Tapping into the level of frustration and difficulty that your customers and prospects are experiencing in a given market is their problem and your opportunity. They have a thorn in their paw and your business proposition is just the solution that will effectively relieve their angst.

When you can discover issues that are your target audiences’ most pressing problems – issues that are not being satisfied anywhere else - you can position your business offering as the go to solution. Your customers will shout “Hey, they’ve got exactly what I’ve been looking for - and I couldn’t find it anywhere else!”

The best approach to unearthing pressing customer concerns is to survey them. And to discover the potential nuggets of gold from within your survey data, you’ll want to focus on the distinction between Point Of Difference Benefits vs. Price of Entry Benefits.

“Most people that take the time to survey their market really haven’t a clue how to use the information they gather and in fact, they allow their surveys to throw them way off the mark.” So says marketing research expert, Dr. Glenn Livingston.

Dr. Livingston is a certified psychologist who earns a nice living as a quantitative marketing research expert. He has completed highly successful studies for an impressive list of corporate brand names such as Bausch & Lomb, Whirlpool, and Nabisco. His cutting edge information is now available to small business marketers as well.

Too often, the data results of a survey can mislead a marketer because they interpret the frequency of a given response to be essentially the same thing as the importance of response. But these concepts are not created equally.

“For example” says Dr. Livingston, “if you do a survey of guinea pig searchers online, you’ll find people very frequently ask about how long a guinea pig lives. In fact, this will probably be the most common question you’ll get.

Now if you go out and design a product all about how long guinea pigs live, you’re gonna be out of luck pretty quickly because what you’ve discovered is not a purchase motivating benefit – it’s a ‘price of entry’ benefit.”

A price of entry benefit is a benefit that all products in a given market must have in order to even be considered by a purchaser. A point of difference benefit is something that “consumers perceive as hard to find answers to their pressing problems - these are where the real market gaps are - where you’ll find the best opportunities to shine” according to Livingston.

Continuing with the guinea pig market example, a more important question for someone marketing a book on guinea pigs might be how to determine the gender of a guinea pig before its two weeks old.

This information may not be seen as often in your survey responses, but its marked as a lot harder to find. The objective is to put enough of these tidbits together and you wind up being THE source to solve your clients’ most difficult problems. Solutions that they can’t find anywhere else.

And getting some Real Marketing Muscle might just be the solution to your own businesses’ most pressing problems. Solutions that your competitors don’t know about yet!