How to Survey Your Audience to Find Their Pain

Whether you plan on creating your own product or promoting one as an affiliate, you have to have a deep understanding of the audience you are trying to sell to. If you don’t have an understanding, your promotions will be a lot less effective than they would be otherwise. Surveying your audience is one of the best ways to improve your marketing efforts, make more money, and help people at the same time!

There are a variety of different ways you can survey your audience. Most logically, you can set up an actual survey! SurveyMonkey.com is very commonly used. You set up your own survey to ask your audience questions about what they are going through, and what would help them. Ask them what they are passionate about and why.

You want to get as deeply into their minds as possible — you want to find out where their pain is so you can market to emotions and offer them the solutions they are desperate for. This works best if you already have a steady stream of traffic coming into your website. Alternatively, you can set up a Pay Per Click campaign that entices people to take your survey after they click through to your site.

Of course, you have to consider that people are very busy these days. You can thank people for their time in a variety of ways. For example, giving them a free gift upon completion.

After you have a large enough pool of people you have surveyed, you can examine the date and make changes to your marketing from there. This works well for creating a product because you’ll be able to match the product with everything your survey revealed and more!

You can also do less formal surveys through market research. For instance, you can browse through niche forums where people in your niche regularly hang out. Take notes on what drives them. Examine what language they use to talk to one another and as they talk about their hobby, passion, or problem. Go deeply into their minds by examining topics that frequently come up (you can usually sort forums by threads that are most read or most replied to).

While this is not a “survey” per se, it’s still a good option for getting to the heart of the people in your niche if you don’t have the desire or time to set up a formal survey right now. Researching on forums is an awesome way to improve your affiliate sales or sales of your own product because it can give you a wealth of ideas and insight into the people of your niche in a way that you would not be able to get otherwise.

It’s very important that you start to survey your audience as soon as possible, because it can give you some insights you would never have gotten otherwise.



image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/36894712@N04/3540043003/ 

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