AP 0915: How Do I Ask My Audience What They Need?

AskPat 915 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 915 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions, five days a week.

We have a great question today from Angie, but before we get to that, I do want to thank today's sponsor, an awesome company called ZipRecruiter. You know, if you're hiring, this is the place you wanna go. You know, at some point in every business you're gonna get to a point where you're eventually gonna wanna hire so you don't get overworked, or so that you can expand and scale it the way you want to, and one of the hardest things to do is to find the best candidates for any positions that you have. Now, you could go out and manually post on hundreds of different job sites, or you can do it in just one simple place, like ZipRecruiter. They'll help you screen all the candidates, you don't have to worry about phone calls or e-mail exchanges, it's all done through ZipRecruiter. And you can try it out for free, by going to ZipRecruiter.com/pat. One more time, that's ZipRecruiter.com/pat.

All right, now here's today's question from Angie.

Angie: Hey Pat, this is Angie B. Likens, and I live in Texas, and I'm the founder and director of Proclaim Truth Conference. You can find more about that at ProclaimTruth.com. But, even more fun than that, we have, actually, a friend in common, and that's PT, Philip Taylor, and Jessica Bufkin from the FinCon Conference, and we all went to Louisiana Tech together. So, Jessica and I have just recently formed a mastermind with a few other friends that specialize in working planning conferences; that's a lot of fun.

So, getting to my point, I just finished listening to AskPat Episode 883, How Do I Identify My YouTube Audience? I really appreciated your tip on how to engage with our community with the auto responder questions, and my question for you is, can you be more specific and give a few more examples of good questions that would help reveal what our audience most needs? Just, how can we help them with what they need the most, or what do they struggle with? I just . . . sometimes get stuck on how to ask those questions the best, and not sound robotic but engaging. So any help you've got, I'm willing to listen. So, thanks so much Pat, I'm a huge fan, and I really look forward to meeting you at FinCon in the fall. Thanks a lot.

Pat Flynn: Hey Angie, thank you so much for the question today, I appreciate your support so much, and I really look forward to meeting you later this year, at FinCon in Dallas, it's gonna be lots of fun. So happy that you're friends with Jessica and PT as well, Philip Taylor from PTMoney.com and FinCon. I mean, that crew there is just so amazing, and it's one of the reasons why I love going to FinCon. It's just such a family type of feel when I get there, which is awesome. So, if anybody is gonna be at FinCon later this year, come and say hi. And Angie, specifically you, I wanna say hi to you and meet you.

But anyway, let me answer your question here. So first of all, one of the best things that I've done, it's not a automated thing, but it does take some manual outreach, and it's been so huge for me and my business in terms of helping me discover what my audience really needs help with. But more than that, helping me understand, by putting myself into my audiences' shoes. And how is that done? It's thorough actually reaching out to subscribers, and actually asking them to get on a phone call with me, or on a Skype call. And I do this every single month with ten random subscribers on my list, and it's funny, because a lot of times when I reach out they're like, “Wait, is this real?” And yeah, it's real. Why? Because that time is so precious, the time that I get to not only just ask questions like, “Hey, what do you need help with?” Or, “What are you struggling with? What were the first impressions that you had when you came to the site? What's something that you wish I could do better?” Those kinds of things. But this right here, what I'm about to say, has changed the game for me. And that is, “Hey, really quick, tell me what's on your mind.” Or, “Tell me your story.” And to hear another person's story, or to hear it in their own words, using their own voice, with their emotions behind it, it really changes the game in terms of the empathy that you feel for your audience.

Empathy is one of those underrated things, especially in online business, where we don't get to really see each other, or shake each other's hands, or give each other hugs, right? We don't feel what the other person is feeling all the time, until you talk to them. And so that's one of the first things I would do Angie, and it doesn't have to be ten per month. I would actually challenge you to just try to do it to one or two people within the next week, if you listen to this. Everybody, everybody should do that. It's game changing. And yes, sometimes those conversations are very short, but sometimes those conversations are very long as well.

Now, I asked you . . . Or, I mentioned a few other questions, such as, “What's on your mind right now? How can I help you?” You know, those are basic questions. “What are you struggling with right now?” is one of those automated ones that I like to include into autoresponders, which is what Angie was referencing earlier. But another thing I like to ask, I got this question from Noah Kagan, and that is, “Hey, what's a tool or a program that you got involved with recently that just didn't work out for you?” Or, “Where do you spend your time these days?” And you can start to learn a lot more information from that question by following up with the right questions, by saying, “Oh, well what's something that you wish could have been done better?” Or, “What do you like about that thing?” Or, “What do you think could be done to improve that thing?” You know? So now we're starting to get into specifics a little bit, but that's where you start to, using those follow up questions—those are the things that help you dig deeper. Typically the surface level answers are just surface level in terms of impact.

So try to dig deep, and that's why, again, I always go back to those conversations that I have, and you don't have to have very many of them, because a lot of times the people in your audience represent a much larger whole. So, reach out to a few people, ask them questions, and that's really what I feel like is the next level, in terms of finding out what your audience needs most.

So Angie, I hope that little challenge excites you, and I'm looking forward to hearing about how that works out for you later this year, when I see you at FinCon. So let me know. Thanks so much Angie, I appreciate you, I look forward to seeing you also wearing an AskPat t-shirt one of these days, I'm gonna send you one for free for having your question featured here on the show. And for those of you listening, if you have a question that you'd like potentially featured here on the show as well, just head on over to AskPat.com, and you can ask right there on that page.

Thanks so much, and I'll see you in the next episode. Until then, here is a quote to finish off the day, by Shannon A. Thompson, that is, “Remember how far you’ve come, and you won’t have to rely on a destiny for your future. It will come on your own.” Nice, nice, I like that.

Hey, it's almost time for another clue, and I'm gonna give it to you at some moment in the next episode, in Episode 916. So I'm gonna say something that might seem out of place. Well, if you hear that, well that's because that's a clue. So, check that out in the next episode. Thanks everybody, and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.