How would your marketing change if you could know your customers thoughts?
Have you ever jumped into a marketing campaign convinced that it would work, but didn’t put any research behind it? Then, after a month you realize that the ad campaign didn’t really perform up to your expectations and now you’re out a chunk of money?
We’ve all played the psychic with our customer’s needs at one point. Which usually results in missing the advertising mark. Instead, try these three research tools that will uncover your customer’s needs before an expensive marketing mistake.
What do you need to know about your customers?
The Basics
To start, you need to know your customer’s demographics, pains, fears and desires. A few characteristics of your customers that you will want to understand fully are:
- Who are they?
- What do they do?
- Why do they buy?
- What is their income bracket?
- What is their location?
- Are they a specific gender?
- Are they a specific age?
- What do they desire when purchasing a product or service like yours?
- What are their concerns about purchasing your product or service?
- What are their concerns about purchasing from you?
- What was, if any, a negative experience they have had when purchasing a product or service like yours in the past?
- What do people think about your competition?
Knowing who your customer is will give you a good idea of how, where and who you need to advertise your product or service. Plus, in several of the online advertising platforms, you can target audiences based on their demographics. This means you will not be spending a lot of money marketing to people outside of your target demographic.
Marketing Details
Using the research tools mentioned in this article, you can dig a little deeper to understand exactly what messaging and imaging resonates the best with your ideal customer. Some additional factors that you will want to uncover are:
- What phrases or terminology do your customers respond to?
- What information are they looking for?
- What catches their interest?
- What imaging works best for your customers?
Market Research with Survey Monkey
Survey Monkey has been a long-standing leader in marketing research. Plus, you can use a lot of it for free!
With their interface, you can create your own surveys to send out to your customers or you could purchase survey responses from their network. There are several templates available through the system filled with questions ranging from demographics to customer satisfaction.
The options with Survey Monkey are unlimited where you can get a non-biased opinion about anything that you’d like more feedback on. We have used the system for product research, voting on logo designs, customer feedback, understanding customer demographics, following up with customers after events and much more.
With the free cost, I challenge you to put together a survey and send it out to 25 of your best customers.
Once responses are collected, you will be able to analyze the results in real-time and make changes or additions to any marketing program you have in place.
Scan Your Site (and Your Competitor’s) For Ranking Keyword Phrases with Ubersuggest
One of the most telling things about your customer’s thought process is uncovering heavily searched keywords and phrases. There are several paid tools that you can use like SEMRush or SpyFu, but Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest pulls just the same weight for this task and is completely free.
You can type in any website’s URL or keyword to get a spreadsheet of important information. The spreadsheet will tell you how often a keyword or phrase is looked up on Google, how much you would have to pay for it if you ran a campaign for it, and the difficulty level for both paid and organic campaigns.
Why do you want this information?
This information is invaluable both for giving customers the exact information that they are looking for and ranking higher on Google.
Get Ideas From Words and Phrases You’re Already Ranking For.
With a quick search on Ubersuggest of your URL, or your competitor’s, you will find:
- Monthly organic traffic
- The website’s top SEO pages including their backlinks
- The keywords that the site is ranking for
This gives you the exact phrases that people are typing into Google in order to find your website. You might find that you are ranking for keywords and phrases that you didn’t even target. With this information, you can optimize your site for those specific keywords to rank higher on Google. And it opens a world of ideas for your content and messaging that is exactly in line with what internet searchers are looking for.
Check Out Suggested Words and Phrases Based On A Keyword Research
When you search a keyword on Ubersuggest, you will quickly see a list of suggested keywords and phrases with their search volume. This will give you the exact phrases that people are using to find information about your industry. The search volume will tell you how many times each word or phrase is searched per month declaring the popularity of that specific word or phrase.
Uncover Exact Questions, Prepositions and Comparisons People Are Searching On Google
An added bonus on Ubersuggest are their “Questions,” “Prepositions” and “Comparisons” tabs. These three tabs will uncover a treasure chest of phrases that people are searching on Google in your industry.
As an example, let’s say you’re a business lawyer and you research “Business Law.”
Here are some ideas brought up in Ubersuggest
Questions
“why business law is important”
“what is business law pdf”
“what is business law and ethics”
Prepositions:
“a business law case study”
“in business law what is contract”
“without prejudice business law”
Comparisons:
“business law and legal environment”
“business law and ethics”
“business law vs. corporate law”
With the uncovered words and phrases from these features in Ubersuggest, you will know your customer’s exact terminology they are searching on Google for information in your industry. From there, you can use these words, phrases, and ideas to optimize your site for SEO, write content people are looking for, and use terms that resonate with your customers.
Google Ads Tools and Research
If you have a Google Ads account, there are two major tools to uncover exactly what your customers are looking for in Google Ads.
Google Ad’s Keyword Planner works very similarly to Ubersuggest where you can type in a URL or keywords to uncover the search volume of specific words and phrases that people are searching on Google. Use these keyword and phrase ideas to write new content, optimize your site and provide your customers with exactly what they are searching for.
It also will show you trends based on your keywords that have happened over the last year. If you are looking for the “When” to write about a certain topic, this might be helpful. For example; if you work with air conditioners, do a little research about when people are searching for air conditioners online and then provide content slightly before the trends in order to catch the advertising wave.
Search Terms Tab in Search Campaigns
When you run a PPC campaign, Google Ads will track exactly what people are searching for when they find your ads. This can be a gold mine for finding exactly what your customers are interested in.
Take an experience with a new opioid fighting NASDAQ company, JanOne.
Political commentator Eric Bolling recently joined JanOne as their President and Chairman. To advertise the news, we run search ads on Google for people searching for information on Eric Bolling. After a few months of running ads, we realized that there is a flood of ongoing traffic from people wondering “What is Eric Bolling doing now?” Clearly, this is a topic that we need to address.
Wrapping Up Your Research
By using these tools, you will have a lot better understanding of not only who your customer is, what their interests are and the terminology they use. With these details, you can create entire marketing strategies to give potential clients exactly what they are looking for on your website, content marketing, email blasts, online ads, and social media.
If you would like assistance in putting these pieces together in your digital marketing campaign, call Marketing Magnitude today at 702.482.8529.
