Running successful online advertising nowadays can be challenging, considering that audiences’ attitudes towards them are mostly negative. That is why brands need to use various strategies to make their advertisements more effective, including applying the pain advertising technique.
This method integrates target customers’ pain points to create advertisements that fit their preferences and characteristics. But what are customer pain points?
Let’s dive deeper into customer pain points by looking at their definition, the different types of pain points, and how to identify them in your target buyers.
What Are Customer Pain Points?
Pain points are specific problems that potential customers are experiencing. Often, they will seek a certain product or service to solve these problems. Customer pain points may vary significantly depending on various factors like economic background, geographic location, or age.
Business owners need to understand these pain points to develop a product or service with an accurate and compelling value proposition. A brand can better attract potential customers by offering products that fit target market needs and preferences.
Understanding pain points also allow companies to offer the best customer experience at every touchpoint. Considering that 86% of buyers will pay more for a great customer experience, there is no reason to neglect the importance of identifying customer pain points.
Types of Customer Pain Points
Customer paint points come in various forms. They are often grouped into four broad categories for easier identification. The groups include:
- Financial pain points – occurs when customers feel like a current solution costs too much and want to reduce their spending.
- Productivity pain points – occurs when customers feel like they spend too much time using a current solution.
- Process pain points – occurs when customers think that current internal processes are not efficient enough. This is more common in B2B sales.
- Support pain points – occurs when customers don’t receive satisfactory support during their customer journey from a current solution.
Companies can offer a better solution to their target customers based on these types of pain points. Use this information to develop better advertisements that attract your target buyers’ attention.
How to Identify Your Customer Pain Points
Now that we know the common types of customer pain points, it is time to learn how to identify them. Here are five steps to consider when analyzing your target buyers’ problems.
1. Conduct Market Research
There are two main methods of market research – qualitative and quantitative.
Qualitative market research mainly focuses on conversational-based methods like interviews and focus groups. This research type is also typically conducted on a smaller but highly validated sample size.
Qualitative research is suitable if you want to get an in-depth understanding of target customers’ behaviors and motivations.
Image source
On the other hand, quantitative market research relies on techniques such as surveys, polls, or questionnaires, which offer more numerical data. Therefore, it requires a larger sample size to achieve credible results.
Quantitative research can give reliable and standardized results by providing statistics to guide your business marketing decisions.
Use a combination of both methods to get more robust and actionable insights into your target market. Also, base your approach on factors such as business goals, available timeframe, desired result, and budget.
2. Use Your Sales Data
A company’s sales team typically has more interactions with customers, allowing them to understand the behavior and reasoning behind consumers’ purchase decisions. Consider using this sales data to understand customer pain points better.
Get your sales team to create surveys after every sales pitch that don’t result in a purchase. The survey results should answer several questions, including:
- Why did the prospect reject the product offer?
- What did the target customer dislike about the product?
- What can you do to make your products fit the target customers’ preferences?
Use this data to develop a guideline for your brand and product direction. It can also help the marketing team create more attention-grabbing advertisements based on target market characteristics.
3. Listen to Your Customers
One of the most effective ways to know customers’ pain points is to apply social listening. This is a method of monitoring what your target customers have to say about your brand and its competitors on various social media platforms.
Social listening involves paying attention to factors such as brand mentions, relevant hashtags, competitor mentions, and the market trend. It also requires you to look beyond quantitative data and consider the social media sentiment surrounding your brand.
This method can be complicated and time-consuming if done manually. That is why we recommend using tools like HubSpot, Sprout Social, or Hootsuite to make the monitoring and reporting process more efficient.
4. Learn from Your Competitors
Sometimes during the research process, there are pain points you might miss due to a lack of business experience or unreached buyer persona. Fill this information gap by paying close attention to your competitors.
Take a look at their marketing platforms, including social media accounts, landing pages, and advertisements. Aspects such as marketing copy and pricing can give you valuable insights into their strategy. This allows you to evaluate their approach and determine other pain points to consider.
Conducting a competitive analysis is crucial since every business has its own unique strategy to approach customers. Focusing too much on your own experience may limit your perspective and hinder business growth.
5. Gather Insights from Customer Reviews
Encouraging customers to leave reviews and testimonials about your products can benefit your business. Aside from social proof that helps build a good reputation, customer reviews also reveal buyer needs and pain points.
While positive testimonials tell you which products are working and should be maintained, negative reviews are a good reference point to identify which product or service needs improvement.
Therefore, it is important to listen and respond appropriately to feedback regardless of whether it’s positive or negative. This will make your customers feel appreciated and encourage them to leave more reviews of your products.
Conclusion
Customer pain points are a great reference for creating attention-grabbing advertisements, better products, and marketing campaigns. It helps business owners and marketers understand the target market’s characteristics and preferences and use them as a guide.
In this article, we discussed customer pain points and their four different types. We also looked at five common ways to identify your buyers’ pain points, including:
- Conduct market research
- Use your sales data
- Listen to your customers
- Learn from your competitors
- Gather insights from customer reviews
Understanding customers’ pain points can make promoting your brand and products a less daunting task. Apply the steps presented in this article to your marketing strategy, and hopefully you can create advertisements that attract more customers.
Recent Comments