How to Effectively Use Remarketing (Infographic)

It seems that each year that passes brings some new forms of advertising that marketers can add as another tool in their arsenal.

These past few years have brought native advertising to the mainstream, which comedian John Oliver analyzed this past August:

Native advertising has taken hold online. Here’s an example from Buzzfeed:

This native advertising happens offline as well. You’ll find it in newspapers, magazines and hear it on the radio (it’s sneaky).

The web has also exploded with the growth of exit intent popups. Hover your mouse near the top of the browser to close or switch a tab and out of nowhere comes a near full page ad asking the visitor for something before they leave – typically an email address. Here’s an example, courtesy of 2xecommerce.com:

In recent years we have also seen the growth of retargeting. This purpose of this is to advertise to people who have previously visited a specific site.

For example, let’s say you visit amazon.com today, place a few items in your cart, and leave. A few days later you’re browsing nytimes.com and see an Amazon advertisement with the products you put in your cart. You can then click the ad and are directed back to Amazon, and complete your purchase.

Sound like a new channel you’d like to test? Neil Patel of Quick Sprout has created an infographic to help you out. Whether you’re just diving into retargeting or have been around the block a few times and want a refresher on some of the principles.

Courtesy of: Quick Sprout

Resources for Learning More

We’ve covered retargeting in the past, including a couple webinars:

• Converting the 98%: Turning Almost Customers into Actual Customers
• Speed Dating on Advertising

You’ll also find some great content around the web:

• How to Spend Your First $100 on Retargeting Ads
• Putting Retargeting To Work For Your Startup
• 5 Tips for Running a Successful Retargeting Campaign

If you’re going to dabble in retargeting, it’s important to measure the results. You can use Kissmetrics to measure and optimize all your marketing campaigns. I’ve written some articles about how to do this:

• Using Channels in Kissmetrics to Learn Where Your Most Valuable Customers Come From
• How to Track the Effectiveness of Marketing Campaigns
• How to Find out What Marketing Campaigns are the Best for Acquisition, ROI, & Retention

You can also request a personal demo of Kissmetrics to learn more.

About the Author: Zach Bulygo (Twitter) is the Blog Manager for Kissmetrics.

7 Ways to Use Cognitive Biases to Increase Email Signups

Are all of the decisions you make rational?

You’d like to say yes, but I’ll let you in on a secret: none of us make rational decisions 100% of the time. As human beings, we are not perfect in the way we act or in the way we think. As such, from time to time we make suboptimal decisions that we are unaware of! Our brain finds a way to stray away from rational thinking, and instead acts on cognitive biases as a result of trying to simplify information.

The existence of cognitive biases is not something you and I can change. What we can do is use these cognitive biases to increase email signups and the conversion rates of your sign up forms.

I don’t want to keep you waiting longer, so without further ado, here are seven cognitive biases that can be countered to help you hack your email signups.

1. Loss Aversion

This cognitive bias refers to the excess influence that the fear of losing out on something has over the positive effect of gaining something. According to Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman (the first ones demonstrate the effect), the pain from losing ‘X’ is greater than the joy of gaining ‘X’.

Regardless of whether or not you actually sell a product/service, or just blog, this irrational way of thinking can be attacked to help you grow your email lists.

Bounce Exchange puts this bias to work by simply asking visitors if they are okay with losing out on revenue. The overlay does not directly ask the visitor if they want to monetize their traffic, rather points to the loss, and uses that as a trigger to persuade.

Use of loss aversion

In order to combat the loss aversion that visitors may have, you need to rewrite your copy to reflect the loss that visitors will encounter if they do not opt-in to your offer. If you convey a message to visitors that they are losing out on more leads and revenue you’ll strike fear and urgency in the visitor. When you are able to create a sense of urgency, your conversion rates are sure to increase. So let’s take a look at how to do that with the Framing Effect.

2. Framing Effect

The framing effect is an irrational way of thinking, in which people react to one offer, presented in different forms – depending on the light in which the choice is presented – in completely different ways.

The bottom line, in this case: people tend to avoid risk when a positive frame is presented but seek risks when a negative frame is presented.

Let’s go back to that last example.

“Do you want to convert your bounce traffic into revenue?” The question is asked in a positive frame; they don’t come out and state a risk rather they point to a benefit. As such, the large majority of the visitors will look to avoid risk, leading them to select, “Yes, let’s do this.”

3. Bandwagon Effect

The bandwagon effect is in essence the same thing as ‘social proof’. The bandwagon effect is what leads to an increase in the acceptance rate of ideas and trends based solely on an increase of acceptance by others.

