In this article I will walk you through the Target Research Strategy. Now, before we dive into the actual specifics of how to use it and apply it to your coaching business, one thing that I want to talk about is this… What I see far too often is people making assumptions about their marketplace, or what their clients want, and about what their pains and fears or hopes and dreams are.

And they think:

• “Oh, I already know this market”,
• “This is what they want”,
• “This is what their age groups are,” etc.

So they’re making all these assumptions about their marketplace, and even some of the best copywriters and business owners in the world have never gone through a process like this to truly understand what is going through their prospects’ minds.

For example, all the burning questions that are keeping them up at night, all the pains and fears that they are experiencing, and all the desires they currently have.

They’re not clear on these, and they’re just thinking that they know them without ever doing the market research.

So what the Target Research Strategy allows you to do is really go into the mind of your prospects and it also allows you to have a look at what questions they are asking. Where are they hurting the most? What is it they really want to achieve? And by using this simple framework and going through the steps I’m about to walk you through, you’re going to walk away with more data and more consumer insights than 99% of your marketplace.

He who understands his prospects and his market more than anyone else is the person that will win that market, and that’s actually what I’m going to be arming you to do right now. So what you can see below this text is my Target Research Strategy template.

Download link – click here to download the template

And all you need to do is go in and fill out all of this information with the data that we are about to obtain by going through this whole process together.

So what you can see there is that we’ve got “Hope and Dreams,” and then it’s got columns: Most Common, 2^nd Most Frequent, and 3^rd Most Frequent. Now we’re going to carry out some research online to find out: What are the number one questions that people are having in this market? What are they thinking about? What do they want to achieve? What are their desires? And we’re going to put all of that information into this template.

Let’s Start

What you need to do in column one (where it says Most Common and Hopes & Dreams), is to look through the forums, boards, communities and other different resources and list the following:

• What are the most common things that keep coming up?
• What is it that they are doing this for?
• What are their hopes and dreams?
• What are they looking to obtain from this?

So where we need to start with this strategy is basically by thinking: What is the number one “money keyword” in your marketplace that the most people are typing into Google in order to find your services? You know what I mean here. If you’re a health coach, for instance, they might be typing in “health coach” or “wellness coach”, or maybe other related inquiries. So find out what the number one keyword is that people are searching for.

The Next Step

Now, once you have one or two keywords, you can move over to a website called answerthepublic.com. Now, this is an absolute goldmine, and it’s probably one of the most under-utilized pieces of information for coaches out there. What it allows you to do is to type in that number one keyword, and it spits out all of the questions that people are really asking about that service and all the different things that are related to that search item online.

So in this instance, let’s just say that you’re a wellness coach and obviously just the search “wellness coach” is too broad. We don’t wanna paint it with such broad brushstrokes. We want to nail down, right? So there are different services that people would be wanting help with. So let’s say for example, someone is looking to increase the amount of energy that they’ve got.

You would go to this website (answerthepublic.com) and type in “increase energy” and then click on “Get Questions”.

So, it will take a little while but what you will see is that it is going to populate this with all the aggregate search data from both Google and Bing, and show you all the questions surrounding the keywords “increase energy”. You will see what the questions are that people are asking online, and what are the most common questions. This is a really incredibly powerful tool. A great marketer, Robert Collier, once said, “You want to enter the conversation that is already taking place in your customer’s mind.” There is no better way to enter that conversation, to know the questions and the conversation that is actually taking place, and this website literally gives you that data.

It even allows you just to download them into a CSV file, but you can always have an open tab in your browser when you’re going through this process. So you want to read through this and find out what those number one questions are that people are asking. You’ll start getting an understanding of what those things are and those common threads that keep coming up.

And once you’ve got those questions, then you go to Google and you type in, for example, “How to increase energy fast”. And what you are looking for is: forums and websites where people are talking about certain things, and you want to see the comments that they are posting. What are the most common problems that people are talking about in forums online?

And then you go to YouTube and type in “How to increase energy fast”, for instance, and look at the most viewed YouTube videos in that niche, and then scroll down to the comments section and again, look at what people are saying. What is the most apparent common trend? And then, once you find what those most common trends are, you want to put them into this spreadsheet that we are using (Target Research Strategy).

This spreadsheet is broken down into:

• Hopes and Dreams;
• Pains and Fears;
• Barriers and Uncertainties.

You also can see that there’s a further three columns:

• Most Common;
• 2nd Most Frequent;
• 3rd Most Frequent.

Start to put all the relevant feedback into the Hopes & Dreams section, partitioned between the most frequent, the second most frequent and the third most frequent. Start building this chart as soon as possible.

You’ll notice that there is a trend, and you need to use it to rank those responses. At the end, you’ve got “Score of Importance”, so you can insert your own score of how important you think those things are. So there might be a common trend of “How to increase my energy without supplements”. That might be a very important factor for you, so you wanna grade that a 10 out of 10 in importance.

And then there might be one of “How to increase energy while taking coffee or while having caffeine,” or other questions that may not be as important, and then you’re going to assign them a lower score (e.g., 5 out of 10).

How To Get Even More Information

The places that are my go-to for doing this research is first Google, then forums, where you need to read the comments too. You need to find out what are the longest comments and the most engaged people in that space. Then you can move over to YouTube, and look at the most-watched videos. Then from there go and have a look at Amazon. What are the most popular books sold about increasing your energy? Read the five-star comments and figure out the following:

• what they really liked about the book;
• the value that they got out of it; and
• the information that really helped them.

And then look at the one-star reviews and see what people are saying is missing in these books. And then once you’ve done that, gather that data, and put it into the spreadsheet. Very soon you’ll find out that you really know what those pains and fears are, what those hopes and dreams are, and the most primal desires of your marketplace and what they really want to achieve.

You’ll also notice that at the bottom of the Target Research Strategy template is an area that says “Glossary of Verbiage, Jargon, and Niche-Specific Terms or Language”. It’s very important that when you’re doing your research online, once you see flags like “specialized terms and niche-specific language” going up… you put them in the template too. 

If you’re researching ways to increase energy, you might find out that a lot of people are using the word “keto” or “ketogenic”, and so, for instance, “increasing energy with the ketogenic diet”. 

It’s really important to put those words into this glossary because then you can call upon them and use them in your copywriting, in your ads, and on your landing pages to really show that you’re an insider and that you understand how this market thinks and how it communicates. So there you have it. Basically what you should do now, is go ahead and download the Target Research Strategy template, do the market research while this is all still fresh in your mind, and enter all that information into the spreadsheet. 

This market research and the template will really help us in the next step­–creating some bait for that market that specifically answers and addresses the number one questions that people have. To know about that, check my next article, “How To Create A High-Value Content Offer“.