How To Find What Your Customers Want!

(This is the transcript from our new video so it may not read as well as a normal blog post would)

Hey, Ben Norman here and in today’s video, I’m gonna share with you some simple strategies you can use today to find out what your customers truly want and desire. As businesses, we spend an inordinate amount of time and money trying to work out what our future customers want and need, so that we can better target them, we can better market to them, and build products and services that speak to them better and solve their problems more effectively, so we can acquire more market share, right? Without further ado, let’s get on to solution number one. YouTube and Google Suggest. Now this is as simple as going to the search bar in Google or in YouTube and you start filling in the main part of what your service offering is or your main objective is and then you see the kinds of phrases that Google starts suggesting back, because from that, we can see what the popular search phrases in YouTube and Google are and you can utilize the popular ones to target your content or your strategy around, so that you can get a better idea on what is trending, what is being searched for more often, and in what way on either YouTube or Google. Solution number two, is Keywords Everywhere. Now this used to be free, now it’s a paid-for service, but it is so, so cheap. You buy a certain amount of credits. You put the plugin into Chrome, and when you do your searches within YouTube or Google, or whichever ones you select from Keywords Everywhere, you will find that it will start returning next to those keywords, or whatever search terms you’re looking for, it will start returning the amount of times that that is searched for and also what the cost per click would likely be for that from an advertising point of view. That can be a really powerful tool to understand how many searches that’s getting and how popular that is, or how sought after that term is and that strategy links really well with using YouTube or Google Suggest. The third strategy is to use TubeBuddy or vidIQ. Now, they are both very similar plugins that you basically plug in, you subscribe to the service through your browser and it basically pulls different metrics into your video. Now all the videos on YouTube, now they both are very similar, but they both have very different plus points to them. They will all give you keyword explorers, so that you can do keyword research around certain search terms, find out what’s popular, what videos you’re going to be competing with, also what the likelihood that if you were to create video content around that on YouTube, what the likelihood of you being able to rank is, because you’ll be able to see how popular those phrases are, what competition there is for them, and it can be a really useful tool to find out how popular different subjects are and different niches within the niche are. Before we go on to the next tip, I’d love to know how you currently establish what your customers are looking for and how you currently decide how to target those costumers. Whether it’s market research or whatever, but do leave me a comment below and just let me know and let’s get on with the next tip. Strategy number four is Google Trends. Now, this is something that a lot of people just don’t know about, let alone use, but if you go to googletrends.com, you are able to put different search terms in, or products, or anything really, and what Google will return to you is how popular that is, whether that subject or that product is trending up or down, so that you can see, okay, well we’re on an upward curve with this at the moment, so we really want to get behind this, whereas if your product or service is seeing a very much downward curve, you know that it’s time for you to innovate, expand your market, try and pivot it slightly, because it could be that you are in a contracting market. It can be a really useful tool just to run your products through services, or just your industry, and find out really whether you are on an upward trend or a downward trend. Strategy number five, really, which is a killer strategy, is called Answer the Public. This website is fantastic. You put your search term in, you put your subject in, your product, whatever it is, and what it will do is it will return to you a mind map, you’re able to download these, you’re able to download them as CSVs, things like that, but what it will do is it will give you the different ways in which that product service is searched for, so you can see how people are searching for what you’re doing, and also how popular those different search terms are, so that you may have a product that’s doing okay, but you’re targeting the search in a slightly different way, whereas if you pivoted it to targeting in a slightly different way, you’d get a lot more search volume, so again, free tool, really useful, and a really clever way of being able to see what your prospective clients are looking for. As you can imagine, if you combine all of these different strategies together and tools together, you do the research on each of the platforms, and then you pool all of that data together, you’re able to get a very well rounded idea of what search terms you should be going after, what products, services, industries are on an incline or a decline, what’s growing, how expensive it would be to market in there, whether there’s new opportunities targeting in a slightly different way. I’d love to know if you’re going to use any of these, so be sure to let me know in the comments below.