able to use in order to gain insights, just like the big boys do on your target market, on what they're looking for and what makes your product or service absolutely irresistible to them. All right, ladies and gentlemen, I am, as many of you know, I actually worked in a corporate environment for many, many years before I became a full time entrepreneur and businesses on the side, but became, before I became a full time entrepreneur, I was working in a corporate environment and many of the things that many of the people here on Entrepreneur's Rocket Fuel also had that experience where they worked for a big company before embarking on their own entrepreneurship. If you're not, no worries. I'm sure that you can follow along as well. But when you work in a corporate environment, you have large.

Departments that can handle certain things for you. And one of the most important things for positioning a product or service in the marketplace is insights on what the customer want, right? What they're really looking for, who they're really about. Sort of a multi dimensional picture of what the target market is. Now, if you are serving a group, hopefully you have a target market established that is easily self identifiable. That is, if you're standing in front of a room and you say, hey, tell me who in the room is a hiker, that people would be able to raise their hand or if they're not a hiker themselves, they would be able to think of people in their environment, in their sphere of influence who are that category of person that are hikers. Right? So something that's easy to attach onto, very easy to understand and a very specific group of human beings. Right. It's not, not too small, not too big, but the people who are in that target market can self identify or identify others in their sphere of influence who have that category. Right. So one of the things we need to do in a large corporation is find out like what for that target market really wants in order to have the best solution, the product or service that really is irresistible to them. All right? But you're an entrepreneur. You may not have an entire team that can be dedicated to customer insights and gathering information about their fears and frustrations and challenges and dreams and hopes and what they want to do later in their life. And you can't hire a whole bunch of people to sit in a room and start making phone calls for you. I get it. Entrepreneurs are very much bootstrapped folks, we got to figure this out on our own. But I'm going to tell you there is a totally cool way that you can do gather information about your target market within 24 to 48 hours, maybe 72 at the outside, but that you'll be able to actually get in with a group of your target market and be able to gather information about what they're looking for. That tool, ladies and gentlemen, that is super cool for entrepreneurs and I highly recommend it is meetup. Alright, so if you go out on meetup right now, you can search for your target market and things to do in your local area for that, right? So you would go on and put in the word hikers, for example, because you are maybe doing a new offering of a new pair of hiking shoes, right? Or maybe you're offering a service about what trails are available and like an app that shows what trails are accessible and what ones are, you know, no longer accessible because of flooding or something like that. So you have either a product or a service that's available for hikers. So you go into meetup and you put in hikers and then you find the activities that hikers are involved in in the next 24 to 72 hours. Now I'm sure that there will be something either evening or maybe this weekend upcoming that you will be able to find something that is involving hikers. Right now you may actually have to do some hiking when you get together with these people or, or you may be able to hang out afterwards if they're meeting up afterwards for a beer or something like that. But what you want to do is go ahead and join the group and then participate in one of the meetups. When you're participating, your goal is not going to be these are not your target markets, so you're going to sell the pajamas off of them. What you're actually going to do is gather information and insights and get market research from them. You want to go in as a hiker, right? And gather information.

By talking with them and having real conversations with them them as if they were real people. Because guess what? They are. And you will find the same multidimensionality of the people that you are in your target market as people do in corporate when they are making phone calls from a big room, right? In fact, you'll connect one on one with them, which will give you even better insights. Maybe you'll get even more information than you were expecting to get. So what you'll do is you'll go to the meetup and you'll participate just like a regular participant, but then you will also ask some certain questions. Right? So you're going to ask, you know, so what do you like about hiking? What do you like best about it? And when you are hiking, you know, what's most irritating about the pair of shoes that you're wearing? Or what's your favorite pair of shoes? Or how do you know when you have a pair of shoes that you're just going to love forever and ever? Or what makes you buy the same pair of shoes the second time? Or those kinds of questions that will get sort of their juices flowing and have them have real conversations with somebody who's hiking right next to them about what they're passionate about. Right. Something that they're very passionate about. So you may have a 1 to 45 minute conversation with one of your target market people in order to gain insights and information from them. You're going to ask them, you know, what are your greatest frustrations with the shoes that you're wearing? And what are your greatest frustrations with any pair of shoes? You know, what makes you throw a pair of shoes out? What are your greatest fears about buying a pair of shoes? You know, are you afraid to spend too little money because you're not going to, you know, the quality is not going to be there? Are you afraid to spend too much money? Are you afraid that you're going to use them three days and that they're going to give you blisters? Are you afraid that they're going to wear out too soon? You know, what are your greatest fears? What are your greatest frustrations with them? When you do buy a pair of shoes and you get them and they fit perfectly, then you know, something goes wrong. Like what frustrates you about a pair of shoes? Maybe the laces are breaking or maybe they're, you know, sort of irritating to tie up or they get hung up on, you know, the loops that are in the shoes. Or maybe there's something else about them. Maybe there's stitching that's on the inside that rubs against their feet in a certain way. All right, so what are your greatest fears, frustrations? What are your greatest challenges with buying shoes? Are you able to find them locally or do you have to order them online? What's the frustration with ordering them online? If you have an online sale, is a return policy really important to you? And then if you can have your dream pair of shoes, what would they look like? What's in a dream pair of hiking shoes for you? Is it, you know, like if they could be absolutely everything, what would be in them? What would be the perfect pair of shoes? You know, very, very light or very, very heavy or sturdy? Are they, you know, do they have to have grips on the bottom? What is it about the shoes that really would be your dream pair of shoes? And then, you know, sort of as you have those conversations with them, hopefully other people are chiming in as well as you're hiking up the mountain, right? Other people are like, oh, I have the best pair of shoes. They're from XYZ company and they really are fantast. What do you love about them so much? And gather information, alright? This is the grassroots bootstrapping down to earth, real touching human beings that are going to be in your potential target market. Your job is not to sell them your product. Your job is to gather information. And the reason that you're gathering information is because of step two. The reason that big corporations gather this information is not so that they can sell the people that they're on the phone to. What are they going to do with it? What's going to happen after they gather all that information? It's going to go to their marketing team and their marketing team is then going to put that same language into effect in order to create their marketing pieces for them. So we're going to talk about that on our next video. But in the meantime, I want you guys to join meetup, do a search for your target market and see what's out there and available in the next 24 to 72 hours that you can participate in where you can have a real life, honest to goodness, downhearted, bootstrapping, feet on the earth and, and doing it yourself kind of conversation with the people who are buying, potentially buying your products and services. All right, ladies and gentlemen, this is Kimberly Hobscheid with Entrepreneurs Rocket Fuel. If you don't already have somebody that can help you through the murky waters of becoming an entrepreneur and taking your business to the next level, whether that be five figures, six figures or seven figures, I would love to work with you to be able to help you to your next level. Fill out an application below or go to Entrepreneurs Rocket Fuel.

And fill out an application. Because I would love to get on the phone and chat with you about where your business is and how we can take it to the next level. Whether it's something that you need help with or whether it's just a little tweak or guidance or mentorship or accountability, knowledge, learning, tools, technology, whatever it is that you need. I would love to chat with you and see if we can't get your business from stuck to unstuck and move it to that next level. All right? Ladies and gentlemen, I am Kimberly Hobscheid with Entrepreneurs Rocket Fuel, and I look forward to working with you. Cheers.