How Do You Find Out What Really Matters to Your Target Market?

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Regardless of what you offer, knowing what matters to your prospective buyers is of critical importance. Without knowing it, you can set yourself up for all types of costly errors.

In fact, you could be setting yourself up for total failure if you miss the mark.

There are, however, a few things you need to keep in mind when trying to figure out what people want.

Your social media audience and your prospective buyers may not want the same thing.

 

Yes, that may sound illogical. It implies that your audience are not potential buyers…

Yes and no.

The reality is that only a small portion of your audience will actually end up doing business with you. So why do you need the rest of them? Would it not be better to just go after your ideal buyer?

Well, there are two things to keep in mind:

1. Your exposure on social media is determined by the engagement with, and consumption of, the content you put out. If you put out a video clip, the network not only looks at the comments, likes and shares, but also at the average watch time, the percentage of people who watched the whole clip, and the total watch time the clip accumulated over time.

2. You cannot really control who follows you, and most of the people who follow you are unlikely to ever become buyers. Even if you are trying to follow “targeted” prospects on social media, the only metrics you have to go by is their engagement with content similar to what you want to put out.

On top of that, many people will follow you organically, out of pure curiosity.

Remember the buying cycle: Browsing, researching, buying.

The bottom line is this:

On your website, or on social media articles, you can create content aimed specifically at someone who is ready to buy. But when you post social media content, you need to create content which is likely to be engaged with – because the network algorithms reward engagement with more exposure.

So, now that we have THAT out of the way…

How do you know what really matters to your ideal buyer?

Well, this is where it becomes interesting. Many people advocate doing surveys, or even appointing survey companies. However, most people never say what they truly mean.

Unless they are really unhappy.

In short, if you want to know what people really think, pay attention to the people who DIDN’T get what they expected.

Go digging through reviews of your competitors, and go digging through reviews on specific products.

There is, however, one small challenge: Unless you operate in a tiny, tiny niche with very few suppliers, chance are that you will find there is a (tanker-sized) boatload of reviews to work through.

Fortunately, there is AI. While it has put many people out of work, it has also made life much easier for others.

Not all AI chats can access the internet (in some cases only he premium version can do it), so you will have to ask your preferred AI tool whether it can do so or not.

Ask the AI to research reviews for competitors or competing products on reputable websites only. Ask it to analyze all reviews good and bad, and to identify patterns in the responses.

For instance, in some cases the AI will note that a specific product needed “feature X”, while in other in stances people were happy about finding a product with “feature X”.

By looking for repeated complaints and compliments about companies or products similar to yours, you will soon be able to determine what really matters to your prospective buyers.

If you do an additional search to focus only on negative reviews, you can also find out which items matter so much (to your prospects) that they could be deal breakers.

In conclusion:

There are two sides to “what people want”. On the one side there is the content they would like to see from you on social media, which they would be willing to engage with and consume.

On the other side, there are the expectations of people who choose to do business with you.

While the second group forms (a small) part of the first group, the majority of the first group may have different expectations – and you literally need their “stamp of approval” to get your content pushed out to more people on the social networks you use.

However, when it comes to what your ideal customers really want from their purchase and interactions with your business, pay attention to what unhappy clients or customers are saying. They usually hold the key to what matters most to your buyers.