Research The Market

Research The Market

A lot of people feel that after you’ve read the product, you can immediately dig into writing the copy. After all, you know everything that’s in the book, right? All you have to do now is talk about it, right?

Wrong!

Knowing the product is only half the battle. In order to write the most effective copy possible, you also need to understand the target market. You need to understand what these people are looking for. What problems are they having? What solutions are they looking for and why?

Let’s take the article writing market for example. People don’t want to learn how to write articles just for the sake of being able to write articles. They want to do something with these articles. Maybe they want to use them to market their products and services. Maybe they want to write articles for the purpose of selling them. The point is, they really don’t care about being able to write articles. What they want are the benefits that they derive from writing those articles.

If you get nothing else from this book, please get this much. Nobody cares about the thing that they are buying in and of itself. What they care about is what the thing that they get is going to do for them after they have purchased it. They’re looking for benefits.

The same is true with features of a product. They don’t care what features a product has. They don’t care if it can do handstands and whistle the Star Spangled Banner. They care about what benefits they are going to get out of the product. If you understand this much then you are 50% on the way to becoming a copywriter who can convert his copy to sales.

Okay, so that brings us to the key question. How do you research your market?

There are many ways to do this. I’m going to outline the main ways and the simplest. These are also the most effective.

The first way to research your market, and the absolute easiest, is to visit forums. Believe it or not, each niche will have a forum that you can go to. In these forums you will find members talking about the things that are most important to them. From just reading the posts, you’ll get a very good idea of what problems these people are having and what solutions they’re looking

for. But more importantly, you’ll find out what it is about these problems that are driving them crazy.

For example, let’s go back to our article marketing problem. We already know that people want to learn to write articles so that they can either use them to market their products or sell them outright. But what are the problems they’re having? What’s really the sticking point?

What you’re going to find, if you do the research, is that people complain that it simply takes too long to write a 500 word article. Some complain that it takes as long as 2 hours or more for a process that shouldn’t take longer than 15 minutes. So their biggest complaint is that the process takes them too long and they want a way to shorten it.

Another complaint you might find is that it’s too hard to research material for articles. Maybe they complain that they don’t even know where to go in order to do their research.

So, when creating your sales copy, you bring up these issues and show the potential buyer how the product holds the solution to their problem.

Write articles in 15 minutes or less

Research potential article topics in no time at all And so on…

The key is to understand what the target market’s pain is. Why are they in pain? What is causing this pain?

This is where we have to understand why people buy things in the first place. If we can do that, we’ll have a greater understanding of how to push people’s hot buttons when it comes to our sales copy.

Here are the main reasons why people buy things: To relieve stress

To replace an existing item Emotional satisfaction

Entertainment Planned purchase Relaxation Education

Improve surroundings Pleasure

Quality of life

If you take a look at this list, you will notice that most of these appeal on an emotional level. Rarely does anybody buy anything because they need it. People buy things because they want it. Emotions are so powerful in our lives and in most cases; those emotions dictate our buying habits.

I’ll give you a perfect example.

I’m a workaholic. I admit it. But every once in a while, I get a little restless and need to relax. Now, I do play guitar but can only play about 2 hours a day because my fingers get a little sore. So I need something I can do that won’t hurt my fingers, or any other part of my body for that matter. So, since I happen to like video games, I just recently went out and purchased a new one to keep me occupied for a while when I don’t feel like working.

Did I need the video game? No, I wanted it. It was a purely emotional purchase. It made me feel better.

And that, when all is said and done, is the ball game. Your target market is looking to make a purchase because they think it is going to make them happy, whether it be the purchase of an article writing book so that they can make more money to buy more things that they want, or to get an acne cure so that they can ask the cute girl or guy out who lives next door. Nobody cares about the stupid tube of acne free or whatever it is. They don’t even care so much about getting rid of their acne. What they care about is getting that date and they think that unless they DO get rid of their acne, that date isn’t going to happen.

I talked about going to forums for your target market research. Another great way to research your target market is to go to Amazon.com and read some of the reviews for related products to the one that you’re writing your sales copy for.

Why are you doing this?

When people write reviews on products, they usually write what they like about the product and how it helped them, or if they didn’t like the product, why they were disappointed in it and what they were looking for. This will also give you a very good idea of what kind of solutions these people are looking for.

The good part about Amazon.com is that many of the top products in a niche have hundreds of reviews. This is more than enough material for you to use in determining the threshold of pain for this target market.

After you have completed your research, the next step in the process is to go back to your product and start compiling bullet points.