If you want your business to be successful, you have to look beyond the usual suspects. What do I mean by “the usual suspect?” Business coaching experts and consultants say that location is everything, a lot of them make a big deal about niches. Others talk about social interaction. A lot of them agree on the importance of brand values.
All of these are important, but without one central piece of information, all of this expert advice would be worthless. I am of course talking about consumer intelligence. You see, people will not put dollars in your hand because they have nothing else better to do.
They’re not philanthropists. They don’t love humanity. They don’t spend money just for the sake of spending money. They’re trying to solve a problem. In other words, people are constantly asking themselves, “What’s in it for me?” In other words, I have needs. I have problems I want to solve, and if your business wants my hard-earned dollars, you better solve those things for me.
That’s the bottom line. The question is how do you get this information? The problem is a lot of small businesses approach this with the “Build it and they will come” mindset. Let me tell you, that is a one-way street to bankruptcy. Don’t even think about it, forget about it, seriously.
No matter how hot an idea is to you, it doesn’t automatically mean that your passion for it translates to other people. There are so many inventions out there that are so awesome to the inventors who came up with them, but are absolute duds on the market.
People don’t want to be bothered. Whatever it was being sold, did not connect at a certain level. Did you know that before Steve Jobs rolled out the iPhone, that there were many other handheld devices that connected people’s phones with the internet on a 24/7 basis? You probably didn’t know that, because those devices didn’t make much of an impact.
Microsoft poured hundreds of millions of dollars on such devices, and they went nowhere. The genius of Steve Jobs is that he understood the power of tapping, and the power of apps, and open architecture in a mobile device. And that’s what blew up the smartphone market.
I wish I could tell you that he was able to do this all intuitively, but he didn’t. This came from consumer intelligence. When apple polled users of the iPod, they noticed that people who use the iPod touch loved it, and they started thinking, “Why can’t this type of technology be applied to the other things that we normally use? Gadgets like game players, music players, video players, and yes, phones.”
So Steve Jobs thought that one device, united by a touch pad technology, can meet all these needs. You want to watch a video? You can use one device. You want to listen to music? You can use that one device. You want a GPS? You can use that one device. And on and on it goes. What really revolutionized this project was the concept of apps.
I wish I could tell you that this was obvious from the get-go, but when you look at the history of the IOS, which is the operating system of the Apple iPhone, the open app architecture was actually only implemented two or more years after the launch of the first iPhone.
In other words, Apple listened to its customer base, and that’s why it’s one of the most valuable companies in the world. This is how powerful consumer intelligence is. And if you want your business, regardless of how small it is, to succeed, you better start listening to your customers.
At the end of the day, if they don’t like the product or service you are offering, you’re not going to make as much money as you had hoped. That’s the bottom line. It doesn’t matter whether people think your business is some sort of local institution. It doesn’t matter how long your businesses has been around, none of that matters.
What matters is whether you can solve their problems in the here and now. This is why consumer intelligence is so crucial. The good news is Facebook ads can help you make the process of gathering consumer intelligence cheaper, more effective and more efficient. How? You can run incentivized Facebook ads.
It may seem like a simple contest, but you’re actually polling them on certain pressure or demand points that you can then correlate with actual market trends. This can enable you to produce better products, roll out better services, and ultimately create a brand your customers can emotionally invest in.
I can’t even begin to tell you how important a brand is. If you’re clueless about this, just compare Joe’s Coffee and Starbucks. It shouldn’t even be close. When you think of Starbucks and you look at the green and white logo of the mermaid, you know that you will have coffee of a certain quality regardless of whether you walked into a Starbucks in Tokyo, or a Starbucks in Lima, Peru, or Pretoria, South Africa.
You have that certain level of dependability. You can look forward to a certain level of quality. That’s how important branding is, but unfortunately, you cannot craft the right brand without proper consumer intelligence, and thankfully Facebook Ads help you get this vital information. Click here to download the only framework you would need to launch successful Facebook Ad campaigns. Regardless of what you need those campaigns for, you can be sure that this guide will help you achieve the success you’re looking for.
