How To Do Market Research - The Correct Way

When reading this, you probably already identified a niche in which you’re wanting to target, whether that be real estate agents, women over 55 who want to lose weight, helping corporate companies dial in their outbound prospecting, installing sales teams into companies that are capped at $100k/mo, etc.

Now we want to be digging as deep as we can into that particular niche so that we know exactly where the nerves lie, what triggers our market, how our market thinks, and so on.

Competitor Analysis

1. Who are your biggest competitors?
2. Why do people buy from them? (lifestyle, personality, education)
3. What makes up your competitor’s offer?

(NOTE: Eg, what are their deliverables? What’s the common pricing? How’s the payment structures? PIF? Split? Pre-pay? Recurring? What are the typical guarantees used (if any)?
Remember, we’re wanting to make our offer BETTER than any of your competition in every way possible.
One of the best ways to ENSURE your offer and deliverables FAR EXCEED your competitions is to buy what they’re selling. This gives you insight like no other. I literally purchased every single program out there so that I can simply make mine better.)

4. What is/are the common transformation/s being promised by these competitors?
5. What are the common headlines used?
6. What are the common mechanisms?

(NOTE: The mechanism refers to the ‘how’. Often times it’s the ‘by using... x,y,z’. The ‘x,y,z, in this case is the mechanism.
It’s important to make this unique because it can hook people in a LOT more. If you say we help agency owners get more meetings with email outreach...
You’re not going to hook a lot of people in because every agency owner is tired of using ‘email outreach’ AND they have a preconceived notion that emails don’t work, so they won’t be intrigued by your offer.
If you were to offer a service to agency owners that helped them increase their meetings booked via emails, that would be the ‘how’.
However, your mechanism MUST be perceived as unique.
Instead of advertising it’s by virtue of ‘email outreach’, you could advertise that your mechanism is ‘By Using Our AI-Based Sniper System’)

7. What are the common angles leveraged in the compt ads/funnels/YT videos etc?

(NOTE: List the common marketing levers used by your competition.
Dive deep into their VSLs, webinars, YouTube videos and any other content you can get your hands on. These pieces of content (especially VSLs, Webinars, etc) have SO MUCH market research compiled into one 30m-60m video that it can give you 60-70% of the answers you need on your niche because alllll of the research has already been done for you.
Also, be looking for:
What angles are they using?
What claims are they making?
What are they routinely alluding to that the market wants?)

8. What (if any) are the common phrases used to describe/detail/explain your competition?
9. List ALL communities (paid + unpaid) within your niche below:

Niche Analysis (Key Questions To Find Answers To)

Your Specific Ideal Customer/Client

1. What makes them toss and turn at night? What makes their palms sweat? What are the 1 or 2 things that give them near anxiety when they think about it not being solved?
2. What scares them? What makes them scared about it?
3. What are their 3 biggest daily frustrations?
4. What do they desire the most?

(NOTE: Go beneath the surface level...
Eg, they desire more customers, however, the reason they desire more customers is because their ultimate desire is...)

5. What is common language within your niche that, if they hear or see those words/phrases, they automatically tune into that specific conversation/dialogue?

State 1 And State 2 Of Your Market

1. What is the current state of your market? Where is 90% of your niche currently?
2. Why are they wanting to leave their current state? What’s painful about being in their CS? What’s the motivation behind them wanting to get out?
3. What’s your niche’s perception of their desired state? Why is their desired state so much better than where they currently are? What’s going to be different once they achieve their DS?
4. Why is 90% of the market still stuck in their CS? If 10% (for example) of the market have made the switch from state 1 to state 2, why haven’t the remaining 90%? What’s stopping them? Beliefs or strategies? What are the roadblocks (mental or physical) that are in their way?
5. What are they currently doing to try and blast through those roadblocks? Why isn’t that working? How do they feel about continuing to do something that isn’t working and won’t help them get to their desired destination?
6. From a belief/mental standpoint, what are they believing to be true that’s holding them back? Why are they believing these things to be true? Why are the 90% still hung up on these mental (oftentimes false) beliefs when the 10% were able to break past them?
7. What’re the things holding them back from believing THEY can do it even though they see other people achieve the same desire they so desperately want?
8. If heard in a conversation, what would make your niche instantly interrupt and join in?

Emotional Analysis

List Problems, Pains, Fears, Frustrations

List Dreams, Desires, Hopes, Wants + Needs

Objections [you can add these in your spreadsheet]

What is your niche thinking/feeling/seeing/hearing in their current situation looking at their desired destination?

