How to ACTUALLY Do Market Research for Your Business

In this video, I'm going to show you 6 of my best strategies for effective market research that you can use today. These strategies will get you fast results. They're easy to do, and most importantly, they work. Right now, there are thousands of other people offering the same thing that you are or that you want to offer if you're just getting started. And what's going to make you stand out from the crowd is how well you understand your audience, because a business who understands their customer best wins. It took me years to figure out that this was a missing piece to selling my products online, 'Cause before that, I was just building products that I thought people wanted, like most people do, rather than doing the market research so that I know that my products are gonna sell because it takes a lot of effort, it takes a lot of time to build great products, especially a product that's gonna live on for years or even decades. Market research is one of the most important and profitable activities that you can do, and it doesn't need to take you months or years of doing this. By using the strategies I'm about to share with you, you'll be able to get an insane amount of information that is quality in about a week or even a couple of days. Hey friend, I'm James Allen, founder of Profit Your Knowledge, where we help people turn their knowledge into an online business, teaching, coaching, creating digital products like online courses, ebooks, selling those things to the world and making a big impact. I believe that you have something great inside of you and you just need to learn how to get it out there. To help you get there the fastest way possible, I created a full 1-hour masterclass that's gonna show you how to turn your knowledge into $2,000 per month of passive income in just 5 hours a week without complicated tech. The masterclass is 3 parts. First, I'm gonna show you how to create transformational products that people actually wanna buy before you build them. Then I'm gonna show you how to create a simple non-techie system that sells that product for you whether you're working or not. And then to wrap it up, we're gonna talk about how to drive consistent traffic without having to post on social media every day to that system so you can sell that digital product. And that's how you make passive income. And this isn't just theory. The masterclass is filled with tools, templates, and examples to help you get your online business up and running ASAP. There's a link in the description, or you can always go to profityourknowledge.com/masterclass. So the very first thing that we want to do in terms of market research is to create a document. Now, this document is going to be your best friend, and I encourage you to store this somewhere where you will easily be able to access it. I personally like to use a Google Doc, but you can use a Word doc, or you can use the Notes app on your phone. You could also do spreadsheet. I don't really care as long as you collect this information. That's the most important thing. So find whatever works for you. Now, what I'd encourage you to do is to create 3 sections to this document or sheet that you create. Section number 1 is challenges, pains, and frustrations. Section 2 is hopes, dreams, and desires. And section 3 is obstacles, barriers, and uncertainties. When you've created your 3 categories, what we want to do is use the next 6 strategies that I'm going to share with you to find great information and anything great that you find, you're going to store into this document. The goal with this document is to fill it with emotionally charged phrases. A big mistake that I made when I was first starting to do this was just filling it with everything that I could find. And then over time, I would revisit this document and run through and be like, why did I add that there? And I had to delete a lot of things. So emotionally charged phrases are the goal. For example, if I was a fitness coach and I asked you, What, what do you really want? What's your big goal when it comes to fitness? And you said, I want to lose weight. That is not an emotionally charged phrase. When you can dig deep and find the real pain that someone has or the real dream that they have, and they say, I just wish that I could lose weight so I could feel lighter and not have to have so much strain on my knees and my joints. And ultimately, I want to lose weight and be healthy so I can set an example for my kids that their dad isn't just some lazy, overweight person. That is the kind of stuff that we want to fill this document with. So once you have your document, let's dive into my 6 best strategies for market research. Number 1 is Amazon book reviews. Go to Amazon at the search bar, click on books for the category and type in keywords related to your offer. Pay attention to the title because that's helpful when you're creating your own products. If a book has a lot of reviews, It means that people bought it, means that people were interested in it. And most importantly, the authors that created those books, I guarantee if they're selling well, they did their own market research. Some people even have teams of people that help them with the market research because it's so important. So you can get inspiration and ideas from what is already working in terms of books when you're going to create your own book or an ebook or digital product like an online course or membership site as well. When you find some good books, we want to look for both positive and negative reviews. It will take some digging digging to go through, but this is a great activity to do instead of scrolling on social media. You can just be digging through some Amazon book reviews and seeing what people loved about the book or what people didn't like about the book or what they wish was included in it. And a lot of times they're gonna share their personal experience of being like, I'm dealing with this and that's what I was really hoping to get from this book. And that's all great research that you can take and add to your document. So when you find these emotionally charged phrases where you can read it and feel like, wow, I can't believe that person just shared that. You can copy it and paste that directly into your document. Market research strategy number 2 is YouTube comments. What we wanna do here is find creators that are doing something similar to you. They're in the same niche, maybe they've built a lot more of an audience, that's usually a good person to go for. And the goal is to look for conversational comments. A lot of times when you follow someone really big like Alex Hormozi will say, If you go through his comments, a lot of people will say like, oh, this is great, love you, Alex. And they say things like that and it's just, there's nothing really there. So again, this is gonna take a bit of digging just like Amazon book reviews. But every now and then you'll find a creator who maybe isn't as big as Alex Hormozi or another influencer in your space, but their comments are gold because they're going back and forth and people are sharing their actual story, their situation, how this content resonates with them or maybe doesn't resonate with them. And all of that is amazing market research that you can find and add to your document. So as you're digging through YouTube comments again, add emotionally charged phrases to your document in the correct category. Market research