easy ways to do market research

Andrew is the Aussie bloke in the U.S., Heather is the American gal living in Australia; together they travel the world sharing strategies on how to put your business on Autopilot. Doing business online is no longer about having a website. To get more clients and take care of the ones you have, you’ll need a map. They’ve got it. So sit back and relax, and welcome aboard. This flight is bound to AutoPilot Your Business.

Andrew McCauley: In today’s podcast we are talking about research. How do you go and find the information you need to keep up with the demand of content for your website?

MC: Have you picked up our online survival guide yet? Get prepped for the future of online marketing, by going to www.aybguide.com

Andrew McCauley: Hello everybody, this is Andrew McCauley, welcome to our podcast, this is podcast number 52. 52 in the AutoPilot Your Business series of podcasts, and today we are talking about research, we are talking about how do you go and find research, how do you find the stuff you need to put on your website, on your social platforms, and where can you go and get some fresh ideas because sometimes you’ll run out of ideas, we are going to give you a couple of tips and some great information in this podcast. And we, of course, being the wonderful Heather Porter, hey H!

Heather Porter: Hey Andrew, hey guys, thanks for joining us, yet again. And Andrew, I’m looking forward to this episode because in the past we’ve spoken about using the Google keyword tool which no longer exists and trying to find information out using just keyword phrases, and you what? That’s a really cool idea, it’s a great idea because you are finding that there is a market for certain keyword phrase, or keywords, or words people are using to search for things. However, you don’t really get to go more into their thought process and their pain points and really hear them in their own language saying what’s bothering them, what they actually need help with, so this episode we are actually going to really dig deeper in that perspective of what do people actually need in the first place outside of just, you know, a few keywords.

Andrew McCauley: Yes, yes definitely. And before we dig into that, of course we are going to have a very favorite session at the beginning of the show, and that is “What Did You Learn This Week?”

Heather Porter: Yes and I want to ask you first. Is that alright? I thought to ask!

Andrew McCauley: You are going to ask me first so you don’t have to listen to me while you think of something you learned, right?

Heather Porter: Shhh, don’t tell anybody.

Andrew McCauley: Alright I’ll play this game. So this week, what I learned was that Google and Gmail have just enabled part of your Gmail to actually let you email people that you don’t have an email address for. Now, sounds crazy but let me explain, if you have connections on Google Plus, and G+, and they are in your circles

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and you want to email them but you don’t actually have their email address, now when you are inside your Gmail account and you go to type an email, Google is now suggesting people who are in your circles and actually auto populates the To field and you can select that person to send the email to.

Now, you won’t find out what this person’s email address is unless they send you an email back, but what it means is that if you have a lot of followers on Google Plus, you have the potential to email a lot of people all at once. What do you think about that idea?

Heather Porter: These are people that you have in your circles?

Andrew McCauley: Yes, yes, yes! So it’s going to encourage people to add more people to their circles, to get on G+ more, right?

Heather Porter: So it’s kind of like what people are doing on LinkedIn, like from time to time you get a blast that comes out.

Andrew McCauley: Correct!

Heather Porter: Yes, okay.

Andrew McCauley: Correct, and you can already email people from G+, okay? So you are inside your G+ and you want to post an update and you can click on circles and you can pick certain circles and then click on Email These People and you get an email from those people inside your Gmail account. You can do it from there but now what they’ve done is they’ve actually opened it up so you can actually email people from your email Gmail account to those people as well without even being on G+.

Heather Porter: Interesting! Alright!

Andrew McCauley: So is that going to open the door to spammers? I’m guessing that there will be some, but here is the other thing I want to add to this for people listening, is that when people do email you from their Gmail account and you are in their circles but they don’t have your email address, that email will end up in the Social Tab of your Gmail account so if you are using Gmail you understand what I’m talking about, there is a Social Tab where Gmail puts all of the social activities you are into. That’s where that email will end up. You can change the settings, and you can also opt-out inside your settings as well, if you don’t want people to be able to email you from their Gmail you can opt-out of that as well, so this is really good news but it’s what I what I learned this week, there you go!

Heather Porter: Very interesting and yes, I mean, there is a big push for Google Plus I know right now with what we are doing and especially this year I think they really are going to do whatever it can take to get it more used by the mass public.

