Content Crooner

photo credit: Brooks Elliott

Every business owner should be absolutely in love with their product or service. If you don’t have a passion for what you do you’ll surely wind up in an insane asylum from unhappily grinding through all of your work. However, passion for your product can also blind you. A budget-draining pitfall occurs when businesses simply assume their offer is superior and fail to diligently gauge their audience’s response.

Even if you know that your product or service can truly help others live better lives, you must make a strong effort to keep a pulse on the public. That massively beneficial offer of yours could simply be suffering from the wrong marketing angle. Incorporating focus groups in your business plan will help you understand exactly how the public views your offer, and how you can best present it to them in the future as well as how you can improve specific parts about your business or service.

Improve Focus for Targeted Marketing

Focus groups support the most efficient and targeted use of your budget and marketing energy. Polling a focus group could tell you that you’re wasting a huge amount of money on marketing and advertising that simply isn’t reaching the right people. Getting direct feedback will let you know what marketing tools are making their way into people’s lives, what direct response mailers get opened at home and which got tossed without hesitation, which emails are clicked on, whether they pay attention to radio or TV ads regarding your industry, and much more. It’s similar to an army campaign: War never goes as planned, and sometimes you’ll need to reposition your troops to win the battle.

Plus, the valuable feedback you’ll garner will help you best tailor your offer to the public. Perhaps the public actually loves the idea of your product or service but thinks your marketing message is too spammy, sketchy, cheap, snooty, or detached. There may be six reasons why people love your product, but a dozen more reasons why they simply don’t like the way you’re talking about it. Get focused feedback to correct these issues.

Achieve Focus on what to Fix

Focus groups will also clue you in on specific, potential problems, helping you foresee them instead of jumping right into a budget-draining catastrophe. These groups also help you maintain a positive public image instead of cleaning up a massive, public faux-pas. The effort you put into focus groups now will be much less than the effort required to put out major fires caused by not keeping a pulse on the public.

How to Select Your Focus Group

Here’s where some simple statistics come into play. You must be sure to use a random selection for your focus group for the most accurate results. Select from a very specific pool of participants and your feedback will be highly biased, which could easily steer your business in the wrong direction.

You must also choose your demographic wisely to get accurate results. For example, if you’re selling high-end TV’s and you do a focus group in the projects, you’re probably not going to get the feedback you were looking for. Yes, that was an extreme example, but it’s definitely worth noting since many businesses test the wrong market or target audience.

While your friends and family may provide a good place to start for some immediate feedback, this will surely produce some naturally biased results. Instead, you can use online polls, customer and prospect newsletters that feature a quick questionnaire, or a link to a quick and simple form on your website. You can even publish a notice in your local newspaper, promising free breakfast for an hour of their time. (Offering something for free always increases participation.)

And what do you do after you’ve conducted a successful round of focus groups? Magnify that focus and test again a few months later. Even Donald Trump is still finding ways that he can improve his business—test, test and test again to continuously increase your sales.

To your success,
Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!