strategy number 3 are Facebook groups. What we want to do here is find groups that your target market would be hanging out in and then join them. Once you're inside the group, use the search icon in the top right corner of the group page and type in words like struggle or challenge. What Facebook will do is highlight those keywords that you put in and dig through every single post that has ever been put into this Facebook group. And then we want to do is find what your audience are talking about related to this topic that you're interested in or interested in building a product around. Again, as you're reading through, add emotionally charged phrases to your document in the correct category. Market research strategy number 4 are online forums. Type in a question that your audience would type into Google and then just add Reddit or Quora. Reddit and Quora are two of the biggest forums on the internet, and they have topics related to literally anything that you can think about. And these are real questions that people are asking. And then there's experts who answer the questions as well. But again, we're finding those conversational pieces related to whatever you typed in to Reddit or Quora. Pay attention to the conversations that people are having related to your product. And again, add emotionally charged phrases to your document. Market research strategy number 5 is to run a survey. This is great if you have access to a large group of your target audience. Oftentimes when I'm working with private clients, they don't have a lot of time to dig through and sift through information, but they do have connections and they have access to a big audience. And that's where it makes sense to run a survey. But if you're brand new, you're just getting started out and you don't really have access to any kind of audience like that, then maybe running a survey isn't the best option at this time. Even if you have a small email list of a couple hundred people, you can still run a survey and get some awesome information. The way that you would create the survey is by having 3 to 5 questions. And the first question related to challenges, pains, and frustrations would be, what is your biggest challenge or frustration related to blank? The second question would be about hopes, dreams, and desires. And you could ask, what is your biggest hope, dream, or desire when it comes to blank? Now, I'm sure you've taken a survey with 50 questions on it and it's taken you 15 to 20 minutes plus to run through it. Unless you really like the person and really want to help them out, you're probably not going to want to take that survey. So we want to keep our survey short by having it be about 3 to 5 questions and make it easy to fill out, but still giving us that great information. So ideally, keep your survey mostly bullet points, but keep one free write answer at the end. And I usually like to have the free write be the obstacles, barriers, and uncertainties. And to turn that into a question, just ask, what is your biggest obstacle, barrier, or uncertainty you have related to blank? The free write answers often give you the juiciest information because it's coming straight from the person in their own words. And that's what we really want. To build out your form, I'd recommend using a free tool like Jotform or Google Forms. And as you get your survey answers in or Remember to add emotionally charged phrases to your document in the respective category. And market research strategy number 6 is by far the most powerful. This is live conversations. Now, live conversations are by far the most powerful form of market research because you can genuinely sit down with your audience and ask questions and dig deep as much as you can. If you're a fitness coach helping people get into amazing shape and you're doing your market research, You can sit down with people and ask them like, what is your biggest challenge related to getting in the optimal level of shape that you want or something like that? And if they say, I, you know, I just, I want to lose weight, you can say, okay, well, why is losing weight so important to you? How come? What is it about losing weight that would really help you and transform your life? It's those why questions. If you've seen the movie Shrek where ogres have layers, people do too. And that's what we're doing here. Every time we ask why or how come, we're peeling back the layers to this person until we get down to the part that makes us cry. And it's not about hurting people or making them cry. It's just getting down to what's really going on here. What's the real motive? Why do they want to lose weight so bad? Because nobody just wants a result. They don't want to just build a business. They don't want to just lose weight or just know how to bake and make great food. There's always a deep driving reason as to why they want that. And that's the goal that we want to find. And live conversations are amazing because you have the luxury of digging deep, assuming that they're comfortable enough to do that with you. And on these live calls, you're not selling anything. If someone's really interested in working with you, you can book a secondary call where you could talk about working together. So as you promote this to people and say, hey, I'm doing market research for a program I want to make, and I just want to ask some questions, it'll be really short, maybe about 15 to 20 minutes. Is that okay? And I would blatantly tell them there's nothing to sell you here. But if you are interested in working with me and it feels like a good fit, we can always book another call. But it's not the point of this call. And when you sit down the call, structure it around the 3 categories. So again, what's your biggest challenge, frustration, pain related to X? What's your biggest hope, dream, or desire related to X? And what do you think is the biggest barrier, obstacle, or uncertainty that you have that's getting in the way of you achieving that. So you want to find out where they are, where do they want to be, and what's getting in the way of them getting from point A to point B. And again, add those emotionally charged phrases to your document in the correct category. If you actually use these strategies, then within a week or less you will have an insane amount of gold. So when you write emails, you create your website, you create digital products or write a book or create a sales page, you can always fall back on this document and have pure gold that is straight from your audience that you can use to communicate with that audience in terms of your emails, sales copy, products. And you're going to know that you're building things that people genuinely care about. Find the demand and then supply that demand. Now, whether you're just starting out or you've been doing this for a while, once you've really done good market research like this, I'd encourage you to go back to your website and your overall online presence and brand and make sure that everything is connecting to what your audience is now saying, because now you really know what they want. And to help you best use all this information that you've collected, you should check out this video where I show you how to build a profitable website. If this video was helpful to you, please give it a thumbs up. And if you have any questions at all, let me know in a comment below. Take what you learned here, get out there, make something happen. I will see you in the next one.