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How to Harness the Power of Pain Points in Your Marketing

They could be lurking anywhere in your company.  They poison your best marketing efforts and bring down your bottom line.

But with a little effort, you can make them work for you and achieve new levels of success and competitiveness.

What are they?

The customer’s pain points are problems she experiences along the way of buying or using what you sell. The aggravation they cause can range from mild annoyance to total frustration.

I use the app Flipboard on my phone at least an hour a day while waking up and at other times as well, such as when stuck in checkout lines. 

When you first set it up, you check off your interests. I selected over 300. Flipboard rounds up articles on those topics throughout the day.

I love the app and have used it for a three years. But here’s a problem, a pain point that happens a few times every day. 

If I jostle the phone or leave the app to check an email, it goes back to the beginning. And there’s no easy way to get back to my place. I have to plow through all those stories again. It drives me nuts.

If a competing app announces they solved that problem, I’ll definitely check it out. Otherwise I wouldn’t, because I’m very happy and comfortable with Flipboard. Except for that one, very annoying pain point!

Which issues are involved?

Pain points frequently relate to:

• Wasted time 

• Costs or payment terms

• Poor customer support

• Difficulty in finding needed information

• Things that don’t work from initial signup to functioning of the product or service. 

Many of these pain points could have been and should have been foreseen by the developers. Good user interface designers should go through the usability as a new consumer would and try to forsee problems. 

Do the same with  every phase of the customer’s journey from purchase to use. If you did this  thoughtfully, most pain points would have been discovered by your company. Then you would avoid annoying your customers.

Why do they hurt?

There are reasons pain points annoy. Each person might have a different reason. And in addition to reasons, there are feelings. 

Feelings are even stronger and more influential on consumer behavior. The irritation and frustration lead to anger, bad word of mouth, and terrible reviews on social media. 

What are the two kinds of pain points? 

Your pain points and those of your competitors. And you’ll find great opportunity in both.

To find those in your business, ask your customers. Surveys, reviews, focus groups, comments on your site and in social media are some of the main ways. Be a detective. 

Talk to your sales people and customer support staff. What do people complain about, ask about, etc.? 

Listen  to what they say and to what they imply. And be especially careful after product updates. Any software user can tell you the things that happen after new versions are released.

These are clues to what people think and feel. Make this a regular and ongoing process. The big pain points that stand out are easier to uncover. The subtle ones need more digging. 

Sometimes it’s helpful to structure an interview around a certain topic. “Some of our customers are having trouble with… Do you ever experience problems with…?” This can help them remember and define pain points they have experienced.

Listen with Caution

You can’t always believe what you hear.

Sometimes customers are not very sure what the pain points are or they may be unwilling to talk about them. They might fear it makes them look dumb or out of touch. 

It would be better if you could watch them in action when they use your product or service or that of a competitor. You would be able to tell the things that work and those that do not.

Observe customers actually using the web site, signup forms, and products. This is even better than questionnaires and oral interviews in uncovering subtle pain points. It’s important to ask, but it’s even better to observe. 

And while you watch them use your product in a focus group or interview, observe them using competing products to see their pain points.

Finding pain points in the competition

Once again, use reviews, comments, surveys, focus groups, interviews. Look at their customer reviews. 

Depending on the type of product or service, check reviews on Amazon, G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, Reddit and other niche forums. Look for patterns. and common frustrations in the complaints, e.g. complaining on cost, difficulty in use, poor service or support, etc. Look for customer suggested improvements. 

Look in online forums to see what their customers are saying. Monitor their websites, help desk platforms, and public user communities, like Facebook groups.

Listen in on their conversations with Social Listening and Community management to determine public sentiment and to determine preferences and pain points.

Finally, take a walk in the user’s shoes and experience the frustrations yourself.

Dealing with Pain Points

First remove the negatives.

What do you do with the ones you find in your own business? Fix them fast.   Make sure everyone knows you fixed them to make your customer’s experience better.

As any PR person would tell you, when you do something good, talk about it. And the language you use can help or hurt. 

Use empathy to understand and an emotional response to deal with customer frustration. Show customers you are on their side and that you “feel their pain.”

Ditch the tech speak and impersonal corporate double talk. People don’t feel pain points on a tech level, but on a human level. So deal with them on a human level.

Couple your discoveries of pain points with good old fashioned empathy and intuition. You might strike gold.

When you write about your solutions, put yourself in her head and feel her pain, fears, and frustration. That’s the difference between pro-forma copy and breakthrough copy that converts.

Then push the positives.

 After you identify and fix the pain points in your business, you should have examples of keywords to test. Once you identify the strongest, use them in your PPP ads and in your content marketing.

What about the ones you find in your competitor? 

I’m assuming your business doesn’t have those same pain points. So you exploit them in your advertising and in your messaging. You sell against them. 

The more annoying and important the pain point, the bigger the opportunity to win new, loyal customers. 

When you attract customers, because you don’t have those problems,  they won’t be eager to go back to your competitors –even if they fix them?

Another way to exploit pain points is to go even further in responding to the problem. If competitors make people wait two days to get something, maybe you can do it in two hours. 

Many times people don’t  appreciate good service until they experience the same service in a worse way.

Put yourself in the mind of the customer. She hated waiting two days, time and time again. Now she can get it in two hours. Think how elated she will feel. 

When it comes to pizza delivery, one of the main pain points was  people never knew when it would arrive. Knowing this, Domino’s based their marketing on “delivered in 30 minutes or it’s free.” It was a big success for them.

This became the basis of their marketing strategy, including locations of stores and determining service areas.

It would never work on everyone. I’ve lived in Chicago my whole life. I care about the quality of the pizza. If it takes an extra 20 minutes, I’ll wait for it. 

But if slow and unreliable delivery is your pain point, the guarantee of a 30-minute delivery will be what you want to hear.

Use your knowledge of pain points in your PPC and social media advertising. Splash it on landing pages. Offer your products or services as a solution to one of their pain points. 

Run A/B split tests to determine the pain point that has the most impact on your target audiences. 

It will be the one with the strongest emotional trigger. And testing will identify that trigger. 

Talking about solutions to the problems you identify, as most marketers do, might be a total waste. So instead solve the problems customers have identified, their pain points. That might be all that is lacking in your marketing message.

Once you are on track with the pain points of your customers, why not try the same thing with your employees? The issues are different, but the process is the same.

Employee pain points hurt productivity and morale. They must be fixed, but that’s another story.