Exercise 3: Mapping your audience's high level goals
For our second brainstorming approach, we're going to focus on a high level goal of your audience, and consider what would be their next step to help achieve it.
You could map this all the way to the point that they achieve that goal, but start small and work your way up. Again we're using the example niche of small business owners that are just starting out on their entrepreneurial journey, and a high level goal they might have in mind is:
Goal: Build and run a successful business making $5 million in revenue per year
This is where deep knowledge of your niche is vital. In order to come up with product ideas that will work you need to have enough understanding of your niche to come up with potential high level goals that your audience can relate to.
Now that we have a goal in mind, let's then break down all the steps our budding small business owners might need to take to accomplish their goal:
| Step # | Activity |
|---|---|
| 1 | Find out what type of businesses can reasonably make $5 million per year |
| 2 | Which of those business align with my skills? |
| 3 | What resources can I commit? (Cash in the bank? Loan from a bank? Seek private investment?) |
| 4 | What support is out there? (Who can I turn to to ask questions? Where can I find information on how best to tackle specific challenges I may encounter?) |
| 5 | Who can co-found the business (Can I find anyone that shares the same vision and wants to join me in building the business?) |
| 6 | Where can I source supplies? (Can they be imported from manufacturers that are specialised in these products? Does it make sense to manufacture them ourselves/with the support of a local partner?) |
| 7 | Research and purchase equipment for staff and office (laptops, office furniture etc.) |
Now that we've broken down all the steps that need to be taken to complete the goal, consider each of the steps you've listed down and start finding products on Amazon that could be useful to help your audience take them.
You can append the products you find to the list you started building up in the previous exercise.
As you can see in our example, some of these steps are difficult to find Amazon products for. It's ok if you run into the same problem when you do this exercise, because as you can see in step 7 we eventually found a step that could be addressed by products available on Amazon.
Regardless, mapping out your audience's goals like this will also help you get a better understanding of what's going through their minds. You can use this improved understanding to write more relevant content that they'll be more likely to engage with.