Andrew McCauley: They’ve had a few failures; I don’t think they want to let this fail.

Heather Porter: Oh, exactly!

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Andrew McCauley: There is a lot more take up on it and I think it is going to be pretty powerful, by the end of this year it’s going to be pretty big, you and I are spending a lot more time on it, we are doing regular Hangouts, we’re about to start regular Hangouts for it so keep your eye out for those as well. But Google Plus is going to be big this year, it’s still a little bit buggy but battle through and you will be able to be on the right side of it. Now, have you had a chance to think about what you learned this week?

Heather Porter: I have and it is so glaringly obvious and you’ll completely agree as well because you and I have been in the thick of it for the last couple of weeks. Alright, so here’s what I learned, we have been doing loads of testing on Facebook, and we’ve been mixing up posts and ads and our posts have been a combination of videos and images, and quotes, and just tips and you name it, and links, you know all the different things you can possibly do. And we have been saying for a while on what we all hear online that is that images work best and you get the most engagement on Facebook.

And this is just Facebook specific I am talking about, but what we’ve learned is that using an image to get the most engagement and clicks on your posts on Facebook is not necessarily true. We’ve learned that it is more a mix, an organic mix of information and we are all about the conversation online, leading a conversation so people can kind of engage with you in different ways and really well and truly we just proved to ourselves just with all of our testing that images are great but you can’t use them alone or rely on them, you have to do everything to have a holistic conversation.

Andrew McCauley: Yes, absolutely and it goes back to the fact where you always test what you are doing because you can’t just assume that what used to work a month ago is still working. We look in our insides every day, a couple of times a day we are looking at things like on our Facebook pages, like reach and engagement and seeing what is working, what is engaging people, what is not, and doing more of what is and less of what’s not and sometimes it’s surprising results.

Heather Porter: It is and it’s one of those things; remember, we have spoken in a previous episode about sliders on websites where you have the big images that slide across, they were the trend for a while and now people are being conditioned to actually just go right over the top of them and I think the same thing is maybe happening or starting to happen in Facebook because all those quotes and inspirational images, we still like and we are still sharing, but maybe people are getting a little bit more numb to it.

Andrew McCauley: Yes, it’s certainly interesting.

Heather Porter: Watch this space; we will keep you posted as we keep testing!

Andrew McCauley: Yes, yes. Now, let’s kick into today’s topic, we are talking about research. Because we get a lot of people saying to us, “Well I can sustain a blog for a couple of weeks or a couple of months because I have a lot of information but I’m going to run out somewhere along the way. How do I come up with new stuff? And

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where do I go looking for it because I’ve got a couple of experts in my field but that’s all, there is no one else out there”. Which people think that it is such a small field but it doesn’t matter what field you are in, there is always things to learn from everywhere.

So today we want to share a couple of those tools with you, a couple of ways to go and find out new information, where do you go and find it? And some of these ways you would not have thought of before, and there are some that you may have heard of and you just need a bit of a refresher. So let’s kick it off, shall we?

Heather Porter: Yes, let’s kick it off. I will bring up the first one, so again these tools are important because we are big believers in speaking in the voice of your market and often times you are talking in your own voice, you are trying to sort of guess what your market wants and what these tools allow you to do is almost get inside the head of the person you are trying to reach and talk in their language very easily. The first one is Amazon dot com, big old favorite that we love and really there’s 2 ways of using it for some really quick and easy market research. The first one is in Amazon dot com on the home page you can actually go to, in the search bar you can do the drop down menu and pick Magazine Subscriptions and then do search and then there is a sort feature on the top right where you can sort by “Popular and New” and you can actually see, sort of in that order all the popular magazines, last I checked there were 400 plus of them or something crazy, so there is loads of magazines, why do you do this?

It’s because print magazines are one of the hardest things or business models to keep afloat because it is expensive, it is hard to get advertisers to buy spots in there, so if there’s magazines that are making it, and are popular, then there’s a huge market for them and you just know that through common sense. So you can get some great ideas of markets and niche markets and sort of by clicking into these magazines as well you can go to their websites. Go to the top websites in your !" sorry I should have said magazines in your space !" and go to their websites and then you can start to kind of look through their articles and get an idea of what they are writing because you already, again, know that there is a market for what they are writing and for what they are talking about.

