5 questions to ask your audience for instant inspiration—for your offers, messaging and marketing

Coming up with offers, content and messaging that resonates with your ideal clients can sometimes be a struggle. We may think we know what our audience needs from us, but often it's a guessing game where we cross our fingers and hope for the best. Today I am sharing with you my 5 key questions that I ask my audience regularly. Their answers always inspire me to create great, targeted content that's tailored to their needs.

– How to research your audience, entice responses and evaluate their answers
– How uncovering their problems highlights the disconnect in your messaging while also offering valuable content material
– The benefit of identifying the end game for your ideal client (and the hidden inspiration this can offer)
– Drilling down the obstacles (real and imagined) that may be holding your audience back
– When audience visualisation translates into powerful copy that resonates with your ideal client
– Why keeping it simple can be so effective

 

Today I'm sharing five questions you can ask your audience to get more inspiration for your offers, your messaging and your marketing because sometimes we like to think that we know everything about our audience, about our ideal clients, and a lot of the time, we're just guessing. 

Now, whenever I run out of ideas for content, whenever I am stuck with my marketing, whenever I'm stuck with messaging, writing, copy, anything like that. I always go back to the audience research that I have done in the past. I always go back to the answers that I've got from my audience and from my ideal clients.

 

Quick tips…

Surveys are great. I love surveys because they're great for getting lots of answers, but bear in mind that not everyone is going to give you in-depth answers, and not everyone who is answering your survey is your ideal client. 

So, you do need to take it with a little bit of a grain of salt. Not every answer is going to be worth listening to. Some people might tell you your prices are way too high and I can't ever afford to work with you. And it's very easy to take that answer on board and be like, oh, maybe I need to drop my prices but in reality, maybe this person just isn't your ideal client. And your ideal clients are absolutely okay with your prices. 

A great tip that I picked up a little while ago, and I'm not sure where I got it from. So the people who are giving you longer answers on their surveys are probably a little bit more invested in what you're doing. They care a little bit more than the ones who are giving you three-word answers. With surveys, you may need to incentivise someone to complete the survey. 

Survey doesn't give you the ability to ask why, or to go a little bit deeper into somebody's answer and find out the real motivation behind it. A survey is just the answer that they give you and then you kind of have to take it at that. You can't go any deeper, whereas a few Zoom calls, you can kind of ask, follow-up questions, tap into what's going through their mind when they are giving you these answers. Okay. 

So having covered those tips now, five questions you can ask your audience for inspiration for your offers, your messaging, and your marketing question. 

 

#1: What are you struggling with when it comes to your area of expertise?

This question, I love it, because it uncovers potential problems that we can solve. And it also shows us where there might be a disconnect between what we, as the expert in what we do know, is the problem. So the expert problem, what I call the expert level problem versus what our audience knows is the problem or how our audience is experiencing the problem. 

So by asking this question, what are you struggling with? It opens up the door for our audience to explain to us how they are experiencing the problem even if it's already a problem that we know they have. We get to hear it in their own words highlighting the language that they are using to describe the problem so that we can speak to them in their words, not in our words. And as soon as we start to speak to somebody in their words, that's when we can catch their attention.

Now, this question also gives really great content ideas. It gives ideas for offers because the best offers solve a problem and it helps us with our messaging when we are selling these offers. 

 

#2: What are your goals?

As it relates to whatever your area of expertise is this year. I love this question because it uncovers what they really desire, what they really want and shows us ways that we can help them with our free content with our paid offers and how we can communicate in our messaging in a way that we're communicating the transformation. 

So that they actually wanted rather than what we think they want. We're using the words that they use to describe what they actually want.

Now the other thing that's really interesting about this question is the words that they use your ideal clients use to articulate what they want versus the words that you think they would use sometimes can be a very big difference. So we want to make sure we're paying attention to what words they use. 

This question also encourages them to think about what they want. Maybe they haven't actually thought about what their goals are and it's forcing them to consider, Hey, what do I actually want to achieve this year? Maybe it's forcing them to even think about what's possible for them to achieve. So it can be kind of inspiring for them as well. 

 

#3: What's standing in the way of you reaching these goals?

This question is great for uncovering the potential obstacles that are holding them back from having what they want. Now, these obstacles come in two forms, real obstacles and imagined obstacles.

Most of the obstacles will be imagined. You know, it's like I have to do this, this and this before I can achieve my goal. And it's probably because they are over-complicating it or maybe they're overwhelmed or maybe they are afraid. 

Now the real obstacles, the ones that aren't imaginary obstacles. These could give you ideas for other offers that you could potentially create as well. Or they could give you ideas for free content you could create for your ideal clients too. 

 

#4: If you could wave a magic wand and achieve those goals, how would you show up differently? What would you do differently? What would be different in your life?

And this question's really getting them to visualise their future selves. And it's giving you inspiration for your messaging and your copy that you can use when you're selling your offers because when somebody is buying your offer, they're really buying a future version of themselves. They're buying into this future identity that they don't currently hold and that they really want to hold. 

So when we get to w when we ask them about their future selves, in a question like this, then we can really speak to what they want to be and who they want to be in the future and our copy becomes so much more compelling to the ideal client. This is also a really inspiring question for them to answer because chances are, they haven't stepped into the future of themselves, their future selves in a little while. They probably haven't reflected on this. So allowing them this moment where they can visualise what their future might look like. It's pretty cool. It's kind of cool for them. 

 

#5: What questions do you have about whatever your area of expertise is?

And if you have multiple areas of expertise, you can ask this question multiple times. You know, I would rephrase this in different ways. What questions do you have about digital product launches is one. What questions do you have about building an online business that's profitable when you're offline? That's another one I would ask. What questions do you have about building out your office suite? What questions do you have about growing your audience? What questions do you have about launching a podcast? These are all my different areas of expertise based on my different offers.

And I wouldn't ask them all in one survey because you know, the more questions you have in the survey, the fewer people are going to respond. But I would alternate between these, depending on what the goal of the survey is. This is my favourite question for content ideas honestly I ask it every time I send a survey to my list every time I do it I end up with dozens of new podcast topics.

 

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