Solve Your Customer Pain Points to Increase Sales

Increase CTR, Engagement and Conversions Simultaneously Through Pain Point Messaging

 

Sarah, a busy single mom juggling work and childcare, just spent more money than she can comfortably afford on a fancy new coffee machine. Lured by sleek marketing and promises of barista-worthy brews, she envisions mornings brimming with gourmet lattes. The reality? A confusing interface, inexplicable error messages, and hair-pulling frustration. Her negative experience spirals, painting a bleak picture for the sales reps who must now pick up the pieces. The machine sits on the counter, a monument to unmet expectations and money burned.

This is a customer pain point in its purest form. The focus on generalized customer personas and demographic analytics can quickly lose sight of the beating heart of every successful brand: the customer. While analytics might paint what appear to be comprehensive and compelling customer profiles, it’s in these raw nerve endings of customer experience that lies the potential either hinder a brand or forge fierce customer loyalty.

Examining customer pain points is more than just a marketing tactic; it’s an empathic quest to understand and address the real-world scenarios and anxieties that customers face.

Customer pain points are the emotional elements of customer experience that cannot be expressed in quantitative market research or in generalized buyer personas; a customer’s unmet needs or usability issues that cannot be expressed digitally can reveal hidden long-term revenue opportunities your competitors might not be seeing. Understanding and addressing customers’ pain points true impact is a necessity for creating meaningful connections. Financial pain points, productivity pain points, or useability process pain points often provide valuable insights you can use in product development and marketing messaging to improve customer expectations and increase brand loyalty.

Customers, too often reduced to demographics and buying habits data points, are in reality a complex mix of frustrations, confusions, and unmet needs – issues that define their experiences and expectations. Many companies claim their product “saves time and money.” But by going deeper and echoing a specific problem or other customer frustration, marketers can evolve from mere vendors focused on how much money their product costs or how much time their product can save to trusted allies in the customers’ pursuit of satisfaction and success. They can elevate their messaging and support to emphasize the best ways their product can benefit their customers.

This article will explore how to meaningfully serve customers, turning your marketing efforts into instruments of empathy or innovation, improving your social media messaging, strengthening your blogging and content development efforts and providing your sales team with a more effective way to communicate with customers by email or live chat to generate genuine customer delight, which will drive sustainable business growth and create resonant brand loyalty.

Many companies have shallow messaging. They focus on their product and its “amazing features” without thinking about customer needs and intent. Few dare to dive into their social media comments or support pain points as qualitative market research measures that could inform customer support teams and messaging to potential customers.

Forget the cold logic of demographics; pain points are the feelings of frustration over a confusing interface, the sigh of relief after a helpful customer service interaction, the quiet hope for a product to live up to its marketing hype.

How can you tap into this source of opportunity hidden in the raw edges of customer experience? First, forget the shallow messaging, the self-absorbed product pitches and company-centric social media posts that repeat words like “our,” “us,” and “we.” Expand your internal processes beyond quantitative research to tap into your customer service teams. Customer-facing representatives are invaluable sources of qualitative information. Their daily interactions, documented and analyzed, offer important insight into customer frustrations, confusions, and unmet needs like those Sarah experienced. By listening deeply to the stories behind the support tickets and social media comments, marketers can unearth hidden messages they can use to develop strategies for content development that resonate on a human level with the target audience.

Open-ended questions are a great way to uncover specific pain points that data analytics cannot capture. By having customer service teams ask the right questions to understand your customer’s pain points, companies gain actionable perspective into improving real experiences. Listening to examples of pain points will uncover the emotional elements allowing you to develop empathic marketing content, sales outreach, and product innovation. Your prospects’ pain points will reveal strategies for messaging that can increase sales and revenue.

Remember Sarah and her struggle with her new coffee maker? What if you created a focus group of the most frustrated customers from your support tickets? A two-hour meeting with a half dozen Sarah’s would provide you with more information than any data analytics could ever provide. It’s not just data on demographics or buying habits; it’s a raw nerve exposed, a story brimming with frustration, confusion, and the lingering question: “what if?” What if the marketing found a way through a conversation or focus group to hear her real needs, what if developers could hear her frustration with the interface, what if customer service was conversational, empathic, and not robotic?

Imagine Sarah receiving a follow-up call. No robotic script, just a genuine conversation: “We heard you weren’t happy with your new coffee machine. Tell us what happened.” In that open space, Sarah’s frustration finds an outlet, transforming into actionable insights for your brand. Her pain point becomes a roadmap to improvement, a chance to earn back her trust and forge genuine loyalty.

No One Wants A Drill

There’s an old saying that ‘no one wants a drill, what they want is a hole.’ This is also true with many products: 

• No one wants a vacuum cleaner; they want clean floors.
• No one wants a keyboard; they want the ability to easily and quickly input letters and thoughts into devices.
• No one wants a car; they want transportation (although with some people this may not be true).

You get the point. Customers experience a need (pain) and desire an outcome to resolve it (the result of your product or service) in exchange for payment. Thinking about your product in this way gives new perspective to aspects of it that may be too complex, unneeded or not implemented correctly. Sarah wants her barista-worthy cup of coffee. If the coffee maker manufacturer re-evaluated her pain, they might be able to save money by fixing or even removing features of the coffee maker. Focusing on pain resolution outcomes gives you a different perspective into the psychology of your ideal customer profile (ICP).

