In the competitive realm of sales and marketing in the online trading education industry, where innovation and understanding consumer psyche are paramount, marketKing uses a revolutionary research methodology that promises not just to keep you ahead of the game, but also to carve a sales and marketing campaign for your product that competitors will find gruelling to replicate.
In this blog, you’ll discover our research approach: a detailed, research strategy that is little known outside our kingdom.
It’s designed to ensure victory in every marketing campaign, allowing you to claim your throne in the industry.
Discover the 3 Steps of Our ‘Research King’ Strategy:
Step 1 – Product Research: Understanding what makes your product unique.
Step 2 – Competitor Research: Identifying your competitors to pinpoint differentiation.
Step 3 – Market Research: Recording and utilising IVOC (Indirect Voice of the Customer) data.
Let’s delve deeper into each of these steps so that you gain clearer insights into what each entails.
Product Research: Understanding What Makes Your Product Unique
Product research forms the bedrock of this strategy.
It’s not just about knowing the product, but fully engaging with its universe.
So put on your investigator hat; it’s time to perform an autopsy on your product.
Here’s what this involves…
Dissecting the physical attributes:
Facts and Features: These are factual statements detailing what your product is and what it does, including its technical aspects, physical traits, and other relevant details.
Advantages: Identifying Unique Selling Propositions (USPs) highlights what sets your product apart in a saturated market.
Benefits (how it will improve the buyer’s life): These are the positive outcomes your customer can expect from using your product.
The benefits highlight the potential value and impact of the features on your customers’ lives.
Target audience identification:
Knowing your target consumer is critical.
Who are they?
What do they value?
This leads to an understanding of how well your product aligns with customer expectations and desires.
By tapping into the desires, notions, and identifications of your ideal target customers, you can persuade them to buy into your ideas and products, among other offerings.
Desires refer to what your customers long for or wish to eliminate.
Notions are their beliefs about the world.
Identifications are the concepts or groups they associate with.
Characteristics describe their physical or mental attributes.
A lot of this is invisible to people; they don’t talk about or question it because it seems normal to them.
That’s why our job is to detect, discover, and infer this information.
The truth is, people buy into ideas, not products.
You must sell ideas, not just your product, and often these ideas represent the ‘Desired Self’ of your customer.
Therefore, when it comes to marketing your product, it is important to understand who your ideal customers are, who their ‘Desired Self’ is, and what pathway you can provide to help them achieve what they want.
Competitor Research: Identify Your Competitors to Pinpoint Differentiation
To outmanoeuvre your competition, you first need to understand them.
This involves creating profiles and considering what your ideal customer might search for across platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Google, and Reddit to identify both direct and indirect competitors.
This step is crucial for mapping out the competitive landscape and pinpointing opportunities for differentiation.
Our Competition Domination Roadmap Will Help You Differentiate Your Product From Your Competitors
Market Research: Recording and Utilising IVOC (Indirect Voice of the Customer) Data
Now that you understand your product, its features, advantages, and benefits, and you’ve identified who your ideal audience is and what your competition is doing, the conquest is only halfway completed.
Market research is the arena where the actual dethroning of your competition takes place, setting the stage for you to establish yourself as the market leader in trading education.
The core of marketKing’s research approach lies in tapping into the pulse of your market by collecting ‘Indirect Voice of Customer’ (IVOC) data, not ‘Voice of Customer’ (VOC).
Keep on reading, and you’ll discover why…
Collecting ‘Indirect Voice of Customer’ (IVOC) data involves a deep dive into the places where your ideal customers congregate, such as social media platforms, online forums, and product reviews.
The aim is to uncover unspoken customer needs, fears, desires, and objections.
As the copywriting legend David Ogilvy once pointed out, ‘The real challenge in market research is that people’s actions, words, and thoughts often don’t align.’
This is why marketKing emphasises IVOC data, capturing genuine consumer sentiments in their natural settings, free from the artificiality of direct surveys.
The IVOC data collected revolves around several key customer insights:
Pains and Fears: Identifying actual problems and the associated worries consumers have.
Objections: Understanding reservations or scepticism about available solutions.
Desires: Pinpointing what customers hope to achieve or experience by resolving their problems.
Firm and Shakable Beliefs: Recognizing deeply held convictions versus more malleable opinions.
This data is then ranked by intensity and frequency, matched with corresponding product benefits, and used to craft marketing messages that resonate on a deeper level.
The Final Steps and Implementation
The end result of this process is the selection of the most potent and relevant messages to be integrated into your marketing campaign.
This selection is driven by how well the IVOC insights align with the product’s strongest benefits, creating a strategic approach to customer engagement.
The marketKing research methodology ensures that each campaign is not only a win for our clients but also a testament to the power of deep, insightful research combined with creative execution.
That’s how you do research like a King! 👑
With good energy,
marketKing (Jacques and André Leonard)