Ep 4 - How to Do Market Research Effectively So That People Buy Your Stuff

 

Have you ever poured your heart and soul into creating a product or service only to find that no one buys it? 

It’s a frustrating experience, and it’s one I’ve seen many healthcare professionals face. 

Can I let you in on a secret?

The missing piece is often effective market research!

 

Market research is the key to understanding your audience’s wants – not just their needs…

And tailoring your offers to solve the problems they’re most desperate to address (and that they’re keen to invest in fixing).

 

In this blog, we’ll explore:

1. Why market research is critical for your offers to succeed (not flop)
2. How to conduct effective market research 
3. What questions to ask to uncover valuable insights

 

By the end, you’ll have a step-by-step guide to ensure that what you create is exactly what your audience wants to buy.

Let’s get started!

 

Why Market Research Matters

Most of us set up our businesses to help people improve their health. 

As qualified professionals, we know exactly what they need to achieve their goals. 

But here’s the catch: People don’t buy what they need; they buy what they want. 

(And those two things are NOT always the same!)

 

If you focus on marketing and selling the solutions you think your clients need, you might struggle to actually sell stuff. 

Market research bridges the gap between what you know they need and what they think they want…

To avoid the disaster of your offers completely bombing!

 

The Dinner Party Analogy

Imagine you’ve invited friends for a lavish dinner party. 

You spend all week preparing an elaborate seafood feast, and you’re sure they’ll love it. 

But when they arrive, they don’t touch the food – because they’re allergic to shellfish!

 

You overlooked a critical step: understanding their preferences.

 

Now imagine you took the time to find out what they like, discovering their love for Italian cuisine and healthy twists on classics. 

You serve a tailored menu, and your guests leave raving about you and your delicious meal…

And they can’t wait to come back again AND tell their friends!

That’s the power of market research: crafting offers your audience is excited to say “yes” to.

 

The Power of Effective Market Research: Rosie’s Story

Rosie, a vegan dietitian with a large Instagram following, wanted to monetise her audience by creating an online course. 

Initially, she planned to teach people how to follow a vegan diet properly. 

But when she conducted market research, she discovered her audience wanted something entirely different: a course on how to manage their weight while staying vegan.

And Rosie listened! She adjusted her idea and created The Flourishing Vegan Weight Loss Programme. 

Her course SOLD OUT with a single Instagram announcement – before she’d even created it. (Because she was offering EXACTLY what her audience was desperate to discover.)

Now imagine if Rosie had launched her original idea without conducting research. 

Ouch. 

After all that hard work, it’s likely the course would have flopped – despite her glowing expertise.

 

How to Conduct Market Research Effectively

Step 1: Identify Your Ideal Client

Market research only works if you’re speaking to the right people. Before you start, define your ideal client:

• Who are they?
• What stage of their journey are they in?
• Where do they hang out (online and offline)?

 

For example, if you’re in the baby weaning niche, you might specify:

“I’m looking for first-time mums with babies aged 4-6 months who haven’t started solids yet.”

 

Avoid conducting research with family, friends, or past clients – they’re likely to give biased feedback to spare your feelings.

 

Step 2: Find Participants

Use platforms where your ideal clients already hang out, like:

• Social media (Instagram, Facebook groups)
• Your email list
• Online forums

 

Ask for volunteers, and if needed, offer incentives like a free consultation, a small gift, or the opportunity to ask you questions during the call.

 

Step 3: Choose Your Method

There are several ways to conduct market research. 

 

I would love to share 5 effective options with you:

 

 1. Interviews

 

One-on-one interviews give you the chance to dive deep into your audience’s thoughts. 

Use video calls to capture body language and tone, and record the conversation to review later. 

Look for recurring words and phrases to use in your marketing.

 

2. Focus Groups

 

Gather a small group of participants and let them discuss. 

Group dynamics can spark ideas that people might not share in a one-on-one setting. 

Although here’s a tip. Some people may hold back their opinions in a group, so watch for nonverbal cues.

 

3. Surveys

 

Online surveys are a quick way to gather insights from a larger audience. 

