Listen Closely & Learn From Your Customers
As I write this, the finishing touches are being put on a brand new home study course I’m producing. It’s called ‘The Ultimate Guide to Creating and Profiting from Your Own Web TV Show.’
There’s an interesting and I hope useful lesson from how this came about. You’re probably aware that my web TV show is called ‘Help! My Business Sucks!’ and the content revolves around marketing lessons – that’s my main area of expertise of course.
Well, one of the popular features of the show is ‘Ask Andrew’ where anyone can send an email and ask me about anything they believe will help their business.
The interesting thing was that in the time I’ve been doing the show (almost 7 months now), one question KEPT coming up on a daily basis. It still does. The question is, “how do you put your show together?” or words to that effect. People wanted to know what equipment I use, how I come up with ideas, how its edited, how I found the music, who does the graphics, what microphones I use, how I got the show so popular in iTunes, and so on, (and on).
Now I had no idea that this would be such a popular topic. In fact, if I hadn’t asked the audience for their questions, I simply wouldn’t have known about the level of interest in that topic. So therein lies a powerful lesson. LISTEN to your audience, in fact INVITE their continual feedback, and LEARN from it.
As a result of doing that myself, I now have another product that I can sell, and I KNOW it’s going to sell well even before I start to offer it, because the audience has already told me they want it. Don’t underestimate the importance of that. MOST business owners offer products that THEY like, or that THEY think customers will want. Many times, that turns out not to be the case, and they’ve wasted many hours and a lot of money creating something for which there’s little or no demand. Don’t fall into the same trap.
I’ve become a big fan of conducting surveys to further enhance the power of learning from my audience.
For the web TV show course, I first segmented my customer list. I invited anyone who was interested in the course to enter their name and email on a special webpage, to be kept notified of updates about the course. So a key lesson is to segment your customer list to create sub-lists of groups with specific, targeted interests.
“Segment Your
Customer List.”
For example, if your customers are gardeners, you might segment the main list to create sub-lists of those that are interested in growing their own vegetables, those who have spent more than $1000 on your products in the previous 12 months, those who are interested in attending a training workshop, those that earn their main living as a gardener, and so on. Can you see how useful it is to divide (segment) your audience?
Yes, you COULD send ALL messages everyone all the time, but your response (conversion into sales) will be MUCH higher if you segment the list and speak directly to the right people at the right time. So some of your messages WILL be to everyone, but when you get into specialist topics, it’s definitely advantageous to divide the audience.
Again, this is a useful process because with the new list, you know that you ONLY have people who are seriously interested, and you won’t annoy others who aren’t interested.
So with my web TV show course, I sent a couple of surveys to the interested group that asked specific questions of them. The first survey asked:
‘What’s the single most important question you want answered about creating and profiting from your own web TV show?’
The answers to that question obviously provided plenty of direction in what I should cover in the course. I devoted more time to questions that lots of people asked, but I made sure to cover everything that came up, no matter how relevant I perceived it to be – my view is irrelevant because it’s what the customer wants that counts.
The second survey I sent out asked three questions. The first was:
“How would you describe your budget for purchasing equipment to do your own show?’
I asked this question because I wanted to get a feel for how much money people were willing to spend on equipment. In truth, you could spend less than $500, or you could spend $50,000 – that’s a huge difference and I wanted to focus on the range that the majority specified. As it happened, 57.4% of people surveyed responded that they would like to keep their budget below 50%, which surprised me a little, but it was obviously useful to know that.
The next question I asked was:
“What niche or field of interest do you plan to serve with your new web TV show?’
I’ll admit that this was a little bit sneaky. Well, not exactly sneaky, but there’s more to this question than you might first think. The obvious benefit was that I could make reference to a wide range of topics, within the course. Another ‘hidden’ benefit was that I could use those topics in the sales letter, to appeal to as many people as possible. And the other benefit was that it got the audience thinking specifically about their own niche, and hopefully their anticipation and excitement increased as they thought about the possibilities.
The last question was:
“What’s your favorite method of learning information?”
I gave 6 options to choose from and the No.1 choice was to ‘watch videos on my computer or iPod’, followed by ‘read it in a printed manual.’
So, guess how the course will be formatted? I hope you can see that there is MUCH to be gained from listening closely to your customers!
