Needless to say … don’t start reading or watching anything in this week’s lesson until you’ve completed Lesson 1 (and you have decided on a narrow or hyper-focused niche to work with).
Before you start — here are your Lesson’s Nuggets for today.
Print them out. Use them to guide you through the lesson. Follow along with our notes as you read, but also make your own notes. Keep all of these as a QRG (quick reference guide).
Know the “Lie of The Land”
Last week you searched for potential groups of people with a similar pain-point (a problem they need to solve).
You should by now have a clear idea about which group of people you want to help (serve).
But BEFORE you can effectively serve this niche market, you NEED to research and understand:
- your competition.
- your ideal target audience.
In this lesson we’ll cover point #1 (in detail).
Next week, we’re going to show you how to dig up some DEEP insights about your audience.
As in what emotions are they feeling. What motivates them to seek out a “fix”. What language they use. And ultimately what solutions (or needs) they are specifically looking to solve or satisfy.
But more about that next week.
To be able to effectually operate in a competitive niche market — especially one that’s hyper-competitive — you need to know the “lie of the land”. As in who you’re up against.
Part of understanding your audience (your ideal customers) is to see what they also see. To know what the market has to offer them in terms of solutions/services.
So you need to understand what types of offers they are (potentially) being exposed to. You need to be able to see the market from their perspective.
This is also essential in coming up with your own unique USP (angle). Your Value Proposition (VP) is going to determine who and why your audience chooses to turn to you over your competitors and can make or break our social media campaigns.
We cover how to develop your USP in detail later.
However, know this…
It’s dog-eat-dog out there in the real world. Every man for himself. Create a “me too” business and you’ll be eaten alive. Like a lamb to slaughter.
We say all of that not to scare you. We’re just being very honest. Build a copy-cat (nothing unique) social media campaign and you’ll lose your shirt. No two ways about it. No maybes or mights … you will lose and fall into the crowd.
Which is exactly why these lessons are so detailed. It’s important stuff that matters (to your success).
If all of this sounds like hard work … then welcome to the party. Building a successful social media campaign does take hard work (certainly in the beginning).
No magic-bullet here.
The big easy button promise (lie) has only ever existed in the hype and hoopla sales messages of misleading marketing. It never really existed in the real (non-fantasy) world.
So let’s start…
Know Your Competitors Intimately
It makes sense that you know who you’re up against. You’ll need to do fairly deep research on your audience, but to start with you need to find out who they are.
Some of the questions you need to answer are:
- Who are your competitors?
- What are they saying to your ideal customers? (their USPs, angles, hooks, taglines)
- How are they making money? (lead generators, money-magnets, pricing structures, revenue streams)
- What are they doing well?
- What are they doing wrong or badly?
- How are they keeping their customers happy (or not)?
- How are they perceived by their customers?
Doing this exercise will be very revealing. Never presume anything. Base everything on hard facts.
Think of yourself (right now) as having on two “hats”. The Investigator:
“OK Miss/Mr. Private Eye … go do what you do best. Investigate. Run surveillance. See what you can dig up.”
…but you’re also the client. You need the intelligence before you can move forward. The intelligence is not a “nice-to-have” … it’s an absolute necessity.
Because progressing without “insight” will result in an almost guaranteed failure. Failure you’ve prob’ly experienced first hand before. But then, to be fair, you hadn’t hired Miss/Mr. Private Eye, right? 🙂
Here’s a massive tip: When doing this research, you want to do it from the perspective of your ideal target customer … not from YOUR perspective!
What’s important is what your audience is seeing when they are searching for a potential solution to their problem or to satisfy a desperate (emotional) need.
The decisions that they make will be based on this.
It’ll be based on what they perceive is the best option. They’ll compare what they’ve seen, against criteria that they care about (not what you “think” is important).
This is the whole point of doing this research.
Because once you know what they’re potentially seeing — you’re in a much better position to write a marketing message that will resonate with them.
You’ll already know the “lie of the land”, and as a result — your USP (angle) will be based on a real gap in the market (not something made up).
… Or better yet — a new category that you create (and hence own and control).
So just consciously be aware to put yourself into their perspective as you create your market profile of competition.
Back to “who are they, specifically?“…
There is no super cool tool that’ll magically tell you who all your competitors are. One doesn’t exist.
Remember … you are putting yourself in the shoes of your audience. They don’t have a tool. They have a problem. They have a need that they’re looking to satisfy.
