Gummys + stealing (ethically)

Have you been paying attention?

Silly question!

Of course you have.

And since you have been paying attention, you’ve noticed that there’s a theme to my emails this week.

They have been about Ideal Clients Profiles (ICPs):

• Monday: Why you should write to a specific person

• Tuesday: What to think about when picking a person to write to

And today we are going to talk about how to gather the data you need about your ideal client.

This is more of the psychographics part of your ICP, not the demographics.

At this stage, I’ll assume you’ve done the homework to know the age range, gender, socioeconomic stuff, etc of your ICP like we talked about in the last email.

This part is about the stuff your person is interested in and the problems they have.

Let’s get to it:

Here’s the top 5 ways I’ve found for researching my ICP:

• Reddit and Gummy Search.

• "Does anyone know how to do {your service or product}" on advanced search

• Competitor’s websites and sales pages

• Niche newsletters

• Direct outreach

Reddit and Gummy Search.

Reddit is a gold mine.

There are so many great answers to questions on that platform.

Your goal here is to find the niche subreddit that your ICP hangs out in.

For instance, the subreddit r/FATfire is a great one for one my ICPs: CEOs and executives.

FATfire is a movement among people that have done well financially and have retired early. While this doesn’t describe CEOs necessarily, a lot of them follow this subreddit and post there.

So, it’s a great place to see questions they ask.

If you don’t know where to start, use Gummy Search. It scrapes Reddit for keywords, and you can build out profiles that will give you the results you’re looking for. Pretty powerful.

Social media advanced search

Use Facebook, X, TikTok, Instagram, or Facebook for this.

Open the advanced search and enter "Does anyone know how to do {your service or product}.”

This will give you an idea about who is looking for your thing.

And you can dig in deeper when you find those people to see what else they are asking.

Competitor’s websites and sales pages

I love this one.

Find your competitors that are doing the same thing you are, and straight up steal the pain points they are hitting with the copy from their websites.

It’s ethical stealing because you are just using the pain points to craft your own copy.

Super great way to find tried and true problems to solve.

Niche newsletters

Subscribe to a newsletter that your ICP also subscribes to.

For instance, Hampton (a community for CEOs that are doing > $3M/year in revenue) puts out a free newsletter.

And all the content is just stuff that the community is interested in.

Comes out 1x/week.

And it’s another gold mine for me to research what my ICP is into.

Find the newsletter like this for your niche, and just wait for the ideas to hit your inbox.

Direct outreach

This is the hardest, but the best.

Find people that match your ICP, and get them on a call.

Easier said than done, but not impossible.

This is the best because it is straight from the horses mouth.

You can ask them whatever you want and get to the root of their fears, desires, and pain points.

And that’s it!

Hope it was helpful,

Swanagan