While you’ll never truly know if anyone wants to buy a product/service - until you’re brave enough to try and sell it, investing time in market research can save you a ton of time (and heartache). 

In this episode of the Courageous Content Podcast, I’ll share 3 social media posts you can create that are perfect for market research.

And by the way, these posts are also perfect for helping you discover why a product/service isn’t selling as well as you’d like. 

Key Links

Janet Murray’s Courageous Content Planner

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Janet Murray's Courageous Blog Content Kit

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IMPORTANT: THIS TRANSCRIPT IS AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED. WE GIVE IT A QUICK CHECK THROUGH BUT WE DON’T CORRECT EVERYTHING AS IT’S INTENDED TO HELP YOU FIND PARTS YOU WANT TO LISTEN TO AGAIN - NOT AS AN EXACT TRANSCRIPT. SO THERE MIGHT BE A FEW QUIRKY WORDS/PHRASES HERE!

Well, you'll never truly know if animal wants to buy a product or service from you until you're brave enough to try and sell it to them. Investing time in market research can save you a ton of time and hassle I'm Janet Murray. I'm the creator of the greatest content plan and a whole host of content kits that will save you time and trouble with the content.

In this episode of the content podcast, I'll share with you the social media posts you can create that are perfect for market research. And by the way, these posts are also perfect for helping you discover why a product or service isn't selling as well as you'd like it to. So, first off there's the, which do you prefer post? So the more you can involve your online community in your product research,

the more invested they'll feel. So when your product or service goes on sale, they'll be far more likely to buy. That's why asking questions about products or services you're developing can be a great way to get your audience involved. You can ask about anything, including titles, names, logos, other design features. Just make sure that what you ask is specific and easy to respond to.

If your question is too open, people won't apply. And if you're using images, which I would recommend, if you can labeling up different options, 1, 2, 3, 4, or a B, or C will make it much easier for people to respond. For example, before we open pre-orders of my courageous concept planet, each year, we publish a short list of eight potential cover designs and invite my social media followers to vote for their favorite one.

So we can take it down to four because that's how many cover designs we publish in the end. If you're listening to this episode around the time it goes live, so should be ended July, 2022, you might be just in time to see this year's post on my Facebook page or link to my page in the show notes. This really helps to create a buzz about the upcoming launch.

And it also crucially allows us to build a wait list for the planner. So as I'm recording this, I've just launched a competition with an amazing prize. So you can win a free ticket to my annual live event. Courageous content live worth 5, 9, 7 that's in pounds, and also a fab tech bundle, which includes a snazzy microphone, a ring light kit,

and also some headphones that will help with video and audio recording. Oh, and a copy of my courageous content packed. In fact, you can even have a personalized one if you want. And that whole bundle is worth well over a thousand pounds. So when we invite people to cast their vote, we also using our clever messenger bot, invite them to enter this competition and also join the wait list.

We don't do all of those at the same time, because I'm a big believer in not giving people more than one action. So we invite people that see the vote for their favorite cover and tell them that if they do say that there'll be invited to enter the competition, and then once they've entered the competition, we ask, if they'd like to join the wait list.

Now this may be a bit more sophisticated than what you're used to. So if it feels overwhelming, don't panic. Remember I've been selling my planner for, I think it's seven years now. So we've added new things in each year. The bit that I really want you to take away is building that buzz and excitement. So by the time I pre-order sales open in August,

we should have a wait list. Typically it's about 1200. So we'll be planning to exceed that this year, but we should have a really nice wait list of people who have already said, they're interested. They've looked at the covers, they've talked about them. They're excited. They're engaged that invested. That's the part that I'd really like you to take around.

Just have a think about when you're launching a new product or service. How can you get people excited about it, invested in it before you actually launch it? And how can you introduce some kind of weightless strategy? And by the way, you don't need a fancy email automation or a messenger bot. I've talked about this on loads of other podcast episodes to have a wait list strategy.