Tapping into social proof is the best way to combat the bandwagon effect. When someone sees that either a large group of colleagues has bought in or a group of well-known influencers has joined the deal too, the visitor is likely to sign up for what you are offering.

The following is a partial view of the homepage of the 4 Hour Work Week. Aside from properly using the call to action, ‘Start Here’, the site also makes terrific use of all the site’s real estate. The two longer testimonials are placed to the right, while three shorter, and very well known publications are placed to the left. Coincidence? No, it’s capitalizing on the F-Pattern that ensures social proof is noticed.

Using social proof to hack email signups

Anyone doubting the benefits of GrowthHackers is instantly convinced otherwise. Not only do they mention the quantity, but they also mention the quality.

Social proof to increase email signups

Whether or not they were going to join before, the tide has turned to a point that not signing up seems almost inconceivable.

4. Commitment Heuristic

“Don’t be a quitter” is a statement that all of us have probably heard from others or something we tell ourselves. The commitment heuristic causes us to believe that since we’ve already invested in a decision or a certain project, we should continue to do so.

At the last startup I worked at I fell victim to the commitment heuristic. I worked at the same startup for almost three years, even though I could tell after a year and a half that it was going nowhere. Why did I stay? I did not want to be a quitter. I told myself that I had to stay the course as I had already invested time and energy into it.

When it comes to lead generation, your business should capitalize on this mindset. Here’s an example from Neil Patel from his website Quick Sprout. He knows that the majority of his visitors create content. He also knows that what they need is for their content to be “king”.

The phrase “better content” makes perfect sense. Pointing out to potential leads that they can take their game to the next level – whatever that might be – is a great tactic to implement in order to use this cognitive bias to increase email signups.

Getting the visitor to strive for improvement

5. Anchoring Effect

The anchoring effect is in essence our mind taking in a first piece of information and attaching to it too much weight when we then make a decision later on. That first piece of information is acting as an anchor (our brain is at a standstill).

The most common use of the anchoring effect for business growth is in sales. As pointed out by Neil Patel in an earlier Kissmetrics post on psychological tips that improve product pricing, “For example, if someone mentions “$300” in regards to a SaaS product that you are considering buying, then your mind is anchored by that number. Thus, when you see the true price — $30 — then you might think “Wow! That’s a great price!” Why? Because you were thinking $300 before”.

This idea however can also be implemented to increase email signups. For example, let’s say you sell a digital product. Either on the page that the visitor is on, or one he/she was directed from, the product was advertised for $59.99. Once the person has seen that price, this is the “anchor”. To convert the visitor into a lead, you offer the same product for $45.99 (for example) in exchange for subscribing to your newsletter.

Here’s an example from dapulse. You’ve got your standard pricing tables. No big deal.

Acts as an anchor

The goal is for every visitor to pick a plan. That however won’t happen. After seeing the above prices, the visitor continues to scroll down, and here is where DaPulse makes use of anchoring to instantly generate new leads.

The visitor came to their site knowing that he/she was looking to improve their project management process. The highlighted “Standard” plan acts as an anchor for this free offer, enabling the company to maximize email signups.

6. Confirmation Bias

The confirmation bias is, in short, one’s fear of new information, and thus leaning on current views to make decisions. Technically speaking, this is our tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms our current train of thought instead of trying to see if our current belief is correct or not.

Here’s a relevant example for our daily life: If you’re convinced that caffeine makes you more alert, you’re going to feel more alert when you take in caffeinated beverages —and you won’t when you are given anything else.

Like the other cognitive biases, in this case too, you can capitalize on this type of thinking in order to increase email signups by assuring the visitor that their current beliefs are correct. Singing up to your newsletter will only strengthen that belief.

Case in point, Groove. In the “Startup Journey” blog, the text refers to their success and uses it as a selling point to other entrepreneurs. The takeaway for me (someone that is subscribed to their blog) is that they are hitting these results. If we join them for lessons, we’ll be able to do that too. There is no need for me to go elsewhere.

Using the confirmation bias

Whether or not what they experience becomes reality for me and others is another story. The same goes for that third cup of coffee – that caffeine may or may not be kicking in (though you think it is).

7. Belief Bias

Have you ever come across an offer and skipped on opting in because it sounded “too good to be true”. Even if the offer is the exact same thing you are a promoting, an offer that gives off a vibe of being too good to be true won’t convert at as a high of a rate as you would have expected.

