The #1 Question that Drives Our Approach to Marketing

The first step in improving your marketing efforts starts with customer research. By knowing your market and their challenges intimately, you’re better able to meet their needs and grow your business.

But you simply can’t ask customers what they want you to sell them. What people say they want and what they really want differ.

Even worse, most business owners assume they know their customers inside and out, but they don’t. This leads to lost sales and revenue.

To counteract this, we’ve discovered a customer research tool that has completely transformed how we approach the “discovery” phase with our clients during the Full Cycle Marketing Success Method.

It’s called The Deep Dive Survey (DDS) and it asks prospects one single most important question (SMIQ for short): what’s your single biggest challenge (as it relates to X)?

This is because people can only accurately answer two types of questions: What they don’t want and questions about their past behavior.

Asking about your customer’s biggest challenge as it relates to your industry or product is the first step in finding out what your customers really want, who they are and how you should market to them.

Benefits of The Deep Dive Survey

When you hone in on your customer, you’re putting yourself in the best possible position to succeed. Then you’re able to:

• Write emails that get opened
• Launch products and services that get purchased
• Create events that get attended
• Grow a loyal base of repeat customers who want to buy practically everything you offer.

The DDS is the first step in The Ask Method®.

Created by Ryan Levesque and outlined in the book Ask., The Ask Method is attributed to generating $100 million in sales online in 23 different industries. And in certain markets, they generate upwards of $8 million per year on individual product lines using the Ask Method.

Through a Deep Dive Survey, we help our clients collect open-ended data that allows us to identify the largest “buckets” or categories of customers and pick up natural consumer language we can use in our copywriting.

Thinking of conducting your own Deep Dive Survey?

Before you get started, make sure you know the answer to these three questions:

• What is your existing product or idea that we’re helping you gain customer and marketing insights into?

• Who is this product serving (who is your target market)?

• What is your product’s core benefit or promise? Describe your customer’s “before” and “after” using your product.

Here are some tips:

• Don’t offer incentives–it’ll bias your data. We have taken a few exceptions to this. In one case we sent the survey to existing buyers of a product and offered them a discount on a future purchase. Any incentive should be in kind to the value they’ll bring by filling out the survey.
• Ask the most important, open-ended question first (the single biggest challenge question) because with every additional question, you’ll see a drop-off in response.

We would love to work with you to identify your specific goals and help you implement ASK Method principles in your marketing. Click here to request a consultation today.