Customer pain points are too costly to ignore.
Your entire business should be or already is based on solving a particular problem. So, I’m not saying anything particularly new.
However, I am saying something different than what is usually said:
Make it very clear to your target audience that you know what they’re going through.
Let me put it in a different way.
Have you ever searched something very specific and gotten an answer to a question you didn’t ask?
I have, and it’s one of the more annoying experiences as a user of the internet.
Time moves at lightening speed. And if you’re like many people, you have a gazillion tabs open! So, when you search for something you want fast and accurate results. No one wants to do a million searches for a specific answer they’ve been looking for for several hours. Rather, they want to land on a page that gives them the information they’re looking for. Furthermore, they want the information to be presented in ways that are appealing and easy to understand.
So, that’s my quick today: Tell your customers how and why you address their pain points.
Why are customer pain points important?
Too often, I see companies and organizations sacrificing clear messaging for graphic design, jargon-filled copywriting or snappy phrases that don’t translate to anything. Here’s a story to show you what I mean:
One of my first paid copywriting assignments was to re-do a website. Naturally, I had to learn about what the B2B company did, who the target audience was and what the brand messaging was. So, I did an audit of the website, and I couldn’t find out what the company offered. However, I could find an endless list of services, a long biography of the company and the leadership team. Unfortunately, I had all of this information, but no clear answer about what problems the company solves.
Customer pain points are important because they (should) inform your marketing and communications decisions. For example, if you know a nonprofit struggles with donor management and that is your specialty, then you have to position your business to be the best answer to their problem. There are many ways to do this, including content marketing and refining your mission, values and vision.
However, your marketing and communications efforts overall should be serving this goal. No customer wants to spend time watching fancy videos that communicate product features or endlessly scrolling through colourful artwork that only represents the company only to figure out that the company probably doesn’t have the right answers.
But here’s the important thing to remember:
Customer pain points are not simple! They are often a combination of many things. For example, your customers may be spending too much money on something because they spend so much time on that something. To learn more about these points, you want to do the necessary research to pinpoint the “how” and “why”. Like any research effort, learning about these pain points will be a matter of trial and error. Furthermore, your customers will change.
f you have to sell customers on the glitz and glam and not on how you tend to their needs, you have a big problem of trust and loyalty that may cost you customers. They may feel like they can’t trust your business…because they don’t know what it is!
Conclusion (plus a few more tips)
If you take anything away from this blog post, it should be that audience engagement is the key to figuring pain points. So, as I mentioned before:
Tell your customers what problems you solve!
Here are 4 tips to get you on the right track:
- Think benefits over features of your product
- Use social media efficiently and in tandem with other approaches
- Write in the language of your customers
- Revise, revise, revise
Ready to find out if your communications have incorporated customer pain points properly?
Let’s get in touch and get started.