In order to capitalize on this bias, the email signup form that you are using must focus on showing visitors the overall result that the product or newsletter will have on them. Don’t promise anything or zoom in on the benefits, rather relay the realistic results of its use to the visitor (like in this example).

Here are two overlays from Cloudways, one older and one that was in action recently. I don’t have results for either campaign, but odds are that overlay number two was much more successful because it’s more realistic (sorry, don’t completely buy the “double” aspect).

Too good to be true

Believable offer

I’d like to think that I am rational, but this is one example in which I would have skipped a great offer because it was “too good to be true”.

Time to Implement

The different psychological tactics and strategies that we can implement are endless. In working on this post I was blown away by all the different biases and irrational ways of thinking that cloud our minds on a daily basis.

We are an imperfect breed and now it is your time to pick out one of these cognitive biases to capitalize on in order to grow your business. I’m curious, which one will you be choosing?

About the Author: Ty is a digital marketing enthusiast that can’t get enough social media marketing and content marketing. He is the inbound marketing manager at StoreYa where he spends his days searching for the newest social marketing scoop and creating amazingly awesome content. If you’d like to chat with him, feel free to connect with him on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Using Kissmetrics to Find Out If You Are Losing Conversions on Mobile

As an online marketer, you probably know that smartphones and tablets are quickly becoming the devices of choice for many everyday tasks. Everything from checking sports scores to shopping is done on mobile. Undoubtedly, some of you are reading this post on a mobile device.

With this surge in mobile usage, it has become imperative for marketers to ensure that their site renders well on all devices. Not only is this important for SEO purposes, but also for conversions. If your mobile site doesn’t render correctly, your conversions will tank, no doubt about it.

The question for marketers is: are you losing conversions on mobile?

This post will show you how you can use Kissmetrics to get the data you need to answer that question.

Using the Kissmetrics Funnel Report to Measure Funnel Performance

Let’s say we’re an E-Commerce clothing store. We get about 100k monthly visitors, and about 2.2% of all visitors convert to purchasing. We haven’t done a lot with our mobile site, but we hear from customers that it can be a little frustrating. We do not offer a mobile app; instead, customers shop through our main site.

We recently signed up for Kissmetrics. This analytics tool will help us measure our marketing performance and show us what’s working and what’s not. One of the ways we’ll measure our performance is with the Funnel Report. This will show us how our funnel is performing and also let us break traffic into groups so we will know how subsets of traffic are performing.

Let’s load the Funnel Report and get a view of last month’s performance.

Looks like about 103k people visited our store during the month, and a little over 3,500 ended up purchasing.

Keep in mind that this is traffic from all devices. Since we’re interested in seeing funnel performance for each device, we’ll segment (group) the data by device type. To do that, we’ll just click the dropdown shown below:

Then, we will have two choices:

• KM Device Type: This breaks down into computer, smartphone, or tablet.
• KM Device Category: This shows whether the visitor came from a computer or mobile. It does not display smartphone or tablet, only mobile.

Both of these are automatically tracked in Kissmetrics.

We’ll choose KM Device Type.

Then, we’ll get a breakdown of traffic by the type of device a person was using.

We have three types of devices we’re tracking:

• Computer – Visitors who came from a laptop or desktop computer.
• Smartphone – Visitors who came from a smartphone running Windows, Android, iOS, etc.
• Tablet – Visitors who came from a tablet, such as Surface, iPad, etc.
• Unknown – Visitors who came from a device, the type of which cannot be detected by Kissmetrics.

Here are some insights we can learn from this data:

• The vast majority of traffic and purchases came from a laptop or desktop computer.
• Conversions were highest on laptop and desktop computers.
• Conversions from mobile (especially tablet) were much lower than from laptop and desktop computers. There appears to be a roadblock in proceeding from step 3 to 4. This is the checkout funnel where users enter their credit card information, shipping address, etc. We can create a micro funnel to see the specific step where visitors are dropping off.

Next, we can create a micro funnel and find the exact pages where would-be customers are dropping off. We’ll create some alternate pages and A/B test them till we find winners across the board (computer, smartphone, and tablet).

Summary

Here is a summary of the process:

• More people are browsing and buying from mobile devices than ever before.
• Websites must be optimized for optimal viewing on mobile devices. This is important not just for SEO, but also for UX and conversions.
• With the Kissmetrics Funnel Report, marketers can track their funnel performance and get a breakdown of how specific groups of traffic convert along the funnel.
• Kissmetrics automatically tracks which devices visitors are using. Marketers can use the data to see how the groups of people coming from computers, smartphones, and tablets convert at each step in the funnel.
• Marketers will learn where there are drop-offs (if any) and how well each type of device converts.

