How to know exactly what your list wants to buy

NOTE: If you’re a brand new customer of mine – I send out a new tutorial every week about running a solopreneur business and copywriting. There’s nothing for sale this week.

This week I’m showing you one of my best secret weapons: The 30 Second Survey.

Like I mentioned yesterday, the entire purpose of this survey is to identify the people in your audience who are desperate to have their problems solved – and are more than happy to pull out their credit cards to do it.

By identifying exactly what they’re struggling with, you can then make content and products that fit them like a glove…

And since they’re proven buyers, they’ll buy it.

Which means you make money.

Simple, right?

Yet somehow business owners rarely "get" this.

Whatever – moving on, today I want to talk about what questions you need to have in your 30 Second Survey. Use the right questions and you’ll end up with pure gold – literally exactly what you need to create, that will sell to your audience.

These are called 30 Second Surveys for a reason: they’re really meant to take only 30 seconds to fill out.

Which means you can’t ask a thousand questions.

There are only 3 different (short) sections in your survey you need:

  1. Demographic Information

  2. The #1 Biggest Problem

  3. Hyper-Responder Indicators

    The first part of our survey (Demographic Information) should include very quick, demographic questions that are easy to answer but also might be useful to you in your marketing efforts.

    For example, if you’re list is in the fitness space, it might be useful to know if your customer is male or female, as well as how old they are.

    If you’re sell investment strategies, it could helpful to know their annual salary and how much money they plan on investing per year.

    If you’re selling a course on finding a new career, I’d likely ask their current career, how long they’ve been in that career, and how old they are.

    Collect only 2 to 3 critical pieces of demographic information.

    Most importantly though, you want people to be able to move quickly through the demographic questions. If you include 5 or 6 different questions people will lose interest, feel like you’re probing too deep, and fail to fill anything out.

    The next question, The #1 Biggest Problem, will help you in multiple different ways – in your marketing and sales materials and also in your products.

    This is because you NEED to hear your customers describe their biggest problem in their own words.

    You might find, like I have, that you’re speaking to one benefit when they REALLY want a different benefit.

    Or, if you’ve got the "right" benefit figured out already, that the way they word it is a little different from how you word it.

    These answers are gold to you on their own.

    Use these answers in your copy and you will sell more.

    But we still want to go deeper to understand whose responses are the most trustworthy.

    Like I mentioned yesterday, you don’t really want to put weight on the answers of the freebie seekers on your list. I’m not shaming people for not wanting to buy anything (I’m on tons of lists myself just for the free information!) but you’re here to run a business, and a requirement of running a business is that you make money.

    And a little secret about people who spend money, is that they usually have spent money in the past.

    In other words, the people most likely to buy your products/services have also bought similar products/services in the past.

    And there’s an easy trick to finding those people.

    That’s the last section of your survey: The Hyper Responder Questions.

    This section should include 2 questions.

  4. "What other products/courses/solutions have you bought to solve this problem in the past? (Enter N/A if none)"

  5. "OPTIONAL: would you potentially be open to a Zoom/phone call with me to discuss these answers further? If yes, enter your email address below – otherwise this survey is 100% anonymous"

    There’s one main purpose of this last section: it’s to identify those people that are actual buyers of products.

    The first question, "what other products have you bought", is how you get an honest answer about whether a respondent is likely to spend money with you or not.

    If they’ve bought other products, then they’re highly likely to buy more products – and hopefully your products (if you have awesome solutions to their problems).

    Find all the people who have a long list of products they’ve bought and "average" their answers out – you now have an avatar of a customer who doesn’t hesitate to spend money to solve their problems, and exactly what they’re struggling with right now.

    Boom – create that content for them (both free & paid), and you’re basically guaranteed to generate more revenue than you ever have before…

    Because you’re selling to people who actually buy stuff – and exactly what they want.

    (You also get a ton of useful information & competitive research by seeing what other people are buying. They’re TELLING YOU what they spend money on – so make more products like that, but better.)

    The other question about a phone call – sure, it identifies Hyper Responders, but also it gives you an opportunity to go deeper if you feel really lost.

    Hold 15 minute conversations with at least 5-10 of your Hyper Responders and you’ll know exactly who this customer is – and exactly what they need to solve their problems.

    You’ll end up with at least a handful of products you can sell and do very well with – I guarantee it.

    Not to mention months worth of free content you can produce to help them go deeper – and build trust.

    If you want to see one of these "live", I’d love if you filled out my 30 Second Survey.

    If you haven’t filled it out yet, but feel like you’re one of those people I’m describing – someone who desperately wants to solve business and copywriting related problems, go fill out it now.

    It really should only take about 30 seconds and it’s actually a real 30 Second Survey – I want to understand my own list better, so please fill it out like you would normally :-).

    >>> Here’s the link to it (it’s 100% anonymous)

    Tomorrow we’re going to start talking about the results from that survey – and I’ll show you how I parse the data and turn it into courses & content I can produce.

    Talk to you then!

    — Derek