Market Awareness

(NOTE: This concept of ‘Market Awareness’ is pulled from the great book ‘Breakthrough Advertising’ and is vital to understand when advertising)

• Most Aware
  • The market knows the product name and price i.e Nike or someone you’ve already had a sales call with but didn’t close, etc.
• Product Aware
  • The market knows the product but is unaware of the price. They may or may not know about you, but they know there are products to solve their problems, however, they don’t know the correlated pricing.
• Solution Aware
  • In this market they know there’s some kind of solution to their problem somewhere… and if they don’t, they at least know they want a solution to their problem. This is where most of you will fall into as this makes up a large portion of the overall market. If they know there’s a solution, you ought to keep your advertising extremely benefit-driven and if they don’t, you need to focus on educating rather than selling them.
• Problem Aware
  • Your market may or may not feel any specific pain/may not know they have a problem as of yet. If they don’t feel pain/don’t know they have a problem then you must focus on creating that pain or problem first. If they do feel the pain/know they have a problem then you need to speak to benefits.
• Unaware
  • This is where you’re creating a completely new market (I do not recommend playing in this market).

The Spectrum Between 1-5

(Using MMO and an agency as the vehicle)

1. Working 9-5 and don’t realise I hate it (Unaware <= Broadest)
2. I now realise I hate it but don’t know what to do about it (Problem Aware <= Smaller)
3. I realise I hate it and I’ve realised MMO is the best option to change it (Problem Aware <= Smaller)
4. I realise I hate it and I’ve realised MMO is the best option to change it and I’ve realised an agency is the best vehicle (Solution Aware <= Smaller)
5. I realise I hate working 9-5, and I’ve realised MMO is the best option to change it and I’ve realised an agency is the best vehicle AND I now know Loes Gelissen is the best person to learn from (Product Aware <= Smallest)

As soon as you get a prospect to ‘Product Aware’ they’ll buy your offer. Once they believe step 5, they’ll buy. The further your market is away from step 5, the bigger the audience is (more scale), however, the more work is needed as there’s more distance you need to get them to travel to eventually land at step 5.

The best biz/offer to create is one that speaks to the ‘solution aware’ market and simply provides them with an offer/deliverable/outcome that they’ve NEVER seen before. Something that either produces an outcome they haven’t seen/thought of before or produces an outcome they know they want, in half the time your competitors promise (for example, get more ready to buy leads from LinkedIn in 10 days or less).

Understanding Market Types:

(NOTE: These market types are pulled from Steve Blank who’s the author of ‘The Four Steps To The Epiphany’)

A New Product In Existing Market: Product offers higher performance than what is currently offered (Faster, better). Users and market are known. Competitors define the market. The basis of competition is all about the product and product features. Competitors will defend this segment with their life since this is the most profitable segment for them.

A New Product In New Market: You create a large customer base who can do something they couldn’t do before because true innovation created something that never existed, or you dramatically lowered the cost, creating a new class of users. Users and markets are undefined and unknown, but there is zero competition. The problem occurs around customers wanting to do the new thing and if that adoption occurs in your lifetime.

A New Product Attempting To Resegment An Existing Market - Lower Cost: Customers at the low-end of the market will buy good enough performance for a substantially lower price. Incumbent companies tend to abandon low-margin businesses and head up-market. They will focus on the most profitable segment of the market. Typically a new technology allows an entrepreneur to make the lower end of the market profitable.

A New Product Attempting To Resegment An Existing Market - Niche:  A segment of the market buys better performance for a higher cost. Worse performance for segments irrelevant to the niche. Goes after the core of an existing market’s profitable business.

Selling What Your Niche WANTS

Remember, we're always selling what the prospect WANTS not what they NEED. We only DELIVER what they need.

When we look at your offer, we’re wanting to highlight what your niche wants the absolute most AND we want to enable our clients to receive that desired outcome as close to today as physically possible.

We never sell HOW we deliver the outcome. What we're selling is the OUTCOME itself and in the sales process, we're simply focusing on increasing our prospects' BELIEF/certainty in the outcome becoming a reality. That's all you're doing. And if you can deliver that outcome with as little to no input from the client’s end, it's over.

(NOTE: ‘Way Of The Wolf’ is a great book on increasing prospects certainty in the outcome being realised)

Every person on earth would want to make an extra $1M/month, right? So why not just make a headline where you tell people you'll generate them an extra $1M/month and then surely everyone in the world would buy whatever you're selling because that's a specific outcome everyone is rooting for, right?

Well, here's the thing... no one believes you in that case. So people not only buy the desired outcome, but they also buy based on their certainty on that outcome becoming a reality.

Once the prospect knows with 100% certainty that whatever their desired outcome is will be achieved/will become a reality in a timeframe that's as physically close to today as possible AND their input needed in order to achieve the goal is 0 or as minimal as it physically can be, then EVERY SINGLE PERSON YOU SPEAK TO WITHIN YOUR NICHE WILL BUY, especially if you hedge their downside with a guarantee.

If you can deliver $50k to a client in 7 days without them needing to do anything (or as little as possible) and your competitor can deliver $100k to a client in 7 weeks (and it’s high input from clients end), you'll CRUSH that competitor all day long. People don't just buy the outcome. They also buy time.

Video going over this document: https://youtu.be/4H9Nq_qwiuY

Twitter: https://twitter.com/loes_gelissen

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