As marketers, you hold the power to shape successful marketing engagements through research.
It provides the necessary foundation for all subsequent work, ensuring that decisions are well-informed and strategies are effective.
During the research and discovery phase, asking only the questions you need answers to is crucial.
Targeted questions will streamline your efforts and yield the most relevant information.
As you delve deeper into your research and begin writing, understanding what needs to be answered becomes progressively easier. The more comprehensive your research, the clearer your path to obtaining the necessary answers will be.
For now, though, here are the key questions you want to get answered across all of your research and discovery for a marketing assignment.
First, what does my prospect want in the short term?
What does my prospect want in the long term?
Which drives them to seek and buy a solution – their short or long-term desires? Short-term desires could be immediate needs or problems they want to solve, while long-term desires could be their aspirations or goals. Understanding these desires can help you align your solution with their needs and develop effective marketing strategies.
What problems have kept them from achieving those desires?
And you’ll want to categorize these problems. This involves grouping similar problems together based on their nature, severity, or impact on the customer. Categorizing problems can help you prioritize your solutions and tailor your marketing messages to address these specific issues.
Are the problems of inconvenience, money, time, injustice, personal, or social, are they anxiety, or even deep and painful emotions, like hate?
From there, keep asking, which problem do they feel most severely?
How does that problem manifest specifically in their life?
Is the problem felt irregularly, or is it the status quo – felt and experienced daily?
Exactly how does our offer solve that problem?
What do people who use our solution to each problem love about how it solves each problem?
Those questions are part of what we categorize as ‘Push and Pull questions’.
What problems are pushing our visitors to seek a solution, and what desires pull them toward choosing that solution?
And most people stop there.
However, it’s crucial not to overlook something significant: insights into what is preventing your prospect from switching from their current way of dealing with their problem to choosing you as their new solution. Understanding and overcoming these ‘switching barriers’ can be a game-changer in marketing, leading to significant improvements in conversion rates.
In fact, for the first almost decade of my career as a marketer, I hadn’t heard much or thought that much about switching costs, barriers preventing the switch, and the force of habit in suppressing conversions.
After I was introduced to the ‘Jobs to be Done’ concept through a blog of CXL, I quickly realized its significance in marketing. This concept emphasizes that customers ‘hire’ products or services to get a job done, and understanding these jobs can help you overcome switching barriers and increase conversions.
Our clients have experienced significant growth when they successfully address a prospect’s concerns about switching to their solution, demonstrating the potential for increased conversions.
Now, think of all the visitors to your page who are considering your solution but are not converting.
If you can overcome the friction they have around giving up their status quo – which is a thing they know – and switch to you, you honestly don’t need to do much more than that to double or triple your business.
The switch is a marketer’s third biggest opportunity after matching the problem that drives people to you and optimizing your offer.
So these are the questions to ask in addition to push and pull questions.
So, we want good data from multiple sources, but your whole job is not doing the research.
It’s researching to figure out what to say and how to say it on your writing page.
Keep in mind that you’ll want to stagger your research. For example, I recommend you survey or interview leads, prospects, and new customers to identify problems and current solutions they’re using. Then, speak specifically to existing happy customers to find answers to questions like how their lives have improved since they started using your solution and what they love most about it. This staggered approach can provide you with a comprehensive understanding of your customers’ needs and experiences, helping you develop more effective marketing strategies.
We will cover a lot more about this. So it’ll get more accessible and more fluid as you go.
Today, I want to talk to you about Thank You page Surveys.
On your thank you page or confirmation page, you should ask this one question: ‘What was going on in your life that brought you to us today?’ This open-ended question can provide valuable insights into the specific circumstances or needs that led your prospect to your solution, helping you understand their motivations and tailor your marketing strategies accordingly.
This is called the Thank You Page Survey.
Implementing the Thank You Page Survey is a straightforward process. Simply type an open-ended question into a type-form survey and embed it in your Thank You page. This simple step can yield valuable insights from your prospects.
So the question is, why do you want to do this?
The moment after a person signs up for your list, buys your product, or upgrades to the next level of your offering is called a ‘seducible moment’.
That’s when your prospect has just said yes to you, giving them a little dopamine rush and making them more open to sharing with you than ever before – and possibly more than they ever will again. This ‘seducible moment’ is a unique opportunity to gather valuable customer insights that help’s you understand their needs, motivations, and preferences, and tailor your marketing strategies accordingly.
That rush of happy hormones makes them ready to say yes to whatever you ask next.
As long as the ask is, you know, pretty small. And answering this one question is a pretty small ask.
Now, here’s why you need the answer to this question.
It will reveal to you the many reasons people choose you.
What motivated them to look for a solution like yours, and what ultimately caused them to pull the trigger?
What are they hoping to get, what are they switching from, and what are they trying to avoid? All of it.
The answers to this question presented during this seducible moment can give you almost all the info you need to understand people before they say yes to your solution.
The rest of your research can then focus on interviewing customers after they’ve used your solution and ex-customers who’ve stopped using it.
Add this question to your Thank You page Today if you have minimal research resources.