Today I will walk you through customers’ pain points. I will explain what pain points are, how to find them, and how to use the results for your website to attract the right paying customers.
What are customers paint points?
Pain points are problems your customers are experiencing and can be extremely diverse. Uncovering them may be harder than expected.
To identify your customers’ pain points you can not simply ask your customers and accept their answer, neither you can assume you already know their main issues, you should think outside the box and put yourself in their shoes.
Uncovering what your customers struggle with, put you in a position where you know how to pitch your solution in a way that solve their specific problems.
How? Pain point > Your solution > Transaction.
Don’t make assumptions
The first consideration is: do not expect to know what your customers’ pain points might be.
There are several ways to uncover what your customers struggle with so that you can collect information that allow you to provide meaningful value for them.
Identifying pain points should be one of your top priories because it allows you to get insights that help you to improve your solution and generate more sales.
The following is a checklist you can freely use to identify your customers’ pain points and use them to attract your perfect customers.
Collect the data
Step 1) Ask your customers what their pain points are
Analyse your database and define which are your best customers.
With this list in hand, get in touch with them, via an online survey or have your customer support team to call them with questions like:
- What features are most important to you?
- How would you describe [product|service] to a friend?
- What are the top three benefits of [product|service]?
- What would you use as an alternative to [product|service] if it were no longer available?
Use open-ended questions to not lead or influence their answer.
Step 2) Talk to your sales and customer support teams
Collect all the information related to the positive and negative aspects of your solution.
- What customers think about the product?
- Is there any specific feature they use more often, or they don’t use?
- Do they complain/are happy about something specific?
- Collect your sales and customer support’s FAQs
- If you employ a ticketing system, review what are the more frequent requests
- Analyse your live chat queries
Note your customers’ language.
Step 3) Check out Social Media and online forums for reviews
Check your reviews and comments wherever they are, from Google My Business to Facebook, customer reviews websites, online forums and social media. Look for your brand’s pros and cons based on customers’ feedback.
Review common threads for your brand and competitors with the same solution based on the alternative your best customers provided you (see Step 1).
Step 4) Get to know when you are mentioned
Set an alert to be informed as soon as your name is mentioned online, you can use Google Alerts, Ahrefs or Talkwalker. This will report you as soon as your brand name is mentioned online, so you can respond and use it as an additional source of information.
You can apply the same principle to the mentioned competitors in Step 1).
Step 5) Check the backlink profile
Make sure you are knowledgeable about 3rd party websites that link to you (the ones that you didn’t build). This can uncover blogs, news outlets and other platforms that talk about you.
Handle the data
Step 6) Group the outcome
Group all the information collected so far in sets of similar queries related to similar topics.
Step 7) Identify questions
Using tools like Answer the Public, AlsoAsked.com, Ahrefs and SEMrush, identify questions related to your sets of queries.
Step 8) Monitor topics
Monitor forums, social media, magazines for threads and comments related to your product and industry on the whole. Listening on the common feedback about your industry will help you identify areas you should mention.
Step 9) Check out your competitors
- Review competitors’ websites to figure out pain points that you have not mentioned yet and see if you can incorporate in your words.
- Features and FAQs pages to identify their focus terms of language and pain points
- Backlink profile to uncover partnerships and uses you didn’t think about
- Imagery to figure out how competitors mirror their customers
- Top pages by traffic to identify what are the topics that drive them more traffic
- Top shared pages to identifying users’ interest
- Search for their ads and look at competitors’ copy that target customer problems
Step 10) Check out your industry blogs
Identify your niche’s most popular blogs and identify what attracts more traffic, comments and shares.
Take action
Step 11) Content research
Search for the questions and the keywords you just collected to identify whether it is worth developing a page or a sub-section of a page.
Step 12) Content planning
After the content research in Step 11, define if the page is related to the ultimate goal your customers want to achieve or it is a supporting task of it. Based on this, define the type of content you want to develop, following the Topic Cluster model.
Step 13) Use your customers’ pain points
- Create content hubs and sections on your website
- Created pain points focused landing pages
- Change your images to mirror your customers
- Improve and test your CTAs
- Improve and test your PPC copy
Conclusion
Finding customers’ pain points is a process that help you attracting your best-fit paying customers based on their needs rather than page view. With this process you can find out why customers are interested in your solution and so increase their number.