Streamline Your Business with Free Market Research
The road to business hell is paved with good intentions.
Nobody I’ve encountered starting or running a business thinks about the demand for what they’re selling.
I’ve never experienced a business owner slamming a market research report down in front of me and saying…
“Here’s Rudolph’s nose to light the way, Charlie!”
Nope, it just doesn’t happen with small businesses.
There is no time or budget for that.
Most entrepreneurs are operating on assumptions.
They know more about what they are selling than who you are selling to.
It usually goes more like this: “Charlie, be a magician; start pulling rabbits out of our market hat that are ready to buy our carrots.”
Even with my skills, systems, tools, and team, I still have to pay market research dues on their behalf.
The good news is that today, small businesses don’t have to pay as much for it as they would have in the past.
There is so much data available at your fingertips.
I want to briefly touch on tactics I have used to gain market share and clarity for the many types of businesses I have worked with.
Leveraging AI for Market Research
Unless you’ve just come out of hibernating in a cave, you know that AI is a great way to access vast amounts of tailored information in a centralized location.
Market research is no exception.
As an agency owner, I am tasked with growing companies in various industries, with which I had little to no experience when I first took them on as clients.
Before AI, I used other tools and tactics to research as much as possible before taking on a new client, but AI has improved my research skills.
Below, I share a series of 30 market research prompts that, once completed, will create a powerful research tool for your toolbox.
I have assembled it over the past year using various resources and experiences, adding to it as I go.
I’ve created a free AI Market Research agent for you to use to get started. (No email required) Just click the link below to get started.
Free Market Research Agent Prompts
Now you and your new Market Research Agent know more about your market and ideal customers.
You can use this agent to create campaigns, sales collateral, email workflows, and more!
Qualitative Data Collection
This sounds fancy, I know, but it’s easier to get your hands on than you might think.
When using forms on a website, a common question is, “How did you hear about us?” The answer is usually a drop-down menu of channels pre-determined by the business, such as Google, Social Media, Referrals, etc.
This approach is wrong, in my opinion, as it makes many assumptions and prevents the customer from giving you real feedback.
A better choice would be to use just a plain text field so they can say IN THEIR OWN WORDS how they came to find you.
But it can get even better if you also change the question you are asking.
Instead of the typical question I shared above, try something more direct and to the point, like:
“Understanding how and why you contacted us would be very helpful. Please take a few moments to be specific about what brought you here. For example, if you found us on Google, what did you do you type to find us? We greatly appreciate this feedback!”
You may be shocked at how clients are coming to you compared to what you assume.
Surveying Current Customers
There is no better wealth of knowledge about your market to dip into than the people who have paid money to work with you already.
As long as you don’t dip too often, your clients are usually happy to provide you with feedback.
Again, this is another opportunity to get even more qualitative data. But this time, instead of coming from leads, it’s coming from paying customers.
You can use AI to help you develop your survey questions. Use the prompt below as a base and modify it to fit your specific product, service, or industry.
“I want to survey my clients to understand their buying decisions better. What are five questions I should include in my survey?”
Use a simple Google Form that drops submissions into a spreadsheet.
Bonus: You can then use ChatGPT AGAIN to process your spreadsheet of answers to summarize and extract insights from to query against.
Polling
Creating a poll is a good way to get direction from your market for many different business areas.
If you want insight into pricing, you can poll people about their opinion of a product’s monetary value.
If you struggle to create content topics, you can poll to see what direction you should go.
Polls can also be a fun way to engage with your market for branding purposes where you ask silly questions such as “Is Die Hard or the Gremlins a Christmas movie?” (Obviously, the answer is Yes)
You can share polls with the market from various channels. Below are a few examples to get started. (Again, AI can help you come up with polling questions for your market)
Social Media
Many social platforms allow you to post a poll or quiz to your feed for people to respond. For example, on Instagram Stories, you can use stickers to do a question poll or even an emoji slider poll where you can make it fun to compare two things, etc.
Your Website
You can use pop-ups on exit or an embedded poll using your form software on your website. If you use a CRM, the form software in the CRM likely has a polling feature, and you can embed your form into a blog, a page, etc., to collect answers. (Don’t forget to drive traffic to it!)
If you have an email list of leads and clients, you can ask for their feedback in their inboxes. Craft a short email with the link to a Google Forms poll, and you'll be off to the races to get insights from your market.
Reddit
Known as the “front page of the internet,” it has vast information to tap into.
Searching for topics around your service or product will yield vast results. This can be a rabbit hole that is time-consuming, and you have to find the serious posts amongst the people trying to be funny, but some nuggets in there could give you insight into:
Messaging
Competitors
Employee perspectives inside your industry
Tools and other resources.
Please don’t knock it until you try it; go to Reddit, do some searches, and take some time to read some of the comments.
Pro tip: Click on posts where the title is a question and sort the comments by “Best” to surface to the top of the responses with the most “upvotes.”
Bonus: Paid Advertising
I know this article is about free market research. However, I have found great success over my career by implementing the information I’ve gathered from paid advertising into other parts of our growth strategies.
Google Adwords search terms can be an excellent resource for insight into how your market searches for your products or services.
You can take this information and improve your SEO and overall messaging on your website, campaigns, and sales funnels.
Because paid advertising gives you reach, you can test vast amounts of messaging for your offers and quickly obtain actual data on the messaging gaining the most engagement in your market.
So keep an open mind to advertising for more than just lead generation, but market intelligence gathering.
Conclusion
My goal in writing this is that you can implement two things:
Doing free market research without paying a firm gobs of money.
Leverage the information you gather to streamline your business by improving campaigns, sales funnels, offers, and overall messaging.
Understanding your buyers helps you sharpen both your arrows and your aim.
Remember, nothing is dead until you kill it. All marketing and advertising is a test.
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