Use tools like Google Forms or SurveyMonkey, but keep your surveys short – 5-6 questions max.

 

4. Analytics and Data

 

Review public data, such as demographic trends, and analyse your own stats. 

Social media and website analytics can reveal what topics resonate with your audience.

 

5. Online Marketplaces

 

Explore platforms like Amazon or Etsy to see what’s already available in your niche. 

Pay attention to one-star reviews (and what reviewers are unhappy about) to identify gaps in the market.

What Questions Should You Ask?

The questions you ask will depend on the purpose of your research. 

However, your goal should always be to uncover your audience’s pain points, desires, and preferences. 

 

Let me share some example questions:

Pain Points

• What are your biggest frustrations with [your area of expertise]?
• Why has this been a struggle for you?
• How long has it been going on?
• What have you tried to fix this problem, and why didn’t it work?

 

Desires

• If I could wave a magic wand, what results would you want to achieve?
• How would your life change if this problem was solved?
• What does success look like to you?

 

Competitor Insights

• Is there anyone already offering a solution to this problem?
• What do you like about their solution?
• What could make it even better?

 

Delivery Preferences

• If you purchased a solution, how would you like to learn (e.g. video, workbook, group program)?
• What’s most appealing about this format?
• Have you used similar resources before? If so, were they helpful?

 

Online Behaviour

• Where do you spend most of your time online (e.g. Instagram, Facebook, Google)?
• What social media accounts do you follow for inspiration?

 

Here are my Best Tips for Success!

1. Stay Open-Minded

Don’t lead participants with your own assumptions. 

Ask open-ended questions and let them guide the conversation.
  

 

2. Listen for Emotion

Pay attention to when participants become animated or passionate. 

This is the gold, because these moments often reveal their biggest pain points or desires.
  

 

3. Use Their Words

Take note of the exact language your audience uses. (And don’t just paraphrase!)

Incorporating these phrases into your marketing can make your messaging feel more relatable and authentic. (‘Oh wow – she’s speaking to ME!’)
  

 

4. Market Research Is Ongoing

This is not a one-time deal!

I encourage you to keep revisiting your audience’s needs and preferences as your business grows. 

Trends and desires can change over time. 

Make sure you keep up to date, if you want your offers to keep flying!

Action Step: Conduct Your First Market Research

I know you love a challenge!

Set aside time this week to conduct at least one form of market research – from the handy list above. 

Whether it’s a survey, an interview, or an analysis of your analytics, start gathering insights about what your audience truly wants…

So that you can be ready to offer the EXACT thing they want to buy!

 

What’s Next?

Join me in my next blog as we dive into buyer psychology. 

Together, we’ll explore the journey your potential customers go through before deciding to work with you. 

When you understand this journey, you’ll be ready to connect with your audience and guide them toward saying “yes” to your incredible offers. Hooray!

 

Grab The Master Plan!

Ready to build the business you’ve always dreamed of?

This step-by-step workbook will walk you through exactly what you need to focus on and when. You'll get my expert knowledge as a health business strategist.

This guide really is your master plan to business success! Grab your free copy, right here…https://www.sarahalmondbushell.com/master-plan

 

Connect with me here:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dietitiansinbusiness/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/dietitiansinbusiness

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BeyondTheClinicPodcast

 

 

Episode transcription:

[00:00:00] Sarah Almond Bushell: Welcome along. Today we are diving into the number one thing that leads directly to more paying clients and that is effective market research. When you conduct effective market research and tailor your services and offers to match what you learn, People will buy your stuff. But so many of the clients that I've coached over the years missed this really vital step.

[00:00:26] Sarah Almond Bushell: So in today's episode, I'm going to show you how to do market research effectively and give you a bunch of questions to ask so that you elicit the information that you actually need. So most of us set up a business to help clients improve their health and we as highly qualified healthcare professionals know exactly what they need, what we need to educate them on and what they need support with when implementing our advice.

