The secret to why most successful online businesses today have become so successful is that they are able to uncover people’s hidden needs and then provide the highest level of values specifically crafted and positioned to meet these needs.
But still the issues remain:
- How to discover the people’s hidden needs, wish, want, or desire that will cause a product or service to have a purpose
- How to identify the product or service features or positioning that will provide the highest level of value, and then communicating the value to everyone who was searching for.
The rest of this article will cover these issues.
Using People’s Needs Analysis Technique we can systematically identify areas that are critical to people’s satisfaction and translate the people hidden needs into specific business features. These features, when mapped back against people’s needs, can then be positioned to provide a distinct competitive advantage for your online business.
Let’s take a look at this specific method we can use to discover hidden needs. We’ll follow these steps to organize the process:
Define the Requirements
To start the process, it‘s important to identify where the people’s basic needs can be uncovered.
Today it’s a lot easier to very quickly get a feel for the industry that you’re interested in. All you have to do is hang out on internet. There are many sites where you can see what people want, or what topics get lots of attention from the media. Here are some easy steps for researching people needs:
- Visit online forums to see what questions people ask and what problems they’re trying to solve.
- Figure out which keywords a lot of people are searching but not many sites are competing for.
- Check out your potential competitors by visiting their sites and taking note of what they’re doing to fill demand.
In this step, don’t narrow your scope too much, as the needs you uncover may provide you your competitive advantage. For example, say you are passionate about cooking. The people’s needs you should identify would be something like cooking recipes, cooking courses, cooking equipment, cooking tips and so on.
Conducting a People’s Needs Assessment
Once you’ve sufficiently gathered the people’s requirement, it’s time to create a people’s needs assessment. In this step we try to dig a bit deeper to describe the needs in more specific terms. For instance, if a need is to cooking equipment, some possible expansions of this need are outdoor cooking equipment, Chinese cooking equipment, commercial cooking equipment, bread machines and rice cooker.
Over time, you’ll grow in your knowledge about your area of interest, and before long, you’ll have a very good grasp on what kind of opportunities exist in that industry.
But there is at least one catch. You have to make sure that the market you want to target is large enough
and capable of providing you with sufficient traffic to your online business. The more people who are complaining about their particular need, want, problem or frustration, the bigger the opportunity.
Designing Business Features.
The final part of this process is designing service features your business will offer that meet people’s needs. Some features may meet multiple needs. Using the cooking equipment previous example, features might include…
- Buying advice
- Product review and recommendations
- Trends and new products information
- Using guide
- Cooking recipes
The main point here is to create innovative service features that meet the people’s needs.
Summary
By designing and selling products or services that specifically meet people needs you will seize a distinct competitive advantage. By defining the people’s needs and mapping service features to these needs, we can consistently sell a product or service that people value and truly need.