Andrew McCauley: I’m on Amazon, I have never looked at !" It’s been a while since I’ve looked at magazines on Amazon; can you flip through some of the pages on Amazon on their magazines?

Heather Porter: Not that I am aware of, I think you… It just has some information about them, I have never used it from that perspective, I just go straight to their website. You know, I do that and I go straight to their social media, Facebook, primarily if they have a Facebook, because again, we are talking that’s your market research already done for you. Whatever they are writing about, they have advertisers that are backing them and people reading it and buying their magazine, these are paying people, they are paying for that content so it’s already !" all the hard work is already done for you, so that’s why it is such a great tool, it is really easy. And now if you can’t find a magazine that is in your space of what you want to create content for, don’t create content in that space because there is no market for it.

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Andrew McCauley: Yes, really. It’s a good point, because we have people coming to us all this time saying, “Well I am going to create a website, or my business is going to be all about x-y-z” !" x-y-zed, which country am I in? !" “and I want to do that because there is no one else doing it”. Well there is probably a reason no one else is doing it, and that’s because there is no market for it. It happens a lot.

Heather Porter: All good ideas have been taken at this point and they are just kind of redone, and then repackaged, or rebranded so you actually want something that has been done before.

Andrew McCauley: Well I said originality will send you broke.

Heather Porter: Totally, well said! I like that one! So that’s the first thing you can use Amazon for. Now the second thing is really exciting you can go to into now under the drop down switch for Magazine Subscriptions over to Books and just, again, just leave the search field blank and just go to search and there’s a sort feature on the top right where you can sort !" Oh, sorry! I should take a step back, not blank this time. You go to Books, and then you type in keywords in the field, so whatever you are thinking about creating content for, whether that is an e-course, a blog post, a podcast episode, whatever it is, go ahead and type in a few words about that particular topic then you hit search.

It’s Books, a few keywords, and then search and then on the next page you can sort by “Popular”, you can sort by “Most Comments” or “Most Reviews”. I personally like that one because what you are now doing is sorting by the books that obviously have huge amounts of reviews and of course what does that mean? It means that people are reading it, buying it, and then engaging with it, it’s creating, it’s sparking conversation which is what you want. So you go into those books, you can click into the book, and in the comments you can read and scan all the people who have read the book and wanted to leave a review and you could in their own language find out what in that book specifically set them afire, what really inspired them, what really helped them, a lot of people say, “Oh my gosh, you just saved my x-y-zed” again and you take those words that they’ve literally written and that can be the topics of a post.

Andrew McCauley: I like it.

Heather Porter: Go to the market, find out in their own words, no second guessing here, what they want, go out and give it to them.

Andrew McCauley: Yes, that is good. And I guess, does it matter how many reviews a book has, or the more the better do you think?

Heather Porter: I think the more the better and the reason why is because again it’s something that people want to engage with, and as you know like I’ve just !" this is another cool thing that I was reading, the 1% rule. In online marketing there is a rule that’s now come about, this 1% rule that says for every 1 person creating content, 99 people will not comment.

Andrew McCauley: Really? That many? That’s crazy!

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Heather Porter: Yes so what that means is 1 person creates content, 1 person comments on the content, 99 people don’t do a thing but read it, they are lurkers basically. So if you have a lot of reviews you already know that there’s loads more readers that are not even doing reviews in the first place, it’s kind of the base benchmark that says to you this is a topic that people want to know about.

Andrew McCauley: Okay, good awesome!

Heather Porter: That’s the Amazon tricks for you. So, and you have a good few ones as well, what is one of yours that you like?

Andrew McCauley: Yes, so some of mine, looking for content, there is a couple of sites out there which are like curation sites that I like to go and check out. One of them is called Alltop, and Alltop is a site that aggregates or curates content from different blogs all over the web and you can pretty much get any topic you like, it gives you a rundown of the best blogs or the ones that are most active in that particular content, you can really narrow it down, and then once you find those you can click on the links and they take you straight to that person’s blog so you can really begin to find some great information there.