As long as you are compliant with data protection, you could literally create a spreadsheet and put people's names on the hill, or even write it down. As long as you are compliant with edge protection law. That is absolutely fine. The key thing here is not just locking up, launching a product with no warning, getting people excited and investigated before you don't want to get really will help you increase sales.

The second type of post, which will help with market research is the what's most important question. So when you're developing a new product or service, asking your followers, what they find most important when they're considering buying a product or service like yours is a great way to get the conversation going and to get feedback from your ideal customers. So for example, if you're carrying out market research ahead of a planning launch using that example,

because it's very much in my head at the moment, you can ask people what they find most important when choosing a planet or journal, but as with any market research posts or in fact, any social media posts to increase the number of replies that you receive, you really do need it to be specific. So instead of just asking a very general open question,

like what kind of planner do you like to use, make it specific? So for example, you might put together a poll and you say what's most important for you, a size B layout, C design D something else entirely. And I usually add that phrase, something else or something else entirely, because that gives people the opportunity to add in their own thoughts.

And that's what gets conversations going. And those conversations can be really helpful. And of course, on a post like that, don't forget to add a call to action, to join your wait list. You can just add a little PS on your posts that says, PS, my, whatever, the name of your product or service is launching soon. If you'd like to join the wait list to be first to hear.

And ideally I'd like to include some kind of incentive for doing so it's some kind of bonus or some kind of discount. Then here's the link to do that or email me or whatever your call to action is. Finally, the competition research posts. This one might seem counter intuitive, but I promise you it's useful asking your social media followers to share product or service they use that are similar,

or even the same as yours can be a great source of market research, because it gives you the opportunity to ask them what they love about that product or service, but also what they love to change. Understanding what's missing from your competitors, products or services is a great way to make sure that yours meet the needs of your ideal customers or clients. It can actually help you to get a competitive advantage.

And it may also give you ideas for additional features or bonuses. Upsells down sells it's really useful stuff. So to use my planet as an example, again, I often do a post around this time of year where I ask people, what are your favorite types of planets? What do you find most useful? And the key thing here is to turn that into a conversation.

So if somebody mentioned your rivals planet, they may even take them in, ask them, what do you like about this by them asking them what they'd like is a little bit more tricky, but if you can phrase it in a positive way, is that anything that you'd love to see in your content planner? Or are there any other features you wish more content planners had?

There are ways to ask without looking like you're picking holes in your competitor, and if this feels uncomfortable, you could even do it privately. So I hope this has given you some ideas on how to carry out market research for a new product or service or improve the ones that you have. I do want to remind you of a piece of advice that I give a lot though.

You will not know if anyone wants to buy that product or service until you're brave enough to get out there and sell it to put a PayPal link or a Stripe link on it and just ask people to buy. So ladies, don't use this market research as sales prediction data, because that can be a very dangerous slash deed. Indeed. People don't always say exactly what they mean.

Sometimes they might say they want things or like things just to be nice. So while this is useful information, when you're making sales predictions, ideally this should always be based on data. And the only way to gather that kind of data is to get out there and sell something and see what happens. So I'd love to know what you thought of this episode and these ideas.

If you try any of them out, then do let me know the best place to connect with me is on Instagram. I'm at Janet Murray UK. And by the way, if you want to get on the wait list for my courageous content planner, you'll see what I did there. Then you absolutely can do. If you're listening to this episode before pre-orders open,

they're due to open the third week of August, 2022, then you'll be sent to the wait list. If you're listening afterwards, you get sent straight to the sales page because we'd be done at the page. So if you haven't heard of the planner, it's an eight desk diary that you can use to plan out your content for the coming here. It's got templates for annual,

quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily planning. So you can stay consistent with your content. It's also packed with hundreds of content, ideas and prompts. So you're never stuck for ideas. And this year it's also coming with a content kit that includes hundreds of ready to go post it, use the awareness days and key dates in the diary and stickers as well.

We do like a sticker and I will put a link to the courageous content planet in the show notes.