3. How-To: Amanda Lester drops lots of market research knowledge:
Big Ideas:
- Everyone can and should be doing some form of market research.
- To make it easier for people to buy, you need to de-risk the purchase for them.
- Develop a hypothesis for your organization.
Great podcast guest for y’all this week, Amanda Lester.
As she mentions at the start, her work began as a musician informed her decision to get into the marketing side of the business.
For a long time I’ve been writing about the need to do more market research, so I’m a believer.
But Amanda lays out a lot more information and I found myself taking tons of notes throughout our conversation.
The big idea that stuck with me was this idea around creating a hypothesis for your market research.
We’ve covered the way I teach folks about market research by doing it backward.
The idea that drives this way of thinking is the need to have a guide for your research and thinking.
So begin with the idea that you need a hypothesis to focus your actions.
Building off of that, Amanda is even more forceful than me when she talks about research happening too late, not nearly as much as is needed, and without a real focus!
Go Amanda! Go!
The secret of market research is that you should be doing some form of research constantly. You can do small scale stuff like individual conversations or ethnography. You can go a bit higher with focus groups. Occasionally, you need to do some sort of big study of the market.
Another secret to market research is to start with Google.
If you are smart about your questions, you can find a lot of secondary research on Google.
The key is that you need to constantly be in the market to know what people want and to figure out how to offer more value.
Finally, your research can help you understand your market and make more sales more quickly by providing a less risky purchase environment.
This is the key idea that is at play with Booking Protect and some of the messages they have been sharing lately about protecting your brand, improving your service, and helping make the purchase path more complete for customers.
In the end, that comes down to de-risking the purchase for a customer.
That’s the beauty of market research:
- You know your customers better.
- You are guided by better questions.
- You find the keys to unlock your customer’s desire to purchase.
In Action:
- Come up with a guiding question for your company or research.
- Look for buying behaviors and what people value. You aren’t your market.
- Stay in the market doing research all the time. It doesn’t have to be huge surveys. It can be a conversation but stay in the market.