How to Find a Social Need That Your Business Can Satisfy

Where do new ideas come from? Innovations do not occur in companies that are looking for faster return on investments. The real innovations happen when people who are inventing the future are doing so by identifying customers’ needs and providing solutions that meet those needs. Sometimes a business’ success does not from inventing new products, but from seeing and then solving people’s current problems. Let’s go through the main steps that will demystify the process of getting an idea for your business.

 

Build Your Marketing Persona

Creating a semi-fictional persona is a good place to start any marketing initiative. It allows you to get inside the mind of your customer so that you understand their goals and behaviors. Furthermore, it allows your sales and customer service team to create a common language about your buyers. Most importantly, it makes it easier to provide content and marketing messages that appeal to your target audience.

So how do you create buyer personas? Sounds like a difficult question. The good news is there is an easy way to create them even if you don’t know where to start. First of all, you need to grab a marketing persona template from the Internet. The hardest part is to identify the demographics of your potential clients and then to focus on their hobbies and interests. After you get this research down,  put yourself in someone else’s shoes and think through what their goals and challenges might be. The final point of your marketing persona is making him or her look real. Make sure you give your persona a name and job title, as well as a real photo so that everyone within your company can envision who this person might be.

 

Understand the Buyer’s Journey of Your Business

Any marketing endeavor should include an understanding on how your buyers come to buy products or services. This process a buyer goes through, from needing something and ultimately making a purchase, is one of the fundamental pillars of your marketing strategy. Imagine that you are trying to sell cameras for traveling. Your potential customer loves traveling and taking tons of photos during his trips. What you have to do is to shape the three stages of this buyer journey. During the first stage, which is called awareness stage, your customer may realize that his problem may be a heaviness of his current camera which has traveled with him around the world. During the consideration, stage buyers will read comparison white papers, expert guides, live interactions and videos. They may even read up on the various brands of cameras. During the last stage, your potential customer will start comparing cameras in similar categories within different brands. That’s why at this decision stage, you should be the top of this consumer’s mind set.

 

Investigate a Customer’s Problem

Whether it is a software application or financial service, customers want to buy a product that offers a solution to their problems. How your particular service works may not matter as long as it delivers the result they want. That’s why one of the main stages of identifying the needs is nailing down and identifying your customer’s pain points so you can reach out to potential customers and solve their problem.

 

Find a Solution You Can Provide

Hopefully by now, the process of finding  business idea is somewhat uncovered for you. Finding a solution to a problem is not rocket science, it is rather a step-by-step procedure that can be started from figuring out who is your potential customer, understand their buying habits, and then identify his or her pain points to build a solution.