Questions to Ask & Understand About Your Target Market

It is amazing how often your clients can articulate the best positioning for your business. But how do we actually get this done? Simple. We need to ask our ideal clients the right questions. When you do this, you will gain valuable marketing insights. It is one of the best things that you can do for your business. And today, what I'm going to do is run you through a host of power powerful questions you can ask.

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

It is amazing how often your clients can articulate the best positioning for your business. But how do we actually get this done? Simple. We need to ask our ideal clients the right questions. When you do this, you will gain valuable marketing insights. It is one of the best things that you can do for your business. And today, what I'm going to do is run you through a host of power powerful questions you can ask.

Hi I'm Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe you must remove your revenue roadblocks to accelerate growth, and marketing shouldn't be difficult.

So I am flying solo today. I'm going to open up the hood, and what I'm really going to do is just walk you through a document we call the Ideal Client Profiler. The Ideal Client Profiler is a document that we use when we complete Ideal Client reviews for our clients as part of our work with them. If you want a copy of this, I will be happy to share it with you, and I will tell you at the end how you can actually get a copy of it. But for now, I'm going to walk you through and just explain some of these elements so that you can better understand them. And like I said, this is one of the most important things I think anybody can do for their business. So if you're watching, I'm going to share my screen. You can view this. If you're listening, Totally okay. I'll walk it through and then give you the info at the end so that you can actually get a copy of this for yourself. And again, I'm happy to share this.

The Ideal Client Profiler

So we call this the Ideal Client Profiler, and it is basically a list of questions that we can ask. We don't ask every single one of these. There's a ton of questions on here, but it gives you an idea of how to frame that conversation with an ideal client. And for me, the way I define an ideal client is somebody that you love to work with, somebody that is profitable, and somebody that you are getting great results for. They are happy with what you are doing for them. If you can work with people like that day in, day out, how much better is your business going to be? It's going to be a phenomenon. So when we interview ideal clients, these are the people that we want to talk to. And ideally, we want them to have gone through and bought from us fairly recently. Because the further out it was, the harder it's going to be for them to remember. So just a few things to keep in mind there. But in the initial, and typically these conversations are 20, 30 minutes, maybe somewhere around there.

So the first thing that you're going to see in this ideal client profile are some deep dive questions. These are questions that you don't ask initially, but they are questions that you can ask to dig deeper based on an answer that you received. Because sometimes you get a very surface level answer, and that's not going to be enough. So for example, let's say I ask somebody, what do you love about working with us? And they say, well, you have great customer service. Who cares? Anybody can say that. We want to understand what they mean by that. That's where these deep dive questions can help. So it might be, Hey, that's interesting. Can you tell me more about that? And why do you care, need, want that? What led to that decision? Walk me through your thought process there. Why did you decide to do it that way? What else was going on that made that the right choice? That seems to really bug you. I bet there's a story there. You seem pretty excited about that. Why was that a big deal? Those are examples of deep dive questions to go below the surface and really get to the heart of the matter and get a much, much more powerful answer that you can use.

Deep Dive Questions

Now, to start the interview, typically we have ice breakers and general questions. You may not ask all of these, but here are some things that I think might be good for you to know about the person you're interviewing. What's your job title? And beyond that, tell me a little bit about your role. Right now, what are your top priorities? What does success look like for you in your role? How do you measure it? What's your day like? What blogs, online publications? Do you do you read? What communities, organizations, or associations do you belong to? What social media networks and platforms do you use? What format do you prefer to consume content in? Do you like podcast? Do you like video? Do you like to read? What thought leaders, writers, bloggers, industry experts do you follow? What are your top three daily frustrations? Think about how powerful it is if you had the answers to those questions about your ideal clients. It could help inform some of the marketing decisions that you make. What social media channels do you need to be on? Are there blogs or podcasts that that maybe you could write for or be a guest on? That's the information that you're going to gather by asking some of these questions.

