Pain Points Equal High-Converting Ads
What Problem Do They Have?
All products and services are designed to address your customers' or clients' pain points.
Having a list of these pain points allows you to create effective direct-response ad campaigns, solve product-related issues, and develop content that guides people in resolving these problems.
The initial step in understanding your customers better is to identify the problems they are currently facing.
What issues are causing them frustration, inconvenience, or stress?
Identifying pain points is relatively straightforward since customers or the market often express them loudly.
They voice these pain points in forums, on social media, and through traditional media.
In contrast to psychographics and various demographic details, pain points are the customers' tangible concerns that you can clearly recognize.
For instance, if you operate an e-commerce business, your customers maybe going through extended shipping times.
Recognizing this as a pain point can inspire you to find ways to optimize your shipping process, ultimately enhancing their experience.
Further develop your ability to become your customers' solution by exploring how email builds penguin-like customer loyalty.
What's Driving Them Nuts?
Once you've identified the problem, delve deeper into what particularly frustrates your customers—another way to describe pain points.
What Exact Issues Are Causing Them the Most Frustration?
For instance, if your customers are becoming increasingly frustrated with slow customer support, automated responses, and long waiting times, these represent specific pain points.
To address these frustrations, you can invest in a more responsive customer support team and implement chatbots to resolve issues quickly.
How Much Time Are They Losing Trying to Fix Their Problem?
Time is a valuable resource, and nobody likes to see it wasted.
Your customers are likely trying to resolve the issues they encounter with your product or service.
For example, offer a software product with a complicated user interface. Your customers may spend a significant amount of time figuring out how to use it.
Simplifying your user interface can save your customers time and resolve the problem.
How Much Energy Are They Wasting on Their Problems?
Searching for solutions to problems can be emotionally exhausting.
Consider the frustration and disappointment they experience when dealing with problems stemming from your product or service.
Take a Smart Home Security Cameras product, for instance.
The customer pain points include:
- Lack of Security: Homeowners often grapple with a persistent sense of insecurity, especially when they're away from home.
- The fear of break-ins or theft of valuable family possessions is a recurring source of pain in their lives.
- Sleepless Nights: The worry about protecting their family's safety and cherished possessions can keep them up at night, leading to constant concern about the vulnerability of their home and causing sleepless nights and stress.
- Loss of Peace of Mind: Without a reliable security system, homeowners may experience a loss of peace of mind.
Their mental and emotional well-being is compromised, as they're aware that their family and assets are at risk.
The Solution
Comprehensive Security: Promote the security cameras not just as products but as solutions that reinstate peace and security in customers' lives.
Highlight the comfort that comes from knowing their home and loved ones are safe.
Customized Security Plans: Provide personalized home security recommendations that address specific pain points, such as ensuring coverage for valuable areas and possessions.
Customers will receive a tailored plan to enhance their lives.
24/7 Monitoring: Offer 24/7 monitoring services alongside the cameras, ensuring immediate alerts and responses to potential threats.
This round-the-clock protection guarantees that customers can enjoy peaceful nights.
Customer Stories: Share accounts of customers who have experienced transformations in their lives after installing the security cameras.
Highlight their regained peace of mind and the prevention of potential burglaries.
Educational Workshops: Organize workshops or webinars on home safety and security, equipping customers with knowledge on protecting their family and belongings effectively.
By acknowledging and addressing these deeply ingrained pain points in customers' lives, the e-commerce company shifts its focus from product selling to providing life-enhancing solutions.
The security cameras are depicted as tools to restore security, peace of mind, and peaceful nights.
This approach can profoundly resonate with customers, and increase sales and conversions.
How Much Sanity Are They Losing?
This concerns their lives. Not having a particular problem resolved impacts a person's mental state and mindset.
For example, consider a professional single mother who is time-poor and struggles to prepare nutritious, healthy meals after work.
This represents a pain point, affecting her both physically and mentally.
The plethora of choices available can result in a loss of sanity, indicating an elevated pain point.
Solution: Offer a healthy meal service where the food is ready to eat instantly.
What Keeps Them Up at Night?
Finally, think about what keeps your customers awake at night.
The most significant issues they confront are likely to occupy their thoughts when they should enjoy a restful sleep.
These issues may be deeply rooted and emotional, and even addressing them in minor ways can lead to conversions and sales.
For instance, if you offer financial services, your customers might lose sleep over concerns regarding their financial stability and the future of their investments.
Providing transparent information, responsive customer support, and personalized financial advice can help alleviate these concerns.
To capture a person's attention, understanding their problems is crucial.
If you position your 'problem message' to the right audience at the right time, you're 90% of the way to achieving conversions.
In turn, potential customers are closer to having their problems solved.
It's a win-win scenario.
The pain point system for effective advertising involves:
Use our pain point system the next time you embark on market research or seek to refine your strategy.
- Documenting all of your customers' pain points by conducting internet research, reading books, engaging in conversations, and experiencing these issues firsthand. Pain points are ubiquitous—you can't go a minute without encountering them. A pain point directly links to what's most important to each individual.
- Document all pain points and identifying the more prominent ones. What is driving them crazy?
- Document the time and energy your customers are wasting when using competitors' solutions or their makeshift alternatives.
- Document how they attempt to compensate when a solution is lacking and the impact on their mental state and sanity.
- Document what keeps them awake at night. Can you provide solutions that can significantly enhance their lives?
Various frameworks, templates, gurus, books, speeches, and more exist on effectively communicating with your customers, audience, or simply your "Who."
After 20 years of experimentation and testing, it becomes clear that pain points will get you most of the way.
This might be because they represent the most objective data among all market research techniques, ultimately helping you identify your company's "Who+Problem+Solution.
