At many different stages it can be helpful to perform market research to help you develop and grow your business. But what do we actually mean by market research? How do you do market research for your coaching business? That’s what we’re going to explore further in this post!

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Market Research isn’t just for start ups

Performing market research when you’re starting your business makes a lot of sense but it’s not only helpful for start ups, it can actually be super useful at many stages of business. If you’re pivoting your niche, if you want to hone your message, if you’re looking to create a new offer – market research can also help you here.

What is market research helpful for?

Market research can help you in lots of different ways, here’s a few of my favourites.

Gaining further clarity on the problems and aspirations your people have

You can use market research to gain more clarity and really drill down on the problems and aspirations your people have. When you get beneath the obvious stuff people might be dealing with and learn more about how they are viewing their problems you can use this in creating offers and services and the copy you need to sell them.

Discovering what in real life (IRL) language your ideal clients are using to describe their problems or aspirations

When it comes to writing copy and selling your services it can be incredibly helpful to use language that reflects what your ideal client is actually saying themselves – this creates resonance and that ‘she’s in my head!’ feeling which is gold dust when it comes to selling your coaching packages.

Checking if your messaging is landing with people

If you’ve been coaching and marketing your work for a while, something you can use market research for is to check to see how your messaging is actually landing for people. This is basically checking if people are actually taking away what you want them to take away when they interact with your business.

Validating an idea or offer

Market research is brilliant for validating an offer. You can find out if people are interested in a service you might provide, how much they’d pay etc. However, don’t rely too much on this, it’s a useful steer but it’s not always super indicative of whether or not you’ll get clients.

Content marketing ideas

If you’re looking for ideas of what you can create content around for your marketing such as blog posts, podcasts, videos etc then market research can support you to do this as well!

In what ways can you perform market research for your coaching business?

There are so many ways you can research your market when it comes to your coaching business. Often it will depend on what stage of business you’re at and what it is you need from the research that dictates which is the best approach.

• 1:1 calls / interviews – best for when you’re starting out but also super helpful at any stage of business and one of the reasons that Priceless Power Hours rock!
• Surveys – good if you have a larger number of people to contact
• Online Polls – quick and easy to get fast feedback
• Checking out places your ideal client hangs out – Facebook groups, comments on bigger IG accounts, Amazon book reviews etc – good for expanding outside of your existing community and great if you’re starting out too.

Something that’s super helpful to remember about approaching market research is to make sure that you’re very clear on what it is that you want to get out of that particular round of research. Be clear on its purpose and your desired outcome.

Choosing your market research audience

The people who you use for your research is important and will influence what you get back and how useful that information is. Many coaches at the start of their journey might do some market research with a very broad base but feel disheartened when the feedback tells them no one would pay for coaching – spoiler alert, these people probably aren’t your ideal clients.

As your business grows, you might be doing research with people who already know you and are on your list or part of your following or you may intentionally need to seek out sources of information that are not already within your world depending on what it is you need.

Performing an annual survey

A useful and fun thing you can do in your business is do an annual survey of your audience. I try and do this each year just to see where my people are at, what they are most struggling with, what stage of business they’re at and what they would find most helpful from me. It’s always lovely to read people’s responses – this post has been inspired by a response to my most recent survey!

I hope this has been helpful in getting you thinking about the ways in which market research can help your coaching business!

Let me know in the comments which form of market research you’ll be trying next!

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