4 Tips to Help you Define your Target Audience’s Pain Points!
When it comes to crafting any strategy for a business, you always hear the number one rule: “Define your target audience. And, of course, you can’t write any strategy if you don’t know who the strategy is made for, to begin with. However, it’s more than just putting a face to your buyer's personas. It’s getting down to the nitty-gritty and diving deep into their emotions. These deeper emotions are called customer pain points. These pain points aren’t some hidden meaning; pain points are challenges, frustrations, and problems that consumers want to solve. Now, discovering these pain points isn’t solely identifying your customer needs, but it’s also finding why they need it and the emotions towards that specific need. Here are our top tips for discovering your target audience's pain points. After you’ve conquered this pillar, you’ll be able to breeze through your content marketing strategies!
Why do I need to discover pain points?
When marketing a particular product or service, we automatically think, “I need to make a product or service that they’re instantly attracted to'' and make it “The most affordable, the-I-can’t-live without.” But in the sea of sameness, a strategy you can leverage is discovering their pains and marketing your product to aim at those needing products or services to fill the voids they’re missing. An easy, top-of-the-mind example is a makeup brand marketing self-confidence to those feeling undesirable. In itself, this is a simple example because the beauty industry revolves around emotions and appearances. However, discovering specific pain points depends on your target audience and niche; you will have to gear your strategy differently to learn particular pain points.
Because there are many niches, some pain points are not as obvious to detect compared to those others (Like the makeup example). In addition, many pain points aren’t necessarily centred around a tangible product. An example of hard-to-discover pain points is; Someone isn’t satisfied with where they are in life, somebody is bored of their appearance, or not living up to their full potential. Your goal is to identify some of these challenges your audience is facing, incorporate them into your marketing strategy objective and, make their lives more satisfying and easier.
Backyard Studies and surveys
If you have peers available for you who are interested or gravitate towards your niche industry, do a backyard study. Create a casual personalized interview session with them because you know these individuals on a personal level. It’ll be the easiest way to identify genuine emotions and pain points towards the products, services, or customer experiences they’ve purchased or once had. Remember to ask the right questions and relate them to everyday situations. A good example is a young mom in her mid-thirties looking for the proper work and home balance with a million things on her to-do list. Just from this statement, her pain-point that you’d be highlighting is her lack of organization and time management. Finding genuine challenges amongst a group of people will help you pinpoint the wants and needs of the customers in your customer strategy without having to guess the challenges within a specific target segment.
Social Listening
The great thing about social media is that it allows you to have a clear overview of your business page and the other businesses in your niche. Through strategic social listening and some basic community management skills, you can understand the opinions and thoughts of various audience segments. Sift through the recommendations, reviews and comment sections in pages that you’ve kept your eye on and narrow down relevant keywords that correlate with your product or service. You might not find it right away, but you don’t necessarily have to find obvious or negative comments to define customer pain points. Through past experiences, we’ve seen various testimonials that blatantly shout, “I’ve had a problem, and this is how this brand has fixed it!” You might even find them on platforms like LinkedIn or Facebook groups with audience members saying, “I wish I can find a similar product or service that can help me achieve this without XYZ!” Jot down all the possible statements from potential target audience members and round up similar pain points that you can use to your advantage in your marketing strategy.
Amp up your customer support or get your sales team talking!
Whether you’re a solopreneur or running a customer support team, you already know that the bulk of customer inquiries and complaints come from customer support. So now, how can you incorporate these inquiries and complaints into your sales strategy? Take a deeper dive into the messaging and communication with your existing customers or prospects and write down observations on successful and unsuccessful conversations between your brand and your customers. Keep these specific questions in mind when analyzing your customer feedback or inquiries:
What were the obvious pain points or challenge that these prospects have?
What did the prospect like or dislike about a particular product or service?
Did the prospect compare a product or service with a competitor? Why?
Identifying consumer and audience pain points can be challenging, but putting them under a microscope can help you enhance your content strategy and customer experience strategy. While making vague assumptions based on your buyers’ persona can be an easy way out, knowing and acknowledging your pain points will go hand in hand with everything you do. Your content strategy, copywriting, customer support, and even product or campaign launches is an essential step in a marketing strategy that many brands usually miss.
Have you found crucial pain points through these steps and need help to build your marketing strategy? We’re ready to help you nurture your customer and audience relationships by turning these pain points into great opportunities that lead your brand to success! Book a complimentary session with our brand experts today; we’re excited to help you and your business grow!
www.ravenandcompany.com/consultation
