How to Identify the Pain Points That Make Customers Decide What They're Going to Buy To know your prospects' emotional buying decisions and their pain points is to know success.
By Eric 'ERock' Christopher Edited by Bill Schulz
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All marketers and business owners share the same pressing concern: understanding their pain points and therefore respond to their unique wants and needs.
Pain points often come down to issues such as wanting to reduce how much they spend on products or services, needing help to accomplish certain tasks or simply wanting a more streamlined way of doing things.
When you understand your target buyers' most pressing pain points, you can clearly market how your service solves their relevant problems.
Of course, first you must identify what those pain points are.
Related: How to Meet Customers At Their Pain Points
Read your reviews
An astonishing 98 percent of customers read online reviews for local businesses, with 75 percent saying that a review that describes a positive experience with the brand is the most important factor in their decision-making.
While responding to customer reviews is certainly important, you can learn more about your target audience's concerns by digging into the details. The things that people mention in their review (good or bad) are directly related to the pain points that matter most to them.
Whether it is an insight into how people use your product or the fact that they are drawn to your services because of the price, these details offer insight about what an audience values about your business.
Related: Online Reviews Are the New Social Proof
Converse with the customers
One of the easiest ways to learn more about your target buyers' pain points is to simply ask. Online surveys that ask targeted questions about their experience with your brand, their interests or the challenges they are facing can give you crucial insights. Sending a followup email shortly after a customer makes a purchase is a great time to reach them while your brand is still on their mind.
You don't necessarily have to limit yourself to online interactions, either.
As Karim Nour, co-founder and CEO of Kashat, MENA's first nano financial service provider, explained in a recent conversation: "We make it a point to invite a handful of customers to our office every month to discuss...user experience. This gives us in-depth knowledge of how they are using our app and what we can do better to meet their needs — and all it costs is a cup of coffee."
Talk with your teams
Your sales and support people generally have the closest connection between your brand and your target audience. These individuals speak with customers and prospects day in and day out. As a result, they have firsthand insights into the challenges your customers are facing. Ask these team members what customers are saying about your products and services.
Encouraging your teams to ask followup questions can also help you uncover additional insights into your target audience's pain points. Asking what is keeping them from trying your brand or why they are choosing a competitor instead can help you understand where your messaging — or aspects of the service itself — is missing the mark.
Browse niche forums
Gaining insights into your niche as a whole can actually be even easier than focusing on previous customers. Even with the rise of social media groups, forums remain a popular source of communicating on specialty topics. Discord alone boasts over 150 million users who use it for community forums, file sharing and video calls.
Whether your niche involves automobiles or computer programming, or if you want to target fans of a particular sports team or media property, there are social media groups, forums and other online communities where users interact with each other. Scanning the leading topics of conversation — or even starting your own thread where you ask "what's the biggest problem in [insert niche here] right now?", can provide valuable insights.
Check blog comments
You're far from the only one creating content or promoting products and services in your niche. Even if your own audience is relatively small, you can learn more about your pain points by looking at the comments on blogs, videos and other content from the most popular producers in your umbrella.
While not every comment is going to have value, focus on comments that mention problems users are facing or those which are critical of the content for not covering a desired topic. Quite often, the categories that others in your niche choose to cover with their content can give you insight into what points are most relevant with your target audience. After all, they're doing their own customer research to create content that resonates with their followers.
Learn pain points to solve pain points
Understanding customer pain points won't just help you better understand your customers — it will also help you realize the full potential of your product or service. By relating what you do to the pressing problems your target buyers most desperately want to solve, you'll become that much more relevant in their lives.
Related: How I Turned a Facebook Group Into a Thriving Startup
