Start Here For Market Research, Audience Profiling And Competitor Analysis
Want to learn about audience profiling and market research but don’t know where to start?
Here’s a list of a number of articles on the subject, written by a direct response marketer, multiple-time business owner and author, and creator of a fledgling online empire.
In other words, me.
Reader SurvivingMyTwenties over on Twitter asked if I’d ever written about market research and learning about an audience and competitors for your business.
I have done – numerous times it turns out – but once again, the poor navigation of this website is leaving it difficult for people to find what they’re looking for.
Because I want everyone to survive their twenties, preferably by learning about market research and then putting that into action in a way that builds lasting businesses that make the world a better place, here’s a collection of articles I’ve written on market research and other related topics.
Market Research: Let’s Get Started
These are the “primer” topics regarding market research. They repeat and build on each other, but the general gist is always the same: find a buying audience, give them what they want, do it well.
https://jamiemcsloy.co.uk/three-key-steps-buying-audience/
https://jamiemcsloy.co.uk/write-different-audiences/
https://jamiemcsloy.co.uk/give-audience-want/
https://jamiemcsloy.co.uk/wish-fulfilment-start-marketing/
https://jamiemcsloy.co.uk/the-market-is-aspirational/
There are a couple of articles above that are about the aspirational nature of copywriting (and by extension, all marketing.)
It’s not exactly audience profiling, but it’s a key part of market research that many people neglect. Remember, you’re not selling a person on what they are now, you’re selling a person on what they can be.
Analysing Competition & Bettering Them
https://jamiemcsloy.co.uk/market-something-thats-done-million-times/
For a freelance business; how to flip the script on your competition:
https://jamiemcsloy.co.uk/flip-script-get-clients/
https://jamiemcsloy.co.uk/flipping-script-competing-freelancers/
More on how to market versus how not to:
https://jamiemcsloy.co.uk/find-copywriting-clients/
Market Research: Audience Profiling
Here are my latest thoughts on giving your audience what they want. The article is a rough draft, but the four point matrix and the journey through it gives you details on what you need to provide your audience, when and where:
https://jamiemcsloy.co.uk/know-reader-needs-give/
Now, everyone is a complete individual. It’s very hard (though entirely possible) to create a marketing message for a single person. (Thank you Facebook Ads!)
But for the most part, you want to paint in broad strokes and niche down during the research stage. Here are a pair of articles that’ll help you do that:
https://jamiemcsloy.co.uk/make-copywriting-gold-pretending-serial-killer-hunter-part-one/
https://jamiemcsloy.co.uk/learn-everything-customer/
Market Research: Specifically For Online Small Businesses and Niche Websites
I’ve written a lot about niche sites, so I’ll include the subject as a section here. You can probably read through these and use the ideas for general online stuff (and possibly offline stuff too,) but if you’re looking for audience-based stuff on niche sites, then these are my current go to articles:
https://jamiemcsloy.co.uk/writing-niche-site-audience/
https://jamiemcsloy.co.uk/write-niche-site-articles-audience-wants/
https://jamiemcsloy.co.uk/write-audience-focused-niche-sites/
For a more powerful version of audience profiling than you’ll get on a million business courses, here’s my recommendation.
Find a psychological school of thought that you agree with. It might be evolutionary psychology, Jungian thought, Freudian stuff or astrology. It doesn’t matter, all of them serve to map the human mind and all have their good points and bad.
Anyway, once you’ve found that school, learn about how it categorises people. You’ll find that all of them; from yoga through Jung’s archetypes and MBTI have a way to categorise people first broadly and then narrowly.
Pick a system and use it as the basis for narrowing down your audience, then use the cold-reading techniques to “make the audience fit.”
More on this another time.
Final Thoughts
There are bound to be more articles on the subject across the site. This should serve to get anyone started on market research, audience profiling and analysing the competition though. (I know there are articles further back in the archives about competing, but I can’t find them yet.)
Ultimately, you need to do three things:
- Find your audience
- Find their weak spots and needs
- Deliver the solution to them in a manner that speaks to them (and do it well)
Those steps comprise a ton of different strategies and tactics, but the backbone of getting those tactics right is knowing how to step into a person’s mind and find out the above.
Hopefully the articles above will help you to understand that first and most fundamental task.