It can become a little bit addictive because it’s just a wealth of knowledge that it dishes up. So Alltop is one of my favorite ones for that sort of stuff. But the other one that I like to use in conjunction with Alltop actually is my reader. Now Google Reader used to be around and that closed down in the middle of 2013 so there’s a mad scramble on all these new readers, a whole bunch of readers got updated, and a whole bunch of readers came out of the woodwork and one of the ones that is leading the charge is called Feedly, and I think you’ve used Feedly before too right?

Heather Porter: Yes I put it on my iPad after you were here actually visiting in Australia and you taught me how to link things up.

Andrew McCauley: Yes, I live on my Feedly, every day I’m on Feedly because the way Feedly works is that you got Alltop, you find a great blog and you think, “Well, this blog has some great information for it, I’d love to keep in contact with this blog, I’d love to see what they write about on a regular basis”. Now, I don’t want to come back and look at it every day to see if there is something new because if there is not something new today I don’t want to come back tomorrow if there is nothing new, I’ll get bored after day 2 or 3 and I won’t come back and then they lost me as a reader.

So what Feedly does is that basically says, what is the URL of the site you’ve got, paste it into your Feedly account and it automatically updates your Feedly reader for you very time there is a new piece of content that’s been written on that blog. Now Feedly doesn’t have to have just one blog on it, you can have a whole series of different blogs from all over the web and all you do is go to one place which is your Feedly account either on the web, or on your iPad, as you said, even on your iPhone, and it delivers all of the latest news to you in one spot so it’s almost like having a personalized newspaper at your fingertips.

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Heather Porter: It saves so much time and we all have a handful of websites that we look at and kind of get inspired by, whether they are competitors for market research, whatever it is, right? So to have them all come into one place, it really saves time and it is really handy because you can even spot trends that way I would imagine, couldn’t you with different content?

Andrew McCauley: Yes totally and it is fun. You know it is also interesting to see which I learned about since I was using a reader was that not everyone is original. Exactly as you said, you see one article on one site and then the same article, not the same words but the same context, is being written about by another article on another blog and you think “Wow, maybe someone is been reading someone” I am not sure know who came first. But it’s just a great way to showcase that you can go and use other people’s content to use as inspiration or review or repurpose if you like, so that you’ve got your own spin on it but it gives you a great idea about content. That is Feedly (f-e-e-d-l-y) dot com. Free account, I’m pretty sure it’s free, yes it’s free, and sign up and check it out. In conjunction with Alltop and Feedly these are 2 of my favorite places to go and find and curate content.

Heather Porter: And save loads of time, spot trends, and get really good ideas. Yes!

Andrew McCauley: Absolutely! Now, one thing I want to touch on before we wrap up the show is social media research. There is a number of different tools out there that we can use for social media research; and what do I mean by social media research? Well let’s say that you want to start researching your customers, your people that are following you on Facebook or people that have common interest with your fans on your Facebook page. I want to talk about the Facebook Graph Search for a few minutes because I think a lot of people have seen the Graph Search, it’s basically just the search bar at the top of your profile, your personal profile. But it’s so much more than that and people don’t understand. So let me give you a couple of examples and you can ask me a few different ones as we go.

Heather Porter: Okay!

Andrew McCauley: A couple of examples that you could use Graph Search for to really find out a lot of information about your competitors or your own customers. So firstly you can !" Let’s say you are a fitness trainer, for instance, and you want to go and find… No, let’s say you sell fitness equipment, small dumbbells and weights and bands and pulleys and that sort of stuff and your target market are fitness trainers and you live in Sidney so you want to find fitness trainers who live in Sidney. So you can go to the actual search bar at the top of your Facebook account and you type in “Fitness trainers who live in Sidney”, type that whole entire sentence out, and Facebook will deliver all of the people’s profiles of people that say that they are trainer and their location is Sidney.