[00:00:55] Sarah Almond Bushell: But what they need often isn't what they want. And when you try to attract clients by talking about what they need in order to improve their health, you'll find that not many people buy from you. And that's because people don't buy what they need, they buy what they want. So how does market research fit into all of this?

[00:01:17] Sarah Almond Bushell: By definition, it's all about talking to your potential clients, gathering their thoughts and ideas, and assimilating that information so you find out precisely what it is that your ideal client actually wants to buy. Imagine you've invited a group of new friends around for a lavish dinner party.

[00:01:36] Sarah Almond Bushell: You spend all week putting together the menu. You've been shopping at the posh delis, and you've been creating this elaborate seafood feast. It could not be more perfect. But then your guests arrive. They've got ravenous appetites. They're ready to be wined and dined, but they don't eat a single thing.

[00:01:57] Sarah Almond Bushell: They're allergic to shellfish. There was a crucial step that you overlooked. Understanding your guests needs and preferences. And you know what? It's exactly the same in business. On the flip side, imagine if you took the time to understand your guests preferences. You discovered their love for Italian cuisine, their dietary restrictions, and their curiosity to try new things.

[00:02:22] Sarah Almond Bushell: New healthy twists on classic dishes. When you've got this insight, you can craft a menu that's not only delicious, but also perfectly tailored to delight them. Now I know that this is a silly analogy, but it's a perfect way to describe market research. It's all about finding out what our audience wants.

[00:02:43] Sarah Almond Bushell: before we ever go ahead and create it. So I want to tell you a story about my client Rosie. Some of you might know her. Her business is Rosemary Nutrition and she is an expert vegan dietitian. She has written for The Happy Pair and Deliciously Ella, and she's very highly regarded in the plant based nutrition space.

[00:03:07] Sarah Almond Bushell: When she came to me, she wanted to monetize her large Instagram audience of nearly 10, 000 followers. She was working for the NHS, and she was seeing clients one to one in her freelance business. But she had this huge, untapped audience of fans, and she liked the idea of an online course. Initially, our plan was to create a course on vegan nutrition to help people follow a vegan diet properly with meal ideas and recipes and shopping guides.

[00:03:40] Sarah Almond Bushell: But when she went away and did her market research, she discovered that actually that was not what her audience wanted. They wanted to learn how to manage their weight effectively while still staying true to their vegan diet. In fact, this was such a surprise that I encouraged Rosie to explore this a bit further and do even more market research to refine exactly what it was that her Instagram followers wanted and that led her to create her course called the Flourishing Vegan Weight Loss Program.

[00:04:13] Sarah Almond Bushell: She sold out her program from one announcement to her Instagram audience before she even created a single part of the course. Now that is the power of effective market research. But just imagine how this could have been a very different story if Rosie had created her How To Be Vegan course without doing her market research.

[00:04:39] Sarah Almond Bushell: And sadly, this is a story that I hear all too often from very highly skilled and very enthusiastic healthcare professionals who create these amazing offers, but no one buys them. They've created something that they want to share with people, but it's not actually what their audience wants to buy. So let's go through how to actually do market research.

[00:05:04] Sarah Almond Bushell: First of all, I only want you to conduct market research with your ideal client and people you've never met before. If you don't know who your ideal client is and where to find them, you need to go and do that piece of work first. But never do market research with family, friends, or colleagues. with friends or even past clients because these people like you, they've got an emotional connection with you and what happens is that they will give you false positive answers for the sake of being polite or not wanting to hurt your feelings rather than their honest truthful opinion.

[00:05:41] Sarah Almond Bushell: So go to your social media audience or your email list or forums or other people's Facebook groups where you already know your ideal client hangs out. And when you're there, simply ask for volunteers. Now most people love to share their opinions on a topic, so it's unlikely that you're going to be short of volunteers.

[00:06:02] Sarah Almond Bushell: But if you wanted to offer an incentive to encourage people to spare their time, you can absolutely do that. Often just offering them the opportunity to ask you questions at the end of the call will be enough, or you could sweeten the deal with a freebie or one of your low cost offers given for free.

