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I'd love to get some advice about conducting Market Research.

What would be the recommended first 3 steps? I'm in the editing process of a course I created and before I edit it I want to make sure there is an audience for it. I know I should have done that step first, but I'm learning. What resources and websites are recommended to conduct market research?

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Identify the problem(s) your prospective specific clients have for which you have solution(s).

The challenge for you is three fold:

  1. Profiling the client with the need to permit reaching he or she.
  2. Convincing them of the need you know exists in terms of specific problems they are experiencing.
  3. Offering solutions in a manner that will convince them to acquire your services.

To really zero in on your marketing targets, consider profiling fictional characters. Give each a name and a title. Naturally your profile will be based on people you know or have observed. Your profile combines those observations into a description of existing conditions that demand resolutions to problems, challenges and issues these people have.

Take care to be specific in each profile about the environment, their jobs, their lives and their issues. Tell their story. What are their unique needs?

In developing these profiles you will find a need to convince yourself that you have adequately determined good, specific targets. That is a common occurrence among many of my clients. Seize the opportunity and find out real world information, including it in profiles that are fictional only from the standpoint of not being individual real people. They are real world descriptions in every other respect.

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Studying audience first often makes sense for a business, as suggested above. I'm going to start in the other end however, and assume you've already created the product (or a large part of it) and are now looking to find out what the demand is for it.

There's many sources for gathering Market insights and data, here's some examples:

-Buy specific market data from research institutes, or commission a specific study from them. Expensive for a small business but probably most comprehensive.

-Find out if there's an industry association of some form. They often aggregate surprisingly insightful data on how their member companies are doing, market growth trends and such.

-Study competitors or similar offerings. Do they appear successful? Large orgs often publish results. Which products seem to sell well? Do they have a best sellers list, or way to filter assortment by popularity? If not, consider calling them as a regular customer who is curious about what is popular.

-Use free online tools like Google Trends (quantitative) or Answer the Public (qualitative) to see which search topics are of interest to people, and if those topics are growing or not. Search data is generally a great indicator for overall interest in something.

-Find your target group and talk to them. If the course is for a subcommunity, e.g. Scuba Divers, probably there is already an online forum (reddit), social media group or other place they congregate. Find that, review the conversations already happening and consider asking. If you can involve the community early on in your creation you will probably get both useful feedback and a lot of goodwill.

-Building on the above, make your work partially public as you go and gauge interest/learn from that. An increasingly popular way to write a book is to break your material up into blog posts. Those who perform best become part of the book, maybe even expanded upon, others may be rewritten based on feedback or cut in the process.

-Bonus tip: Learn from other geographies. Is something trending in another market where data (any of the above ideas) is more accessible? Is it reasonable to expect this trend/interest will be exported?

Good luck! Jacob

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  1. Identify potential users among your friends & relatives and interview them
  2. Find lists of potential users via LinkedIn or other social media, and offer them an incentive to answer a few questions about your course (e.g. a discount or lottery for a free copy)
  3. Use Surveymonkey.com or similar service to send a survey to your list
  4. Look at sites like Udemy.com as a possible channel to market to test your offering

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