About the Author: Zach Bulygo (Twitter) is the Blog Manager for Kissmetrics.

Why Account-Based Marketing Is a No-Brainer

In my first post on account-based marketing (ABM), I went over its history in the 20th century, from its humble, unsophisticated beginnings to its modern day automation.

Today, I want to go over its benefits, and why—if you’re a B2B marketer—it’s essentially a no-brainer.

Are You Already Doing ABM?

If you work for a B2B brand, chances are you’ve done a fair bit of account-based marketing without even knowing it.

By their very nature, B2B companies are forced to prospect and sell to a narrow list of prospects. They use a combination of inbound, outbound, and account-based marketing techniques to make the magic happen. But most B2B marketers probably aren’t marketing to accounts the right way.

Marketing agencies (like Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce of Mad Men) are a great example of this. Most agencies have a very long list of one-off, once-in-a-while clients, and very short list of recurring “whale” clients that provide the bulk of their revenue (the 20:80 rule). They know that account-based marketing is the answer—they want to turn more of their “80” clients into “20”s—but they don’t know how to properly implement it.

Instead, they run campaigns against target lists the same way the ad execs of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce did it in the 60s: create a proposal over a week or two, land a target exec at the account in question, work for that exec, take him or her out to dinner, nudge them into introducing their colleagues, get in with those colleagues. Rinse and repeat.

It’s a very reliable but unsophisticated process that takes a long time to bear fruit. And it’s very risky. New account managers and projects managers have to be hired on for every new contact at the account, new vendors have to be corralled, new risks taken. If any given client bails, changes jobs, or gets fired, the agency is left to deal with the fallout.

The obvious solution to this problem? Automation. By implementing marketing automation and customizing it for account-based marketing, B2B marketers will have a technology stack that can scale with their new business. Fewer account managers will be able to handle more accounts. Target list prospecting happens automatically. Forecasting and goal setting actually becomes realistic.

Automated account-based marketing really is a no-brainer. The question is whether it’s right for your company.

The New Reality of B2B Marketing

Megan Heuer at SiriusDecisions gave a great presentation on ABM in April in which she went over the “new reality” of B2B marketing. She profiled the companies already using ABM as well as those thinking about starting this year.

Company size:

• 45% less than $100 million
• 18% between $101 million and $1 billion
• 36% more than $1.1 billion

As you can see, the vast majority of companies using ABM have revenue below $100 million, and another large segment had revenue over $1.1 billion.

Yet it seems like companies making between $101 million to $1 billion underutilize ABM. That’s a massive range, and it tells us that most companies are interested in ABM to either scale their early growth, or streamline their expansion beyond the ten-figure mark.

This suggests that companies making between $101 million and $1 billion could be running their operations much more effectively than they realize. Perhaps they simply don’t realize that scalable account-based marketing is the right move—yet.

Customer type:

• 75% enterprise (more than 1,000 employees)
• 21% medium (101 to 1,000 employees)
• 11% small (100 or fewer employees)

But regardless of revenue, the vast majority of ABM-practicing companies are enterprise-level brands with more than 1,000 employees. This makes sense—ABM is easier to implement and scale once you already have a larger client base and staff in place.

But it also means that B2B companies with between 10 to 1,000 employees are not taking advantage of ABM. Perhaps they feel their employees are overworked, and don’t have the time to learn yet another system. Perhaps ABM is an unproven, “new” concept and they are too busy with old methods and strategies. Maybe they don’t think they have enough clients to justify such an investment.

Is ABM Right for Your Company?

But I think they’re missing the point a bit. ABM works best for B2B companies that sell to:

Situation A: a few large, key accounts, or
Situation B: accounts of a certain size in a specific industry.

If you’re targeting Fortune 500s to 1000s, for example, ABM can help you unlock the full potential of each target account and effectively double or triple your client base. Who wouldn’t want that?

Great candidates for ABM also include companies with ineffective sales models:

• 82% sell with direct sales force
• 13% with inside sales
• 4% with third-party channels

If your advertising isn’t working, or if you feel like sales is always complaining about a lack of alignment with marketing, maybe it’s time to try something new. ABM can help you accurately measure marketing ROI, button up marketing-to-sales alignment, and reduce or maintain the size of the sales force you need.