[00:06:21] Sarah Almond Bushell: You also need to make sure that you're getting the right people into your market research. You want to be asking qualifying questions. If I was doing some baby weaning market research, I might prefix my request with, I'm looking for five first time mums with babies between the ages of four and six months who've not started solids yet.

[00:06:45] Sarah Almond Bushell: So this way I can be absolutely sure that I'm going to get exactly who I need. First time mums, babies of the right age, and before they've started weaning. I think it's worth a mention at this point that if you're doing market research with a view to putting together an offer and you're new to business, Or perhaps you don't have an established audience to ask.

[00:07:05] Sarah Almond Bushell: Now's not the time to be putting together an offer. You need to go back a few steps and spend a bit more time and energy on growing an audience so that you have got people ready to sell to. You can, of course, conduct market research at any point in your business journey. And if you're just starting to understand your niche and who your ideal customer might be, this is a great thing to do, but your questions will be different because you'll be wanting to find out the basics like who they are, where do they consume their information, what are their interests, what are their struggles, their problems, and how does this impact on their everyday lives?

[00:07:43] Sarah Almond Bushell: So you can carry out market research. in various different ways. And I'm going to take you through my top five suggestions. Number one is interviews. These are face to face discussions that happen either in real life or online. Now, I highly recommend that you do these using video conferencing software if you're conducting them online.

[00:08:07] Sarah Almond Bushell: rather than just a phone call, and that's so that you can observe and respond to each other's body language and record the conversation. Likewise, if you're meeting someone in real life, record an audio file of the conversation, as you'll want to go back over what they told you afterwards. Listen out for common phrases or words that your potential clients use, because you'll want to keep a language bank of these to sprinkle through your marketing material in the future.

[00:08:35] Sarah Almond Bushell: Number two are focus groups. So these are small groups of people who you bring together and facilitate a discussion around some predefined topics. So what's great about focus groups is that the members will bounce ideas around. Perhaps one will prompt a thought from another member that wouldn't have been elicited otherwise.

[00:08:57] Sarah Almond Bushell: The downside of focus groups is that sometimes people refrain from speaking their mind because they're in a group setting. But again, I want you to record the conversations so that you can revisit them after the event. You likely want to watch back these a few times because you'll notice new things each time you do.

[00:09:15] Sarah Almond Bushell: And it's a good idea to take a note of your participants facial expressions and body language to see when they get excited or more animated when talking about a certain topic. Number three is data and analytics. Data and analytics. You should absolutely dive into any public records and publish data that's relevant for your niche.

[00:09:39] Sarah Almond Bushell: So for example, as an online business coach, I like to keep an eye on the popularity of the various different social media channels and the demographic data of the people who are using them. And in my nutrition business, public data tells me that there are more babies born in September, which means that come February and March time, five to six months later, parents will be starting to think about weaning.

[00:10:06] Sarah Almond Bushell: Also, take a look at your own stats, like your social media analytics. You'll get demographic data, including age and gender, Where in the world your followers are coming from, and check out your website stats. If you publish blogs, it can be really helpful to gather information on what topics your audience resonate with the most, what was popular, and actually, what didn't do so well.

[00:10:31] Sarah Almond Bushell: Number four are surveys. Now, online surveys are a great way to collect a lot of information about your target audience in a relatively short amount of time. You can use software like a Google Form or Typeform or SurveyMonkey to put together and distribute a questionnaire. Just be mindful that the more questions you ask, the less likely people are to fill it out.

[00:10:56] Sarah Almond Bushell: So really think about the quality of the questions that you're going to include. You want to aim for about five or six. You could offer an incentive to encourage people to fill out your forms, such as Putting their names in the hat to win a free one to one consultation with you or a place on your new program.

[00:11:16] Sarah Almond Bushell: The higher the value of the prize, the more likely people will take part. But do make sure that the prize is something that your ideal client wants and that other people don't. I've seen people offer things like iPads as a prize, for example, but if you do something like that, chances are you'll get anyone who fancies an iPad filling out your survey, and not your ideal customer, and the quality of your results will suffer.

