Questions to Ask & Understand About Your Target Market

One of my mentors says, “Businesses that grow faster have customers they just know better.” There are a lot of things you can do to understand your customers better. One of those is to ask yourself the right questions. That’s what I’ll cover in today’s episode.

Join?Tim Fitzpatrick?for this week’s episode of The Rialto Marketing Podcast!

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Questions to Ask & Understand About Your Target Market

One of my mentors says, businesses that grow faster have customers they know better. There are a lot of things that we can do to better understand our customers. One of those is to ask ourselves and our ideal clients the right questions. That's what I'm going to talk about in today's episode.

Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe you must remove your revenue roadblocks if you want to accelerate revenue growth.

Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. This is going to be a short solo episode today, but one of the best ways to understand your ideal clients is to interview them. So many people neglect this, skip it, overlook it, don't even think about it. Man, it is absolutely invaluable. I've talked about this multiple times. I will continue to do so, but the following questions are going to help give you it's not an exhaustive list, but it'll give you an idea, the types of questions that you want to ask. Please feel free to tweak, add, but the goal here is to enter the conversation that they are having in their heads as it relates to what you do. When you can enter the conversation that your ideal clients are having about your business, your industry, what you do, marketing becomes much, much easier. So there's ten questions. Again, this is not exhaustive, but it will help give you an idea of where your questions should be headed and why.

First question. What keeps them up at night as it relates to what you do? So, for example, as a marketing consultant, what keeps them up at night about marketing? We want to understand what they're worried about, what concerns they have.

Who are they mad at? Or what are they mad about? With marketing they might be mad at other marketing providers, right? They spent a bunch of money, didn't get any return. Right? They're mad about not seeing results with their marketing, right? There's all kinds of different things, but we want to better understand who they're mad at and what they are mad about.

What are their top three daily frustrations? In my case, when it comes to marketing, what are those frustrations, those concerns? You can see these first three questions are slight variations, and you might get slightly different answers to these three questions, okay? So we want to really dig in and find out exactly what the problems, what the frustrations really are.

What's their day like, right? For our ideal clients, what is their day like? What is happening throughout their day? This gives you a much better understanding of what's going on in their business and what their daily business life is like. So that gosh, are there things, services, products that you can offer that can help make that simpler, easier, better, more efficient?

What trends are occurring? What's happening within the industry? This can help you kind of pinpoint gosh there. Do we have gaps in what we offer? Or is there another need that we might be able to meet within the market? We want to have an idea of where things are headed.

Number six, what do they secretly desire most? If you come out and ask this question directly, you're probably not going to get the accurate answer. So this is one of those things that by asking questions, you really need to kind of pay attention and hone in. And this is not going to be something that's going to be easy to discover with just one question. But gosh, you really want to understand what it is that they most secretly desire, okay? This is about peeling the layers of the onion back. You ask somebody what they want, the first answer is not necessarily what they really desire. I want to grow my company. Why do you want to grow your company? Right. To feel successful. Why do you want to feel successful? Right? We keep digging deep, deep, deep. You got to go deep to really find out what they secretly desire most.

What's their subculture language? Different industries have different language, right? And you want to make sure if you're going into a really specific market so for example, doctors, health care, they talk about patients, not customers. Little subculture language there. You want to understand their language, how they refer to things. Because you want to use that subculture language in your messaging, right? Because that's what's going to resonate with them. So really important to kind of understand what they, how they refer to certain things within their business.

How do they describe themselves? Again, this is just we're getting a better understanding of how they think about themselves, how they perceive themselves.

How do they talk to each other. This is going to, again help you better understand the subculture language. But then if you understand how they talk to each other, you can communicate to your ideal clients in the same way, which is going to grab their attention, their interest, engage them, get them to take action.

And number ten, what is your advantage? What is your unique advantage? This is really starting to dig deeper into your competitive advantage, right? Your unique selling proposition. What makes you different than every other provider that's out there that is talking to them as well? So what makes my company different than every other marketing company that's out there as an example, right? What is your advantage?

And I'm going to give you a bonus here. Number eleven, what is their most pressing problem? When you understand what their most pressing problem is, you can create services or products that are going to address and meet that need. Really important, right? We can't just create a product or service and then go out and find the market. We want to understand the market and the problems that they have and then create products and services that are going to address and address their needs and solve the problems that they have. Super, super important.

So, like I said, this is not an exhaustive list, but there are eleven questions there to help get your creative juices going. I would highly recommend you start, I'm shooting this right near the end of 2022. So if you're watching live, listening live, great. If not, this episode will be published in early 2023. Start 2023 by interviewing at least five to ten ideal clients. Ask them these questions. It will be absolutely invaluable. I promise you that the information you glean from this will improve your business tenfold. I promise. So do it. Let me know what you think.

Target market is one of the nine revenue roadblocks we help clients remove so that they can accelerate revenue growth. If you want to find out which roadblocks are slowing down your growth, head on over to Revenueroadblockscorecard.com. At revenueroadblockscorecard.com, in less than five minutes, you will be able to discover and assess which of the nine roadblocks is slowing down your growth. You can also always connect with us over at rialtomearketing.com book a free GPS call. I would be happy to chat with you, give you some outside eyes and guidance on the direction you should head with your marketing to get where you want to go.

Thanks so much for listening. I appreciate you. Till next time. Take care.

About the author,?Tim Fitzpatrick

Do you know you have an opportunity for revenue growth and are unsure how to make it happen? Do you lack someone with the time, skill set, and desire to take ownership of marketing to drive results?

When it comes to marketing, it's easy to fall prey to information overload. We understand how overwhelming and frustrating marketing your business can be. But, marketing shouldn't be difficult.

At Rialto Marketing, we work with B2B professional service firms that want to accelerate revenue growth and attract more ideal clients.

So, stop gambling with your marketing budget each month. Put an end to guessing what your next marketing step should be and hoping it works. It's time to remove your revenue roadblocks.

Wouldn't you like to reach your revenue goals faster? Let us run your marketing, so you don't have to.