Pain Point Messaging for Content Writing and Marketing Campaigns

Insights gathered from customer feedback are a goldmine for business owners striving to excel and grow. So how do you use the open-ended feedback to fuel content development to get more customers in the first place? To write engaging customer-centric marketing content, create a system to capture customer journey pain points — both negative and positive. There are a number of different ways and tools to do so. Helpdesk software, a knowledge base wiki or even a shared spreadsheet can be used. Once customers vent their confusion, frustrations and unmet needs, your sales or support teams are likely to also hear many positives about your product or service. Capture it all. This is content development gold!

Next, don’t forget to include content from your online reviews and especially negative reviews. And another best practice is to dive into the online reviews of your competitors – both positive and negative. Doing this will not only improve your wholistic understanding of the biggest challenges your competitors are facing but will fill in areas where you might have a lack of knowledge about some aspect of their customer problems.

Also include social listening: comments and conversations outside your company’s own communication channels that talk about your category of product or service in general. Synchronize all insight sources to get a wholistic view of the challenges, frustrations and unmet needs, then categorize customer pain points together into different types. Categories like “NEEDS,” “FRUSTRATIONS,” “IMPROVEMENTS,” or others you think of or uncover can be a first step to evolving your brand. You should begin to see patterns: groups of the most common customer pain points that you can put into actionable plans can improve:

• customer communications and your sales process
• marketing messaging and case studies
• the product itself

Many companies miss this marketing strategy: capturing patterns of customer frustration and poor customer service along with messages of customer satisfaction messaged in marketing content will not only save you time in your writing, it will elevate your messaging above the sales pitch “us,” “our,” and “we” content — the “feature and benefit” content most companies repeatedly generate and no one reads. Such content can also be woven into your online store product listings.

Captured open-ended pain point content is the only way to reveal intent psychology that you can use to break content authors out of “feature and benefit” sales writing. Switching from feature messaging to highlight the positives uncovered in pain point conversations and how you’ve improved on the negatives and frustrations engages audiences and visitors. This rich messaging provides better customer experience and educates prospects to become higher quality leads. Pain point messaging in one of the best practices that adds pull to customer journeys lifting conversions, reducing buying friction and even improving customer retention.

Prospect Marketing Messaging

Next, take a new look at your best performing keyword phrases. Include all the keyword phrases from your PPC campaigns to your product descriptions. Determine if they truly speak to the main types of customer pain points for your target market, or if they’re features and benefits phrases that you’ve guessed, hoping they will resonate.

Chances are the latter is the case. From Sarah’s example with her new coffee maker, suddenly phrases that include words like “interface,” or product error-message phrases may already have traffic can be exploited. Are there new pain point keyword phrases or phrases in common support issues? Is there a type of customer pain point related to productivity or specific issue around providing customer delight you’ve uncovered from your qualitative research? New content written to include such phrases will increase CTRs (click-through-rates) and conversions (sales).

To create more resonant prospect marketing messaging, list your highest engagement keyword phrases in a spreadsheet and add columns for “customer Intent,” “positives,” and “negatives,” or categories from your challenges, frustrations and unmet needs spreadsheet above. Then think about each phrase individually and try to see if the phrase is “feature and benefit” speak or if it really addresses specific needs and your prospect’s pain points. Try to think of an example of a productivity pain point or develop wording around complex features — phrases you’ve uncovered that you may not have previously targeted. With your new challenges, frustrations and unmet needs understanding, go deeper into the psychology of your customer base and rewrite your content around specific issues from your customer’s bad experience perspectives to win new business.

Another known best practice is to identify more of the intimate details driving decisions for each of your most ideal customers: those customers that are delighted with your product. Identify several ideal customer profiles (ICPs) to:

• determine the best performing customer segments, then …
• increase engagement with those segments, then …
• broaden messaging with lower performing ICPs making sure to include your qualitative customer research insights.

Focusing on pain-point messaging in this way will optimize your content and engage more prospective customers of your business. That will increase profitability. Segmenting prospective happy customer profiles against current customers dissatisfied customers is the easiest way to wholistically target new prospects. Writing content with this holistic mindset can improve your sales strategy, visitor engagement, and traffic, and revenue. Focusing on pain-point messaging to the exclusion of product features will cause website visitor traffic and engagement (“content stickiness”) to rise.

A marketing strategy to address pain points is not new, but again many small businesses and even some large companies focus on features and never listen to the problems customers tell them. Feature and benefit marketing without pain point knowledge will get you only mediocre engagement. Content quality, social proof content or any other marketing campaign remains flat or loses traction. By finding the pain points of 1-4 well-defined ideal customer profiles (ICPs), companies can quickly increase sales.

Put yourself in settings and situations where and when customers use your product. Push to experience the unique nuance and detail that is different for each persona. Collaborate with others to increase the level of detail and use aspects. Approach your product use in new ways with alternative solutions to its functions. Perhaps even try using your product for an unintended purpose.

These exercises do not have to take long. In a two-hour meeting a savvy marketing team with other customer pain point product knowledge can develop topic and content ideas by leveraging this thought technique. Your competitors are not this comprehensive in their thinking. Customer pain point research and can allow you to win more customers.