[00:11:43] Sarah Almond Bushell: And number five is online marketplaces. Another great place to dive into market research is just to pay a visit to places like Amazon and Etsy. Type in the topic that you're researching and see what comes up and then filter by the one star reviews. This will give you a really good idea of what people feel is missing from the products and the services that are currently available.

[00:12:10] Sarah Almond Bushell: The next question, I bet you're thinking is Sarah, what questions do I ask? And actually, the answer to that depends on the purpose of the market research. You're going to need to spend a little time here really thinking about the purpose of each question. What is it that you need to know from your people?

[00:12:29] Sarah Almond Bushell: Your questions really should be open ended in the main. You don't want to lead your participants in any way. You want to sit back and let them talk. So if you're running interviews, it's actually best if you just leave them unstructured. With focus groups, you will benefit from having a loose structure just to guide the group.

[00:12:50] Sarah Almond Bushell: But think of your role as a facilitator rather than an interviewer. And with online forms, you will need some specific questions to ask. And actually, this is where closed questions that elicit a yes or a no response might actually be quite helpful for you. For example, if you work in the fitness space and you're Pretty sure that your audience wants to change their shape, you might ask them a closed question like, are you satisfied with your current body shape to elicit the majority rule?

[00:13:22] Sarah Almond Bushell: So here are some questions that you could ask, but use these as a bouncing off point and let them spark other questions because honestly, there's no right or wrong here. I'm going to continue with the fitness example, but switch this out for your own area of expertise. Tell me about your fitness as it feels now and just let people talk.

[00:13:44] Sarah Almond Bushell: What are your biggest frustrations with trying to improve your endurance? Why do you think that this has been a struggle for you? How long has it been going on? Where do you feel stuck? One of my favourite questions is, if I could wave a magic wand and get you the results that you're after, what would those results look like?

[00:14:08] Sarah Almond Bushell: Is there anyone out there who offers this solution already and does it really well? If so, who is that? If there's one thing that could be added to make their solution even better, what would that be? These questions are actually really great at identifying who your competitors might be. And then afterwards, you can go and take a look at their websites and their social media channels to see what it is that they're offering.

[00:14:35] Sarah Almond Bushell: What have you already tried to improve? In your sports performance that hasn't worked. If you haven't tried anything yet, I'm curious to know what stopped you from taking action before? That question will help them identify what their limiting beliefs are. Next, you could try and get them to visualize what the future might look like when their problem has gone away.

[00:14:58] Sarah Almond Bushell: Now, this is really important to understand what their desires are and what they actually do want. How would you feel if you could get a solution to this problem? What would life look like for you? Next, you might want to try and find out about their learning style. If you were to purchase a solution that promised you results, how would you like to be taught?

[00:15:21] Sarah Almond Bushell: One to one, online, group setting, video, audio, workbook, et cetera, et cetera. And then you want to ask them. Actually, what's most appealing to you about this particular method of learning? You could also ask whether they've ever watched videos or tutorials to help them with their fitness, their performance, their endurance.

[00:15:43] Sarah Almond Bushell: If so, were they helpful? And if so, did they actually take any action from them? And then you might want to find out where they spend most of their time online. Just ask them, do you spend your time on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn? Google search, emails, you name it.

[00:16:02] Sarah Almond Bushell: And ask which social media accounts they follow as well.

[00:16:06] Sarah Almond Bushell: So that's a ton of ideas for you and you won't want to ask them all, so do have a think about exactly what you need to know from your target audience at that point in time. Market research really isn't a one and done thing. You can never know too much about the audience that you're trying to serve.

[00:16:25] Sarah Almond Bushell: Okay, so there you have it. Now you know how important market research is when it comes to selling more of your products and services and why you should absolutely not create a single offer without doing it first. I've talked you through my five ways to conduct market research and given you a ton of suggestions for questions to ask.

[00:16:47] Sarah Almond Bushell: So your action step today is to go away and do some of that market research and find out what it is that your audience actually wants, which, as by now, it's often not what they need. Join me next time where we are diving into buyer psychology and the journey that your potential customer goes on before they ever decide to work with you, see you then.