If you’ve been thinking about evergreen marketing strategies, you’ve probably come across the Ask Method.
In my opinion, the Ask Method takes a couple foundational marketing concepts and fits them into a neatly organized framework to follow. The result is a practical guide to effective evergreen membership marketing.
What Is The Ask Method?
The Ask Method is a marketing framework put together by internet marketer Ryan Levesque. It offers a practical guide for online marketers to apply three foundational marketing strategies: deep customer research, prospect segmentation, and delivering targeted marketing messages. The end result is a highly targeted online marketing funnel that Levesque assumes will increase conversions.
The framework provides structure to these marketing principles through three key components: the Deep Dive Survey, identifying customer buckets, and then the micro commitment bucket survey that segments prospects.
Deep Dive Survey
Everything starts with the Deep Dive Survey. This is basically a comprehensive marketing survey that aims to uncover your prospect’s major challenges when it comes to your niche, the key demographics in your niche, the language that prospects in your niche use, and the main categories or “buckets” in your niche so that you can properly segment your market.
Levesque intends for marketers to send the Deep Dive Survey out as a one-time or infrequent marketing campaign, in order to extract key details that you can then use to plan the rest of your funnel and marketing communications.
Major Challenge(s)
The major challenge in your niche is the problem or difficulty that prospects face when trying to achieve their goal. For example, if you are in the fitness niche, a challenge your prospects may face is finding the time to exercise.
Remember that a business is an organization set up to solve a problem for a customer, charging money for that solution (and hopefully delivering the solution at a profit). The challenges the prospects face in your niche form the basis for your business – they provide you with an opportunity to craft solutions and offer those solutions for sale.
Levesque’s Deep Dive Survey is his chosen strategy for uncovering those challenges, to help build a product or service, and segment prospects into buckets for a more targeted and effective message. When planning your survey, make sure to ask respondents what the major challenge is that they face when trying to achieve their desired outcome in your niche.
These examples will help you structure this question for maximum effect. Look for the goal and how to phrase the challenge in each:
What’s your biggest challenge when it comes to successful special situations investing?
What key challenge do you face when trying to build muscle at the gym?
What do you find is your major challenge when it comes to potty training your child?
The Ask Method Deep Dive Survey can be delivered via an email to your email list, via a rented email list, through your website to visitors, or as a link in an online advertisement. Basically, so long as you are targeting prospects in your niche, you can get the survey out to them in any effective way.
In the past, when launching an online venture in a similar or related niche, I’ve sent the survey out as an email campaign. This has been quite effective, as my email list was fairly large and stuffed full of subscribers who would likely be interested in the related niche, so the response was always good.
If you already have a website and are just wondering how to monetize it, sending to your list or displaying a prominent link on your website could be an effective way to attract a good number of respondents.
If you are just starting out, or have a low traffic website, it may be worth running ads or sharing it as a quiz on social media.
Identifying Customer Buckets
One of your key goals in identifying your prospects’ major challenge(s) when running the Deep Dive Survey is to identify the different market segments in your niche and to split your prospects up into different buckets based on these segments.
This sounds more complicated than it really is. All you’re doing here is uncovering the major challenges your prospects have when it comes to achieving success and then recording the number of prospects that group around a similar / identical challenge.
Keeping with our example above, if you are in the fitness niche, you may find that many prospects in your niche have difficulty finding the time to exercise… but your survey may also reveal that others who have the time just don’t know which sort of exercise to do to achieve their goals, while a smaller group have the time and know which exercise they want to do but are unsure how to actually go about doing the exercise (they lack knowledge of technique). You could then split the niche into those three groups, or “buckets,” based on their specific challenges.
Alternatively, you could find that the majority of prospects in your niche have one major challenge, while a much smaller number have various other challenges. Maybe your fitness crowd has the time and knows that they want to lift weights, but are unsure about how to advance past basic exercises. Rather than segment prospects in this niche into buckets based on the challenge they face, you could segment them based on their desired solution, for example: 1-on-1 coaching, access to weightlifting courses in an app, or instructional videos on a website.
Using the Ask Method to Segment Website Visitors to Deliver an Effective Marketing Message
Once you have your buckets laid out and have put together a product or service that caters to each bucket, it’s time to start marketing your wares.
Rather than simply list all of your products and services for sale on your website, the Ask Method segments your website visitors using a Micro Commitment Quiz, to deliver an appropriate marketing message and funnel the right people into the right offer.
Those following the Ask Method start by crafting a short marketing quiz with the purpose of splitting the prospects based on need, financial capacity, solution preference, etc. They then place this quiz on their website, so those who are interested in addressing their major challenge can take the quiz.
At the end of the quiz, the software used to segment the site visitors spits them out on the most relevant offer to sell them on the most relevant solution.
This means that, if you plan on using the Ask Method, you will need to create different sales pages that directly speak to each customer segment in their own language.
The major advantage here is that you end up delivering the most relevant offer using the most relevant language to the most relevant prospect, which should in theory increase conversion. When you deliver a prospect to a sales page that sells them on a solution that is directly relevant to them, using language they would use to discuss the niche and their challenges in it, you end up with a much more targeted message, and hopefully, one that better resonates with your target prospect.
Think about the difference here: On one hand, you click on a link to a sales page that lists a number of different offers, most of which are not relevant to you, and the copy you read describes these packages, the niche, and your challenge in the niche in language that you wouldn’t really use… This probably would not be a very effective sales page. You would probably feel that the product or service is not really for you.
On the other hand, if you’re taken to a sales page that offers you a single seemingly effective solution to your exact problem, describes the niche, your challenge, and the solution in the language you would actually use, and then addresses your exact concerns, you would feel that the solution was made specifically for you and be much more likely to make the purchase.
Should You Use The Ask Method? What Are The Drawbacks?
The Ask Method is an effective marketing framework that you can employ to increase membership signups. It helps you put marketing best practices (understanding the customer, speaking to them in their own language, crafting a solution that seems tailor made for them) to use with a simple step by step approach. The result is an online marketing funnel that is highly tailored to your target customer.
It isn’t perfect, though.
For one, you do need to do a lot more work upfront without really knowing if people will buy your proposed product or service. You basically have to have all of your funnel marketing and solutions ready to go without knowing first if anyone is going to buy.
Second, some niches simply have too many customer challenges, making bucketing prospects difficult. If your survey returns 30 different customer challenges without a few dominant challenges standing out, that can make segmentation hard.
The final complication that I see with this approach is that it may be difficult to get a good number of responses so that you can draw proper conclusions. I would say that 100 is a good minimum and would provide robust data if there’s a strong similarity among the respondents. If people vary considerably in their answers, you would need a lot more responses to really make an informed decision on how to segment and market in your niche.
Still, for most niches, I think The Ask Method is a great framework for understanding the market, and ultimately boosting membership sales. We’ve used it successfully on a number of launches, and I recommend giving it a try.
