Here’s the thing: if you're feeling stuck on content ideas, your audience will typically tell you what they want or need.
Now, that doesn’t mean that you’re just going to create every single thing that they ask for, but it *can* give you some good insight and get your creative juices flowing.
Instead of polling your audience on Instagram (because I know the polls and question boxes on stories can be tempting), I encourage you to take this further and conduct a deep dive survey with your audience via email.
Here’s how this works:
(NOTE: I did not invent this concept! It’s called the ASK Method by Ryan Levesque and it’s something I learned about early on in my marketing career and is such an interesting tactic that I think every business owner can benefit from.)
Essentially, this method focuses on understanding and addressing the specific needs of your ideal audience by asking them very specific questions in a very specific way in order to generate very specific responses.
❌ What We Aren’t Going To Ask ❌
“What content do you want to see more of?”
Tbh, that’s boring and no one really knows what to say. When you ask this, your audience will probably respond with something like, “more of what you’re doing, I love your content!”
Thank youuuuu, but also not helpful, right?
✅ What We ARE Going To Ask ✅
“What industry are you in?” OR “Which best describes you?” (and provide multiple choice options to learn if they’re a full time business owner, service provider, side hustler, etc.) – this is an example of a segmentation question that helps you gauge who is actually in your audience.
“When it comes to X [insert the SPECIFIC thing you help people with], what is the single biggest challenge or frustration that you’re facing right now?” – this is an example of a bucket question that helps you uncover specific problems, challenges, and desires of each segment.
Phrasing your questions like this gives your audience more of a chance to actually explain what they’re experiencing AND it gives you greater insight to their hesitations, objections and challenges, so that you can create better content that speaks to those things specifically!
There’s a few key things for this method to work:
- Don’t ask a TON of questions – keep it short, sweet, and simple so that people actually respond
- Keep the majority of your questions open ended – this gives your audience a chance to be more detailed in their feedback and give you greater insight to their problems at hand
- Send this survey via email – remember, your email subscribers are typically more dedicated and loyal followers (aka they’re more apt to do you a favor when you ask)
- Segment the responses – after collecting the survey responses, segment your audience based on their answers so you can group certain people with their specific problems or pain points and can create specific marketing messages just for them
This is something that I try to do in my business at least twice a year to get a better gauge of who my audience is and get a better understanding of what they really need from me at different points in time.
I encourage you to implement this, too!
⭐️ BONUS if you make it happen before the end of the year – doing so can really set you up for some great content that speaks to what your audience actually needs.
So, whaddya say? Are you going to try it? Respond to this email and let me know!
