AP 0899: How Do I Research What My Audience Needs?

AskPat 899 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: Hey, what's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 899 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 coming in from Anna today, but before we get to her question, I do want to thank today's sponsor, who is DesignCrowd. Now if you're stuck on ideas on how to develop your logo or your website or business cards, connect with a bunch of creative minds around the world with DesignCrowd. They have over 500,000 designers worldwide that are there to help you with your custom graphics, so it doesn't matter what kind of business you have. You can get the perfect custom design every time, or you get your money back, so check out DesignCrowd.com/askpat. Learn more and download your free guide to crowdsourcing great logos, graphics, and websites for your business. You can get $100 off your next design when, again, you go through that link which is DesignCrowd.com/askpat and you enter the promo code “AskPat”. All right, thanks so much and here's today's question from Anna.

Anna: Hi, Pat. This is Anna. I don't have a website or even a business name yet, but I would like to be able to give bookkeeping lessons to businesses and new bookkeepers by print and video. I would also like to build a community so that businesses can ask bookkeepers questions, and this could build trust, and maybe even lead to a client for the bookkeeper. My problem is that I'm having trouble with the research. I've tried the Facebook groups to find out what businesses are struggling with, but I'm not having very good results with that, so do you have any suggestions on how I can research this to be able to give my audience what they need? Thank you so much for everything you do and I appreciate your time.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Anna. Thank you so much for the question. I really appreciate it. You know, Facebook groups is not always the best approach. Now that is a great approach, I know a lot of people who have done a lot of great research and have connected with potential customers, have used those relationships that were built there to actually discover what products were created and even pre-sell products too, specifically through Facebook groups, but not all niches are going to work in that way. There are many other places online where you can do your research and find people who could potentially become customers or at least people who will help you to determine what it is that you should be creating.

In the world of bookkeeping and finances, a great place to go to would actually be LinkedIn, Anna. There's a lot of business to business type stuff, businesses talking to other businesses about things. That is a great place where there are likely conversations happening right now related to bookkeeping, where you can go in and even on the sidelines see what conversations are already happening. Now, if you could come in to those conversations and add value and actually provide answers that make sense and really help people out, I mean, you can automatically and in a very short time period begin to start becoming a little bit of an authority in that space. What then is able to happen is you can begin to start having conversations with individuals who seem to be having problems or issues or needing some sort of solution around this, and then you can kind of use the messaging systems within LinkedIn, just like you can with most other social media platforms, to begin actually doing your research.

Now you don't necessarily need to be in a group to do your research. You can find where groups of people exist outside of social media groups. So forums, for one, would be a great place to go. You can find personal finance blogs that talk about bookkeeping and you can look at the comment section of those blog posts to determine what people like or dislike or experiences that they might be having.

Another great place to look at questions that people are asking related to your topic is a tool that I found recently called AnswerThePublic.com, so if you were to actually type in “bookkeeping” or “bookkeeping services” or “bookkeeping questions” or “questions about bookkeeping” within that tool, you're—on the next page, on the results page—going to get all the questions that are important, that are listed in and around that topic. It's a great place for you to determine what content to create if you're a blogger or a podcaster. It's also a great place if you're doing research to determine what the biggest struggles are that people are having, so again that tool is AnswerThePublic.com. Just a forewarning, if they haven't changed the website yet, just be aware there's kind of a guy that greets you on the page, which is very strange and unexpected. I mean, he's not like crazy ugly or anything like that, but he's just . . . Go there and you'll see, so AnswerThePublic.com.

Finally, make sure that you try to get a point where you're having conversations with people, so you might want to actually reach out to business owners that you know already and ask them questions about their bookkeeping and things like that so that you can dive in and find that golden level of topics that seem to be of most interest to people related to what it is that you have to offer. What's cool about this—you mentioned that you don't have a website or email list yet, and you don't need an email list or a website to do this kind of stuff. You're right in the middle of it, which I know can be difficult sometimes. Now, because you got shot down on Facebook, don't worry about it. Move on to the next space. Find the other influencers out there who already have built trust with this audience, and see if you can go and penetrate those markets, and get on their radar. You can just start adding value and then you can start having conversations.

Anna, thank you so much. I appreciate you. I hope this has been helpful, and I want to wish you all the best. I also want to send you an AskPat teeshirt for having a question featured here on the show, so thank you so much and we'll get that to you in a few weeks.

Other than that, for those of you who are 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.

Thank you so much. I appreciate you and I look forward to serving you all in the next episode, which is Episode 900. Here's the thing, if you aren't subscribed now, subscribe now so you can get Episode 900 directly to you because that'll be the first episode where I drop in a clue that could help you potentially win $1,000 leading up to Episode 1,000 later this November, so the five episodes leading up to Episode 1,000 which is coming this year. We're almost at 900, so 100 more episodes to go. The five before 1,000, I'm going to be giving away to five lucky winners, and you'll hear more about how exactly you're going to enter, but there will be a clue in the next episode, so make sure you subscribe. I'll be giving away $1,000 a day leading up to the 1,000th episode of AskPat. How crazy is that? 1,000 episodes. That means there's 1,000 teeshirts out there. Well, there's been a couple of people who have asked multiple questions, but there's probably more than 1,000 teeshirts out there already because I've given away a number of teeshirts on AskPat Live, and sometimes I've given away two because it's like a father/son or a mother/daughter situation going on, and I love hooking up the kids with AskPat shirts too, but anyway, make sure you subscribe so you get Episode 900 and you'll hear the clues along the way. I won't give away clues on every episode, but I will give away a clue in Episode 900, which will all add up to a way for you to enter into the drawings, and so there you go. It's something that only you AskPat listeners will likely be able to get involved with, and so the earlier you can get in, the better. Subscribe now if you haven't already, and thank you so much for listening in.

As always, I'd like to end with a quote, and today's quote to end the month of June, already . . . We are over halfway through the year. God, that's crazy. This is by Ignatius Loyola and that is, “Teach us to give and not to count the cost.” Hear hear. Take care, guys. Thank you so much. I look forward to serving you in the 900th episode of AskPat. Thanks, guys. Bye.