The Clear Benefits of ABM

Of course, none of this is convincing unless account-based marketing boasts clear and observable benefits. Fortunately, in my experience, it does.

Benefit #1: ROI is Much Clearer

According to the 2014 ITSMA Account-Based Marketing Survey, ABM delivers the highest ROI of any B2B marketing strategy or tactic. And according to Alterra Group, 65% of B2B marketers agreed that ABM provided significant benefits for attracting new clients.

This isn’t surprising—ABM is the sniper’s way of marketing. It’s incredibly precise, targeted, personalized, and accurate compared to general inbound and outbound strategies, which also makes it easier to measure ROI. Here are some more stats to back up those claims:

• Response rates from ABM accounts: 47%
• Online activity from ABM accounts: 39%
• Number of new contacts in ABM accounts: 36%
• Internal stakeholder feedback: 36%
• Participation in all marketing activities: 25%

Benefit #2: There’s less waste and less risk

This all means that unnecessary waste—and risk—are greatly reduced. By scaling ABM marketing strategies, B2B marketers can do more with less. A smart ABM technology stack helps the same number of account managers target, market to, convert, and upsell a much larger number of contacts at each account before another account manager has to be hired.

Which means there’s much less risk involved. You don’t have to hire and fire talent based on how well an account is doing. With ABM properly set up, accounts become revolving doors—even if one contact is lost, another one will walk right in.

Benefit #3: Clients like it because it’s personal

According to Aberdeen, 75% of customers prefer personalized offers. This has been shown time and again to be true. It’s why email marketing remains so successful compared to other forms of inbound and outbound marketing. And it’s why solutions that aim to stop cart abandonment are so popular with retailers.

ABM is implemented with the needs of a specific target prospect at a specific target account in mind. The research required to get this type of marketing up and running means that your prospects will know you’ve done your homework—and they’ll love you for it.

Benefit #4: Goal-setting and analytics are easier

When you analyze campaign effectiveness, it’s easier to draw conclusions. Not only are you looking at a smaller set of targeted accounts, you also have well-drawn battle plans for each account that let you easily compare end-of-quarter results to forecast goals. Which brings me to the last big benefit…

Benefit #5: Sales alignment is much easier

ABM marketers speak the same language and have the same knowledge as the salespeople they work alongside. They have to work closely with sales to accurately identify target accounts, map them out, and align on sales initiatives. This type of tag teaming between marketing and sales is what ultimately leads to the powerful, predictive marketing and turnkey targeted advertising that unlocks accounts.

But how do you set it up?

In the next and last post in this series, I’ll go over several resources you can use to set up ABM the right way and keep your accounts coming back for more.

About the Author: Alp Mimaroglu is a Marketing Luminary. He specializes in marketing automation, demand generation, analytics, and marketing technology. Alp has extensive experience with both business and consumer marketing. He’s passionate about how technology is rapidly becoming the key to success in both the corporate sales and marketing landscapes. Follow Alp on LinkedIn and Twitter.

5 Free Market-Research Tools to Read Your Audience’s Minds (And Create Content to Delight Them)

Have you ever read something that made you think the person who wrote it was reading your mind?

They were speaking your language. It almost felt like they knew exactly what you were thinking…

And they probably did. They probably did the research to find out what their target audience was thinking, and then created the content they knew would resonate with them.

When you resonate with your audience you sell more product, build your email list more quickly, and connect with them on a deeper level.

So what’s the secret sauce? How can you, as a business owner, read your audience’s minds so you can create content to delight them?

We’ve found five free tools to help you do just that:

1. The Front Page of the Internet

As far as free market research tools go, reddit is among the best.

And reddit isn’t called the front page of the internet for nothing.

Reddit reaches over 200 million unique visitors each month with over 208 countries, which means that your target audience most certainly spends time on that platform.

Since reddit is completely free and powers communities called subreddits where a group of people discuss common topics, reddit is ripe with opportunity for any marketer.

To find your audience on reddit, search your keywords in the subreddit search tool to find conversations about your topic. For example, if you were in the nutrition industry, you might type in “nutrition” to bring up a list of subreddits related to that topic.

Then, start combing through the “top” results in the subreddit.

You can see the amount of “upvotes” between the arrows on the left-hand side of the post, which gauges the popularity of the post.

In the example above, you’ll note that of the top ten posts in this subreddit, two of those top spots are taken up by talk of energy and nutrition.

With this data, you can create content that will delight your audience by helping them achieve the results they want. What would be more compelling to you as somebody struggling to get enough energy during the day – a headline that the content creator obviously guessed at, or a piece of content that actually addresses what you’re struggling with?

