Do you want to increase your sales and strengthen customer loyalty? If so, you’re in the right place. Today we are going to show you how to discover and solve customer pain points. Essentially, customer pain points are specific problems experienced by your target audience.
For example, a marketer looking for a good email marketing software might have trouble generating leads. In this scenario, the pain point is lead generation. B2Bs that focus on helping businesses grow may highlight lead generation as one of their specialties in an attempt to resolve the marketer’s pain point.
We are going to take a look at the four main types of pain points, how you can gather consumer data for relevant marketing, and how to put this information together to create comprehensive content.
Let’s dive in!
Understand the Major Pain Point Catagories
Before you make any significant changes to your marketing strategy, you need to identify the problems plaguing your customers. At first glance, it can feel stressful and overwhelming to pinpoint one specific issue when you serve potentially thousands of people every single day.
You’ll be happy to know that despite the numerous personality types and problems, most pain points fall into under one of four categories. In some cases, customer issues can overlap into more than one category.
Process: let’s go back to the lead generation pain point we mentioned earlier. This example is considered a process pain point. In other words, the customer wants to accomplish a specific task, but they need a tool to improve and fine-tune their strategy.
Financial: Financial pain points occur when a consumer has a product that works great, but they need something that’s just as effective and more affordable.
Productivity: These pain points are best summarized as problems that are tedious or time-consuming. These customers are looking for a product or service that streamlines their internal processes, gives them more free time, or reduces employee workload.
Support: In this case, the consumer knows what they want, but lack the technical and sales support they need to make an informed choice.
If you don’t understand the problems your customers are facing, you’re going to have a hard time resolving their pain points. Now that you know the four main categories let’s take a look at how to gather data based on customer feedback.
Ask Consumers Open-Ended Questions
Feedback is one of the best tools you have as a marketer. Both good and bad feedback can plan a role in developing your future content, marketing campaigns, and promotions. However, when it comes to identifying pain points, negative feedback can give you a much clearer picture of what your target audience expects from your brand.
There are various ways to get consumer feedback for your business. First, we suggest adding both a contact form and a live support option to your customers. These two things will help you learn more about your audience, which can help you identify their pain points.
Additionally, you should frequently send out surveys to your email subscribers. Ask them their honest opinion on your service, where they are struggling, and how you can help improve their experience. These open-ended questions will give you a wealth of data that you can use when calculating the pain points of your customers.
We also recommend that you post interactive polls on your social media page and website. The data obtained from these sources could be questionable, considering anyone can participate. However, if you sift through the spammy posts, you’ll find a group of consumers with real problems that you can solve.
Meet with Your Customer Support Team
Your customer support team can provide you with a ton of information about your customer pain points. Many customers are unaware of their problem until we bring it to their attention. For instance, if I told you I have a program that can organize 100,000 leads at once, and your current software only supports 20,000, you might have just realized that you need a software that can support your growth.
If your support team is attentive, they know what complaints come up regularly, and if they share this information with you, it will be easier to discover your customer’s pain points.
Hold a weekly meeting with your support teams and ask them what they are hearing from customers. You could ask questions like:
- What was the most common complaint you heard this week?
- How can we resolve these issues in the future?
- Do you have the resources and knowledge you need to help customers to the best of your abilities?
These three questions help you touch base with your team, understand customer pain points, and start getting your staff proactively thinking about solutions to problems when customers call in.
Compile Data and Create Targeted Content
On-site analytics help you learn about customer behavior when they are on your website. It turns out that if you check your bounce rate per page, traffic, lead magnet conversions, and referrals, trends begin to emerge. You can use these trends to learn about your target audience, which helps you increase your sales and traffic while reducing your bounce rate.
Let’s say you work for a pet supply eCommerce website. After checking the analytics, you notice that a staggering 70 percent of your views are on blog posts about dogs. You can infer from this information that a majority of consumers have questions or concerns when it comes to dog ownership.
Now you have a template for the type of content you can add to the blog in the coming months. As you begin to create more content that focuses on solutions to your customer’s problems, you’ll notice an increase in both sales and loyalty. The more you are able to resolve customer questions, the better chances you have at retaining them for years to come.
I’d also recommend on having a look at on site polls & exit intent pop ups using hotjar, crazyegg and the like.
Hotjar has an awesome question bank that helps you ask questions that get responses.
The other really cool place to gather critical data is thank you page polls. Eg post sign up or post purchase thank you page polls.
Lastly, a good framework to work to is what phase of lifecycle are we looking at 1. Acquisition 2. Activation 3. Monetisation or 4. Retention.
Like a leaking bucket best to plug holes down the bottom first.