So you are starting to find exactly who your target market is, now it starts to get even better because then you might want to think, “Well what if I want to get into Fitness First” !" So Fitness First is like 24 Hour Fitness in the U.S.; Fitness First is a big franchise, fitness gym company in Australia. !" And let’s say that you want to get into Fitness First but you don’t know anyone that worked there, so you can type in on

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Facebook Graph Search, “People who live in Sidney and work at Fitness First” and Facebook will spit out every person that says that work in Fitness First. In fact, you can even narrow it down to a specific Fitness First as well, you might want to say, “People who work at Fitness First in Manly” and it will tell you exactly who on their profile have said that they work at Fitness First in Manly. So it gives you some pretty in-depth information about that.

Heather Porter: Are these profiles or are these pages?

Andrew McCauley: They are all personal profiles; so you can reach out to those people, you can leave them a message. But here is a cool thing that you can start to do. You can start to do things like, if you have your own business page, right? You can start to say interests of fans of AutoPilot Your Business fan page, and what Facebook does is it gives you a list of the interests that all of the fans of that particular page have in common.

Heather Porter: Are you serious?

Andrew McCauley: I’m dead serious, it is awesome! It is like wow! All of a sudden I’m doing market research. Now, that’s all good for my page but what if I want to find out, what are the interests of my competitors?

Heather Porter: That’s exactly where my mind went.

Andrew McCauley: So you go and type in !" Let’s say a competitor of ours was Bill Smith, okay? And Bill Smith was the guru of all gurus; and we wanted to go and market to his people so I can go and type in “Fans of Bill Smith” and get a result straight away. I can type in “Fans of Bill Smith who live in Sidney” and I can say and go an tag them, “Hey I am running an event in Sidney, would you like to come along? I know you are fan of Bill Smith, I think he is great, would you like to come and see my event?” Right, so you are really targeting them there, so you can really narrow that down. But I can also go and do some undercover work and say, “What are the interests? What are the favorite interests of fans of Bill Smith who live in Sidney?”

Heather Porter: Yes that’s more where I think that it gets really fascinating because these are, again, keywords again, right? Of people that we are interested in.

Andrew McCauley: So all of a sudden you are starting to find the interests of that particular fan page. Now why would you want to do that? Well there’s a whole range of different things you can start to use. I mean you can go and look at movies that the fans of Bill Smith like, and you can start to run ads, you can create Facebook ads around specific interests.

Heather Porter: Very interesting. I know that the whole new Facebook ad module and how you can get really detailed with the interest and !" Wow! So this is almost some great research not only to find those keywords and just using their comments even to understand more about them and what they want to learn about for content but also use it for ads.

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Andrew McCauley: Totally, so you can do that sort of thing. Here is another thing you can do: I’m a member of a number of groups as we all are members of groups even if you don’t know that you are a member of groups sometimes. But I can go and find members of groups that I am a part of who have a specific interest, or a favorite, or live in a certain area. So let’s say that I am going on a business trip !" Let’s say that you are going, you are flying out to Brisbane and you want to catch up with some people from a video, let’s say it’s an internet marketing group that you are part of, because that’s what you’re interested in. So you might say, “Who are the people who live in Brisbane that are part of this group?” And it will spit out a list of the people that all live in Brisbane and they are part of that group, and you may want to say, “Well, let’s create a little mastermind get together for all these people”.

So all of a sudden you are starting to really filter out so much information out, how does Facebook let you see all this stuff? Let me just quickly give you a quick overview, every time you comment on something, every time you Like something, every time you do any action on Facebook, it gets stored in their database. It is all open knowledge and what they are doing is, they are tabulating all of this information so that it can serve up to people that are smart and know how to use the Search Graph for this sort of information so every time you Like a page or Like it, you go into a post place and you check in, or you go and comment on it, Facebook is storing that information and they are using that and people can use that information to build a dossier on you if you like.

Heather Porter: You know while you are on this point and it’s just slightly off the mark, I guess the mark what we are saying, there’s !" I see reviews a lot now on pages where you see the 4 stars and people doing reviews, can you sort by reviews in this graph as well?

Andrew McCauley: You know, reviews does not come… reviews is pretty new. I’m just going to do it right now as we speak.

Heather Porter: Yes I am asking of course because of what I said before; where if you are finding what people are really interested in you can easily do that via reviews if that is something they have opened up yet for search.

Andrew McCauley: I am not seeing it pop up, so at the moment I am going to say no but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It may mean I am not putting the right terminology in but I wouldn’t be surprised if you can.