From there, we want to understand what their goals were. We want to better understand what the buyer's motivation to purchase was. One of the most powerful questions you can ask to understand their goals is when you decided to buy our solution, whatever that solution may be, when you decided to buy solution, was there a specific problem you were trying to solve or a job you were trying to get done?

Next thing we want to look at is we want to explore the outcomes that they desired. How did they hope their life would be better after working with you? Best question here, when you bought our solution, how did you hope it would improve your life or your business.

Next question we're going to look at is digging at the pains with the old solution that they had. What problems did they have with other solutions that they tried before they started to work with you. So, hey, let's take a step back. What were you using before our solution to get whatever specific job it was done and why did you start looking for something new? What were you using before our solution to get the job done? And why did you start looking for something new?

Next thing we want to understand is the trigger event. We want to hone in on that moment that the buyer realized they had a problem to solve. Best question you can ask here, do you remember the first time you thought about needing a new X or whatever you do, whatever the solution is. So if I'm a managed service provider, do you remember the first time you thought about needing a new managed service provider? For example. We want to understand what that trigger was.

Next thing we want to understand is we want to better understand their journey, the buyer's journey. What steps did they go through to actually make a decision? Here's the power question there. Once you've figured out you had a problem that needed to be solved or a need that wasn't being met, how did you go about finding the right solution? Try to walk me through each step of your search in as much details as you can remember. What we want to understand is we want to understand them becoming aware of the problem, researching specific solutions, and then how they actually qualified solutions and providers, and how they finally made that choice of who they were going to work with. That's what we're trying to understand here with this question.

Now, the next thing we want to do is we want to understand any objections that they may have had. We want to understand their anxieties, habits, or constraints that may have stopped them from actually buying? Here's the question. Before you bought our solution, was there anything you were anxious about that could have stopped you from trying it?

Next thing we want to look at is why they bought from you. What was your winning value proposition that got them to choose you? Excuse me. So here's the question. If you had to narrow it down, what was the number one reason you chose to work with us?

Next thing we want to look at is we want to measure their satisfaction. We want to evaluate how happy they are with the purchase and where there may be room for improvement. The question here is, now that you're using our solution, how does it compare to your initial expectations? Another clarifier there, what do you like most about working with us? There are variations of all of these questions I'm giving you, and those variations or additional questions to dig deeper are in the ideal client profiler that I will share with you.

Next thing we want to understand when interviewing ideal clients is we want to discover new opportunities, if there are new opportunities. Are there services or products that are complementary to ours that they're buying that they would love to buy from us? We just don't offer those, for example. So when it comes to X, and X being what we do, when it comes to X, what's one challenge or struggle that still keeps you up at night? Or you might ask, what can we do to be even more valuable to you going forward?

The last question, and I call this swipable language, right? This is a great opportunity to hear in their words how they describe you. You'll get marketing message gold with this question. So here it is. What would you say if you had to convince a friend to try our solution and you only had two minutes to explain why they should buy it? What would you say if you had to convince a friend to try our solution and you only had two minutes to explain why they should buy it? That is the last question.

Conclusion

Like I said, the Ideal Client Profiler Doc has a ton of questions within each of these steps that I've shared with you today. So I want to make it available to you, but I hope that outline gives you an idea of some of the questions that you can ask, why and why you should ask them when you interview Ideal Clients.

So here's how to get a copy. I want to thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. If you want these lists of questions that we ask when we do client interviews for our clients, here it is free, no strings attached. Just send an email to [email protected].That's R-I-A-L-T-OMarketing.Com. In the subject line, just put Ideal Client Profiler. And just say, Hey, watch the podcast episode. Would love a copy of your Ideal Client Profiler. That's all you got to do. So send an email to [email protected]. It's the subject line, Ideal Client Profiler. Just let us or listened to the podcast episode and you would love a copy and we'll send it your way. So I hope you found this helpful. And till next time, take care.