Reddit is magic for any content marketer.

2. The Question and Answer Tool

One of the best ways to create content to help your audience with the exact challenges they’re experiencing is to discover what type of questions they have about your topic.

This is what makes Quora such a great free tool for market research. Quora is a platform on which your audience is actually asking the questions they want answered.

How’s that for reading their minds? Think of Quora like a sophisticated Yahoo! Answers. People ask questions, and other people – experts, content creators – answer them.

Use the search tool on Quora to search keywords for your industry. Let’s say you were in the business-to-business industry and helped new entrepreneurs start their businesses. You might type “entrepreneurship” into the search bar:

Begin to read through the Topic FAQ; these are questions that others have upvoted, shared, and re-asked over and over again.

You can use the exact language and concerns the asker uses to create content that gives them exactly what they want (and makes them think you read their mind – because you did!):

Then, Quora does a lot of the work for you by listing related questions (on the right hand side):

How’s that for being handed content ideas that will delight your audience on a silver platter?

3. The World’s Biggest Retailer

A market research tools list wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the world’s biggest retailer:

Amazon.

Amazon is marketing gold for reading your target audience’s minds, because almost your entire market buys from Amazon, and because they’re actively reviewing their purchases and providing detailed feedback.

Start by searching popular book titles in your industry. For example, in the personal finance industry, you might search Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey.

Then, sort by “critical reviews”.

Amazon reviewers can be very detailed, so you’ll get insight into the language they use, the gaps in the book, and the information they need.

In this detailed review of Total Money Makeover, for example, the reviewer says:

“…You need to impose self-discipline to break bad-spending habits. His methods require almost crash-financial-diet measures (such as taking on extra jobs, ceasing any and all unnecessary spending to the point of maybe not having much fun, selling your possessions, etc.), but if you can stick to it, it will probably yield results.”

If you served this audience, how powerful could it be to provide them with the exact, step-by-step strategies that actually work to build up self-discipline and stick to financial goals?

4. The Social Platform Marketers Love to Hate

As frustrating as Facebook can be for marketers, it’s difficult to argue that Facebook has a reach that few other social platforms have.

Almost everyone you know uses Facebook, which is why Facebook is mind-reading gold.

But don’t just stick to Facebook pages or profiles. Facebook groups are where the action happens.

Facebook groups are gathering places for people who are interested in a specific topic, and if you focus on targeted groups, you can eavesdrop on your audience’s conversations so you can create content to provide massive value.

For example, if you taught photography for beginners, you could search photography in the search bar and sort by groups:

This will lead you right to the water; this is marketing gold, a place where thousands of your target audience is congregating. In this case, over 10,000 members!

When your membership is approved, start combing through the posts and taking note of the language your target audience uses and the types of questions they ask:

You can create content to help them exactly where they are.

5. Where Your Audience is Already Having Conversations

One of the best ways to create content to delight your audience is by filling in the gaps.

Have you ever tried to find information that just didn’t seem to be out there? It’s frustrating and when you finally find it, it’s a huge relief.

Your audience feels the same pain when they can’t find the information they need, and you can find what those gaps are by going where the gaps exist and your audience is having conversations around your topic:

Blogs.

If you aren’t familiar with any blogs about your topic, use a tool like Alltop.com to find popular blogs in your industry. For example, if you’re a career coach, you might choose “Careers”:

You could choose any of these blogs, but the best blogs to focus on are large, popular, single-authored blogs. These tend to drive the most comments.

When you’ve found a blog that fits the bill, read through a couple of the most popular blog posts and take note of what the blogger isn’t saying, and what the readers are in the comments sections.

Read through the comments, and take note of the trends in the type of questions people are asking.

This will help you fill in the gaps and give your audience the information they need rather than competing with the information they’ve already been given.

When it comes to market research, many businesses think they need to shell out money and resources on focus groups and research.

However, these tools are under-appreciated, free, and powerful platforms for that will save you a lot of cash and time.

As you dig through these platforms, you’ll begin to pick up content ideas, sales copy wording, and even your next product idea to help your audience with their exact challenges, desires, and needs…

Creating a truly irresistible value for your business.

About the Author: Nathan Chan is the Publisher and CEO of Foundr magazine. He is extremely passionate about entrepreneurship and has interviewed some of the most successful entrepreneurs on the planet today (Richard Branson, etc). He shares all of these interviews at www.foundrmag.com.