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Brian chats about Dan Kennedy’s checklist, The 10 Smart Market Diagnosis and Profiling Questions from his classic book The Ultimate Sales Letter.

Transcription

Customer research methods.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

I wanted to talk a little bit of a piece out of this book and it’s really good for research.

Sometimes it gets tough in the very beginning, especially when you’re getting into advertising, and you’re wanting to learn more about your customers. And that’s really the beginning of the good direct response advertising is really knowing about but who, really know about who you’re trying to reach, and making that kind of your primary start.

If you’ve at least got that in your mind, you’re on a good track and sometimes if you start there, it’s like, Okay, well, what do I need to know about him?

I mean, there’s a million things, you got your demographics, and psychographics, and all these different things.

Well, this is a great checklist from Dan Kennedy’s book, the Ultimate Sales Letter, I think this checklist is in a couple of other formats floating around out there also but this is a good book to begin with.

I mean, this isn’t a complete review of this book but it’s an awesome book. It’s not just about sales letters, it’s about communicating a thorough message when you’re trying to sell something to anyone in any way, especially online, where you have actually sales letters printed on pages. On websites, you’ve got video sales letters, in a sense, you have audio coming through and podcasts and other formats.

There are a million ways to be able to sell people now more so than ever before. And it all really originated with mailers, and direct mail, and, and advertising that way and through magazines and newspapers.

It’s moved to today, but at the same time, the same things are true. And so when we’re looking to find out more about potential customers, we’re wanting to do research and really find out what they’re all about so that we can communicate properly to them, and be able to speak their language, then this is a great way of going about doing that this is from chapter one.

It’s the first step in his process of creating a good sales letter, and specifically a good sales message.

He says step one, get into the customer.

And he has this list. It’s called the 10 Smart Market Diagnosis and Profiling Questions.

Okay, so there’s 10 of these, let’s go through them real quick, shall we?

Number one, what keeps them awake at night, indigestion boiling up their esophagus, eyes open, staring at the ceiling?

And what keeps them awake at night is all bolded. It’s what really has your customer on edge, you got to at least know that whether it has anything to do with your product or not, you got to know where they’re coming from.

In general, once again, a whole lot of this is guessing unless you already have a customer, or unless you are already familiar enough with the market unless you know them personally. And you could base this off of one person to begin with if you needed to.

Number two, What are they afraid of?

There’s a very common thread throughout all of this. We’ll hit on that at the very end.

Number three, and then once again, that could be number one. Number two could be the same thing, right? It all depends.

Number three, What are they angry about? Who are they angry at?

That’s number three.

Number four, What are their top three daily frustrations?

Real similar trend throughout this whole thing, but you might be able to pick something up. And you may not have an answer all these questions, but you may be able to pick something up off of one or two or three of these questions.

Number five, What trends are occurring and will occur in their businesses or lives?

Number six, What do they secretly ardently desire most?

Number seven, Is their built-in bias to the way they make decisions? Is there a built-in bias to the way they make decisions?

Okay, for example, engineers are exceptionally analytical. So that’s kind of their bias is in a very heavy analytical side. So is that true of your market also?

Number eight, Do they have their own language?

More than likely they do depending on how defined you have your market down to if it’s a specific career choice if it’s a specific religious sect if it’s, you know, whatever it is that makes your people unique.

What is that language and they’re not just talking English versus German versus whatever, that’s not the type of language that Dan Kennedy is talking about is do they have certain terminology and everything else that other people may not even understand if you brought it up, it’s very important to know.

Number nine, Who else is selling something similar to their product and how?

So to your product, you know, is something is someone selling something similar and how are they doing it?

It’s a tough question, but it’s something you really need to know.

And number 10, Who else has tried selling them something similar and how has that effort failed?

Not that easy to find out. But if you really know the market, well, you may already have that answer. Or it may have been you maybe you’ve already failed at trying to sell something similar up until now. But those are very, very, very important questions.

Those are the 10 Smart market diagnosis and profiling questions when it comes to your market when it comes to your potential customer or client. Very important stuff.

That what’s the common trend. The common trend throughout almost every single one of those answers is emotion.

Okay, we’re focusing very, very deeply on the emotion that runs through your marketplace.

What are they feeling?

What are they angry about?

Where what gets them going?

What are they excited about?

These are all emotional ideas and emotions. You know, we are not our emotions as people but quite often we let our emotions drive us.

And especially when it comes to purchasing when it comes to separating from our money. A whole lot of that is an emotional process. In most cases, it was one of the things I fought a lot.

When I first started getting into the marketing arena, they kept saying that I’m like, Yeah, but it shouldn’t be that way. You know, people should be more logical about this type of thing.

I’m more logical, why can’t everyone be more logical, and you can’t get caught up with the way things should be. You have to focus when you’re coming out from a scientific perspective.

The whole Claude Hopkins, you know, Scientific Advertising, you come out from a scientific perspective, you have to look at the way things are, and not the way you want them to be.

And the plain fact of the matter is, you go out there and try enough times you’re going to find, you’re going to get a motion back over and over and over again, as the main reason why people do things.

And if you ignore that, you do it at your own peril. You’re gonna have a really tough time getting anyone anywhere, and getting anyone excited about what you’re doing.

If you don’t, at least acknowledge that that’s where they’re coming from. Now you can help redirect them and help help people to think better if you want, but you have to meet them where they’re at. And where most people are at is in an emotional state.

Especially if they’re going to be purchasing anything from yourself.

Hopefully that’s helpful. Like I said, great book.

I’ve got my own book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business. Just one book so far, but this is a good one. Go check it out small lots more than this one.

It’s a quick read, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business you can get a free copy at AmazonProofBook.com. Go there right now for a free copy. AmazonProofBook.com.

We’ll be back here tomorrow. In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.