Let’s say, for example, you were investigating the World of Warcraft niche. And the specific audience (sub-niche within World of Warcraft) you wanted to target were peeps looking for ways of earning more gold (quickly and easily).
With that in your mind, then perhaps they may type something like this into Google:
world of warcraft money making
world of warcraft money making guide
world of warcraft money system
wow money making
wow money making guide
wow money system
cataclysm money making
cataclysm money making profession
cataclysm money guide
Make sense, right?
It would also seem plausible that they would also prob’ly hang out on one of the big WoW forums.
So there would perhaps be a forum category just on “money making”. And no doubt sites or products (guides) would be cited (referenced or recommended) within these forums.
This is what you need to do — always thinking like your audience. What would they do now? … and based on this-that-and-the-next-thing, what would they do next?
Think like them.
You need to systematically work your way through the list of questions in this week’s task.
Once you find a website (competing company), ask yourself the next question (from the perspective of your ideal audience)…
… like, “What is their USP?”
Now, of course, the audience is not going to think “USP” per se.
But they will be thinking — “What’s unique or different about this site or product? Why should I pay attention? What is this site saying that makes sense to what I want?”
Your audience is thinking this whenever they land on a site selling them something. Some of it may be subconscious.
Hope this is making sense.
To show you all this in action — read through “This Week’s Task” section. We’ll show you our research results from doing this very exercise for the “weight loss for brides” hyper-focused niche.
We had no idea what we would find out. The insights we got, as a result, were eye-opening, to say the least.
There Are No “Rules” …
The insights you get from doing this will be different for all 3 companies.
You’ll see this first hand in our example shortly.
Just know that there’s no right or wrong way to go about compiling your surveillance data. What’s important is that you just do the work.
We’ll give you a spreadsheet template that we use (in the Task section below). If it works for you, use it. If you figure out another way that you prefer — then great — do that.
I used to use plain text files. Now I use Evernote. But in many cases a spreadsheet is a better way to visualize the data.
In those cases I simply paste the Google Docs spreadsheet link into Evernote. Whatever you choose to use — make sure you keep all the information in one place.
Before you read through the research example for the hyper-focused niche we chose, we have a few docs for you to download as you’ll need them.
- Lesson 2 Nuggets
(Right-Click and select Save As…) - Market & Competition Profile Worksheet Sample
(Right-Click and select Save As…) - Market & Competition Profile Worksheet Blank Template (in .XLSX) (and .XLS format)
(Right-Click and select Save As…)
Research Example
Weight Loss for Brides
To demonstrate some (real) results to you … we’re applying this week’s lesson to the weight loss for brides niche market.
In doing this, we discovered an insight that we would have prob’ly completely missed, had we not profiled the market & competition.
When looking at the merchant sites, and what they were saying — it became very clear to us that there are two distinct “categories” of women here.
- Susan has got 6 months to lose 20 lbs.
- Tiffany has 30 DAYS (60 days max!) to lose 20 lbs.
Think about the mindset behind these two categories or women.
Susan has time on her hands. She hasn’t left the weight issue until the last minute. Consequently … the need to lose weight NOW is far less desperate.
Do you follow?
Meaning that the sites she’s looking at are more geared about slow/healthy weight loss. Or more so — the “messaging” on these sites resonate with her more.
Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, etc.
Tiffany, on the other hand, is DESPERATE. She’s left it until the last minute. Her need to look stunning and beautiful is no different to Susan. But now urgency has come into play (big time).
The consequence of that … sites like Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig no longer offer a compelling value proposition. The USP and overall messaging don’t resonate with her.
Tiffany’s (desperate) hunt for a perfect solution “fit” at this point changes focus. She’s realized that places like Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig are no longer a fit for her needs.
Now she changes from “weight loss for brides” type of searches, to broader searches in an attempt to widen results.
She now searches for stuff like:
rapid weight loss
30 day weight loss
fast weight loss
quick weight loss
Make sense?
Because of this new insight — we decided to focus on the latter category of women (for our research example). Those that desperately need to lose weight fast.
As a result, here are a few observations:
- We’ve just made a LOT of the big brand competition irrelevant. Places like Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig … and even to an extent, Jillian Michaels.
- Our messaging can now be more focused.
- Our USP (when we develop it later) will talk more DIRECTLY to our now far more specific audience (all the “Tiffany’s” out there).
Hope this is all starting to make more sense now. You should now start to see why doing this is so powerful (and critical).
Now is the time to execute this week’s tasks, then move on to Deep Target Audience Analysis.