Heather Porter: One time I was, not too long ago, speaking at one of those expos for the beauty industry and I was showing them for salons, people can type in “Hair Salon Sidney” and it will have all the people that enabled reviews, and you can sort on that page by reviews from memory but you can’t… I couldn’t search by reviews, I had to search by Salon Sidney and then I’d see all the salons there, and then I could just, at a scan, see which one had the most reviews.

Andrew McCauley: Yes okay, I am just looking for that right now. And I can’t see it. It’s defaulting to people who have liked rather than people who have reviewed.

Heather Porter: Okay gotcha.

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Andrew McCauley: It’s not popping up for me right now, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that does change in the near future.

Heather Porter: Yes something to keep in mind is this tool really progresses. Look Yelp, and in Australia we have Eatibility, we have all these amazing tools that you can use where you go and do market research based on reviews. And so all these review sorts of functionalities are important I think, because you get to see the most popular therefore you can write content around what people want.

Andrew McCauley: Exactly, right. So that’s the Facebook Graph Search, go and check it out because it’s a pretty awesome tool and there is a whole bunch of other things that you can do with it too, I’m not going to get into it but mind you, you can refine your search to gender so you can refine it to males who like certain things, you can put in relationships, and employers, current cities, you can put schools in as well people who attended this school, who live in this city and like this page. It’s super refinement, it’s just amazing.

Heather Porter: You know if I were to give 3 action steps to someone listening to this episode I would say: Go do research on one book on Amazon and just to see how powerful it is to read other people’s comments to get ideas, I would say go hook up Feedly if you don’t have it, so just hook it up with 1 website even, and I would say go start playing around with the search bar in Facebook and see what you can come out with.

Andrew McCauley: Yes, absolutely, do, do it, do it, do it. Alright so anyway, that’s I think we are going to wrap it up because we are coming to our time. We’ve put out our ayb guide that’s going like hot cakes right now, how do people go and get our ayb guide?

Heather Porter: Okay so you go to !" very easy! !" aybguide dot com and you’ll see a cute little video on that page of Andrew and I, no, but seriously it’s pretty cool, you get some great social media tips and other resources and even a nice little script in there to help you out with your marketing. But what’s cool about that is we are doing a weekly tactics updates so we are giving you some great resources and we are just, as Andrew suggested earlier in the episode, we are starting our ayb Hangouts and the reason why we are doing that is because Andrew and I have worked in the event industry for so long, we’ve traveled I think, I know I’ve worked in over 30 countries, I don’t even know how many, I think you’ve beat me somehow Andrew.

Andrew McCauley: Yes, I’ve been in a few. I think I am up to 47.

Heather Porter: We’ve met so many amazing people and we’ve been so focused on growing our business that we’ve kind of not lost track but not socialize as much as we used to in the past with these people and we are talking entrepreneurs, leaders, all over the world, so we thought, you know what? The coolest way for us to hang out with them and to reconnect with them is going to be to do Hangouts so we are inviting all of you guys in to meet all the people that we know and get some great business tips from them, so if you sign up for our guide we are going to keep you in the loop of our Hangouts as well.

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Andrew McCauley: Yes absolutely, alright H, that’s awesome. Another good podcast, thank you very much, I enjoyed that one, it was good.

Heather Porter: Yes it was good, it was fun. Alright thanks Andrew, thanks guys for listening and all over the world, wherever you may be, and we’ll be talking to you soon.

Andrew McCauley: See you later.

MC: Make sure to grab out free business automation guide now and get access to other special bonuses, head on over to ayb podcast dot com

All passengers and cabin crew should now be seated, please keep your seatbelt securely fastened. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the first officer speaking. On behalf of your captains Andrew McCauley and Heather Porter, we would like to thank you for taking the journey with us to AutoPilot Your Business. You are now closer to putting your own business on AutoPilot using the internet. Of course if you would like to rack up some frequent flyer points, visit our website www.AutoPilotYourBusiness.com or check us out on Facebook at Facebook.com/AutoPilotYourBusiness. These frequent flyer points are totally useless but the information is gold. Until we fly again, happy travels!

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easy ways to do market research

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