The customer segment I call Transformational Consumers are defined by their common characteristics. But your product’s or company’s Transformational Consumers may reflect a subset of this overarching group. And as such, they probably have their own special quirks, values, priorities, content cravings, up-at-night fears, hopes, dreams and vocabulary.

To create products that appeal to them and send them the bat signal that THIS is for THEM <homebuyer/Crossfitter/etc.>, you have to

• listen to them
• think like them and especially
• communicate in their natural language, and be present in their natural habitats, online and off.

One of my first hires to build out the Marketing team at MyFitnessPal was a Market Research and User Insights Manager, whose job is to mine user data, conduct primary research and generally give our audience a direct line of communication to our product and marketing teams. If you don’t have this luxury, here are a few rough/dirty ways you can listen, deeply, to what your Transformational Consumer audience wants, needs and cares about:

1. Comments. These can be blog post comments or Facebook comments – but they don’t even have to be on your blog. Read comments on competitors’ blogs or on media outlet articles related to your subject matter.
2. Reviews. What are they reading and buying? Read the reviews of those books and products. Amazon and Goodreads are your friends. But any ecommerce channel that they frequent – especially your own and your competitors’ – are potentially rich fodder for reviews. Mine them to get at what needs they are not having met, which will in turn surface opportunities for you to serve and engage with them.
3. Ask them. Do a survey. If you have your own user base, awesome. Send ‘em a Survey Monkey poll. Or just ask them a question on Facebook, like we did here. If you don’t have a user base, or your target audience and your current audience are not the same, take a look at Survey Monkey Audience, Google Consumer Surveys and Qualtrics Panels – these companies all will find people to get answers from who meet your specifications, at varying costs.
4. Content performance. What posts perform well on your blog and social media channels? What about on your competitors’ or other outlets’? For example, sites like the New York Times Well blog, PopSugar and MindBodyGreen all show the most popular and most emailed stories or social media share numbers for each post. Use that as directional insight into what your users want to read.
5. Search trends. Learn to love, use and frequent Google Trends. Bruce Clay does a great job of explaining how to use Google Trends to understand your market and audience, here.
6. Your sales team. The way I got into this business was that, as a real estate broker, I kept spotting patterns in the questions, fears and dreams of my customers. Ultimately, paying close attention to these patterns and the content that solved for their issues was the fuel I used to publish the most-read, single-author real estate blog in the world, for years, before I went into the marketing business whole-hog: Ask Tara @ Trulia.Sales people know what customers care about with more intimacy than most other teams in a company. They know what objections they get, they know what concerns they hear over and over again, they know what problems people come to your company to solve, they know the life events that trigger people to need your offerings or stop needing them. SO TAP THEM. If your company doesn’t have sales people, find subject matter experts who deal directly with your target audience around your subject matter for a living, and hire one to consult.
7. Other types of UGC: user questions and discussions. Discussion boards might seem passe, but they are alive and well. Especially when it comes to subject matter around health and career/lifestyle design. Don’t believe me? take a look at the forums on MyFitnessPal, Bodybuilding.com, the Fitness Subreddits. . . the list goes on. Your audience is there, talking to each other. They might even be talking about your product or brand. So listen.

No, seriously. LISTEN.