How To Find Your Customers Pain And Use It As A Powerful Marketing Strategy

The world is filled with pain points in different forms, and people are not immune to these problems. This may raise the desire to get over a struggle or find the solution to a particular challenge.

It is common to see people spend money to find relief to what’s bothering them. They are always ready to buy the product or service that will offer them permanent relief from those painful problems or challenges.

However, you should consider this good news as a marketer. You can capitalize on the struggles of your customers and strategize on how to use them to your advantage.

How can you go about doing that? The answer is simple:

• Offer a solution to their pain points.

How can you achieve that?

Read on…

Identifying Your Customer’s Pain Points

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The objective is very clear – provide relief for the pain of your customers. The bad news is that you can’t achieve this if you don’t know the source or nature of their challenges.

It is, therefore, imperative to start off by pinpointing their pain points.

The good news, however, is that you can do this by opening up good lines of communication with them. If you open up such lines, your customers will be more than willing to share their feelings with you. Social media marketing, blogging, forums are great way to communicate with your possible customers.

You definitely need to be trustworthy before you can gain their confidence. This is beneficial if you consider the impact of pain on an individual.

Pain is very personal and sensitive. You are asking your customers to reveal their innermost feelings to you when asking about their pain points.

This is important because if they don’t have your trust, you can’t market to them.

There are some fundamental questions you need to ask if you want an accurate insight about what’s keeping your customers awake at night.

What Are Your Possible Customers Struggling With?

Why is this question important?

Remember that your goal is to turn the challenges of your customers into a marketing strategy. Unfortunately, that will only remain a dream if you don’t know their pain points.

You can’t offer solutions to a problem that is strange to you or a problem you’ve never heard of.

Your duty is to find out what makes your customers uneasy, sick, scared, angry, or uncomfortable, and what always keeps them up late at night when others are sleeping.

If you can figure out their problems, you can leverage that; you can rig it to your advantage.

This SlideShare presentation outlines five easy ways to achieve this:

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There are a several ways to find out what’s bothering your customer.

Here’s a list of some of those ways:

1. Digital Analytics: With digital analytics, you can analyze information that you receive from different sources to optimize your overall business performance.

2. Customer Interviews: If you already have a good number of clients/customers, you can interview them with the objective of identifying whatever issues they’re having. If it is well planned out and implemented, it won’t be long before you spot their problems.

3. Surveys: You can ask them some good questions relating to their personal feelings and experiences. One of the best ways of spotting their problem is by conducting a survey. From the survey, you may find out the following useful information:

• Their problem.
• The percentage of the population that is affected by that same problem.
• The most affected gender.
• The demographic that is at a higher risk of exposure to the problem.

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There are two survey methods that you can take advantage of. Each of them works to achieve the same set goal.

• Online Surveys: Online surveys offer you one of the best ways to get to the root of whatever issues your customer is having. People will be ready to express what they want from a particular product so that you can quickly adapt your strategies to fit in. With a few questionnaires relating to your field (like the way Michael did it from the screenshot above), you will draw those experiences out.
• Offline Surveys: You can also send questionnaires to potential customers offline. The response of these people coming to the polls will be useful in pinpointing what they’re struggling with.

4. Leverage Social Networks: Social networking sites are excellent platforms to find out your customer’s issues. If you check some sites like Quora, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook, you will find communities of people who are connected by a single purpose- the need for a solution to a sleep-depriving problem.

5. Find What They Search For On The Internet: This is another window into the minds of your customers. You can find out what they are looking for on the web and the frequency of their searches. They are looking for relief to a hopeless situation. Typically, you can find this by searching for the keyword related to your area of specialization. For instance, as an IT firm executive, you may search for “IT-related problems”. The result pages will contain thousands of results related to that keyword.

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From there, you can pinpoint the problems of the people and the particular problem that your business is poised to solve for them. You can take help of Keyword research tools to find how users are searching for solutions.

Once you narrow down the problem to a particular group of users, it will be easy to tailor your marketing strategies to meet the needs of the people in the group.

You can hack any of these tactics to spot the particular pain of your customers that you intend to remove with your product or services. The information gained will help you focus your marketing strategy on those at high risk of exposure to the problem.

Your approach will turn out to be more efficient than randomly targeting an audience.

Which Of The Challenges Do You Want To Address?

It is safe to admit that you can’t offer a solution to ease all your customers’ problems. Your business should be focused on dealing with a specific issue. Therefore, you must identify a particular challenge your product or service addresses.

This will be of great help in explaining to your customers how your product or services can relieve them of their struggle.

• Identify your area of expertise: This comes in after identifying their pain points. While you cannot provide relief for all of your customers’ problems, you should focus on the relief you can provide. You can use that knowledge to provide appropriate assistance. Dabbling into an issue you have no knowledge of will be counterproductive. You will end up damaging your reputation instead of building it up.
• Understand how the problem can be solved: This is where you bring your expertise and knowledge to work. The issue must have a solution, and you are in the best position to find that solution. You can’t do that without the knowledge of the problem and the relationship between your product/services and the problem. If you have no understanding of their pain points, there’s no way you can solve their problems, and your marketing strategies are useless.
• Create a list of relevant keywords: Once you’ve identified the problem you want to address, create a list of keywords that are pertinent to the problem. This list will be useful in creating the right marketing strategy because you won’t be working in the dark; you will have a comprehensive understanding of the problems you want to address.

Create An Effective Marketing Strategy By Targeting Your Customers’ Problems

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The points discussed above are the prerequisites for creating a robust marketing strategy based on your customers’ pain points.

Creating an effective marketing strategy will require incorporating the two points discussed above – identifying the problem and determining how you want to address it.

Remember that your customers need your products and services because of these challenges.

The pain sparks the need to find a company that will offer them a solution. You are the business they require. You are the company that will give them relief. You are the solution.

But for you to fill their needs, you have to show genuine interest in them and in helping them solve their problems.

This will be reflected in the efficiency of your strategies and products or services.

In short:

• There is no simple way to eliminate problems from human existence.

For one reason or another, we all feel some pain that we wish to go away.

And it is the responsibility of businesses to ease this pain. This is an area where your marketing skills should be put into action.

You can identify what’s bothering your customers by implementing the suggestions given above. They have been tested by successful marketers and have been proven to be very useful in helping marketers get the best out of their customers.

Find out what problems your target audience needs to be solved. With that knowledge, you know how to meet those needs by positioning your products and services to help them solve those needs.

Focus your marketing strategies on solving these problems.

By doing this, your customer will see you as the ultimate authority in your niche.

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How do you identify pain points of your customers? What techniques do you use to help in identifying common problems? Let me know your methods in the comments below!

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