Pinpoint Your Customers' Pain Points

What are pain points in business?

So, what are pain points in marketing?

Customer pain points are problems that your target audience faces. They may have pain points about their current solutions or the products and services they purchase through your business.

Pain points directly affect your business because they can tell you what your competition is doing wrong and help you identify issues with your own products and services. Pain points can be problems related to specific products or problems they deal with in life in general.

For example, a pain point for a customer might be spending too much money on operations costs or productivity issues due to inefficiencies.

Addressing customer pain points is how you drive sales. Creating products and services that address your prospect's pain points can help you stand out from the competition, allowing you to help potential customers realize they can find the solution to their problems with your business.

Unfortunately, not all sales leads are aware that they have a problem. It's marketing's job to make these prospects aware of their pain points to give them a reason to continue listening to your sales pitch.

Once your customers are aware of their pain points, it's your job to convince them that your product or service will address them and somehow improve their life or work.

Why is it important to identify customer pain points?

Identifying customer pain points can help you reach your target audience more effectively while improving the entire customer experience. In addition, knowing these issues can help you position your business, product, services, or brands as the solution and tailor your marketing messaging to fit their specific needs.

For example, let's say you sell content marketing services. It's your job to identify the pain points of your target customers, which will be other business owners. In this case, the pain points are simple; your target market doesn't have the skill set or resources to accomplish their own content marketing.

Why does this matter? By identifying this customer's pain points, you can start to build a relationship with them. In your pitch, you'll mention their pain point and how your service solves that problem for them.

Types of customer pain points

Customer pain points are problems that inconvenience or affect their personal or professional lives. They can be anything from a mother not having a good calendar to monitor her kid's activities to a business professional not having enough time to accomplish all their daily tasks.

Whatever the case, there are a few types of customer pain points you should be aware of, including the following:

Productivity pain points

Productivity pain points can affect personal or professional lives. Ultimately, it means customers are wasting time using their current products or services and want to use their time more efficiently.

An example of a productivity pain point might be a digital marketer using several tools to create client reports. The solution here would be a product that consolidates their reports into a single dashboard to save time.

Process pain points

Process pain points can affect productivity pain points, but they focus more on the internal processes of a business, such as qualifying leads.

If you've ever worked in a sales team, you know that nurturing and qualifying leads is time-consuming and may take multiple emails and phone calls to determine how interested a prospect is in a product or service.

Process pain points can help address internal business functions to make workers and the entire business more efficient.

Financial pain points

Financial pain points are those that affect your prospects' budgets and wallets. Ultimately, they spend too much on their current solutions and want to spend less. Businesses lose money every day for countless reasons, so you'll want to position your product or service as a way for businesses to save money.

For example, you might offer the same product as other companies, but your customers get more value from your business because it's more affordable.

Support pain points

Support pain points are customer service-related issues. Ultimately, it's possible that customers aren't getting the support they need from the businesses that provide their products and services.

For example, maybe your competition doesn't have a good onboarding process or doesn't respond to customer inquiries. Whatever the case, identifying support pain points can help you improve your offering and use it as a selling point that drives sales.

How to identify customer pain points

Now that you have the answer to your question, "what are customer pain points?", you need to identify them.

Identifying customer pain points in business is crucial for helping you develop products and services, build marketing strategies, and create better customer experiences. But the only way to identify these issues is to conduct qualitative and quantitative market research to learn more about your target audience.

Qualitative research allows you to survey your target market to learn more about their pain points, wants, and needs. For example, you can send surveys to existing customers or invest in market research to learn more about your audience.

When you conduct customer research, you can find out your customer's pain points and the reason for their problems.

For example, two customers could have the same financial pain point but for different reasons. In this case, customer A might not be using a product correctly because they lack the proper resources. At the same time, customer B might know how to use the product, but it's too expensive for them to maintain.

To identify your customer's pain points, you need answers directly from your customers, sales, and customer support team. Of course, you already know the importance of customer service, but it can affect your business in more ways than you realize.

The individuals who talk to your customers day in and day out have unique insights into their pain points and what drives purchasing decisions, so make sure to get them involved when trying to determine pain points and how to address them.

Then, any pain points you discover should be added to your buyer persona template to help you reach these individuals more effectively.

How to solve customer pain points

Identifying your customer pain points in marketing can help you attract higher-quality leads by showing them why your solutions are better than what they currently use.

Here are a few ways to solve genuine customer pain points in marketing and business to improve the customer experience.

Prioritize pain points

So what are pain points for customers?

Your common customer pain points depend on your business, industry, and target market. To correctly address your customer's pain points, you have to put them at the forefront of your marketing and sales strategy.

However, you must first ensure your product or service can deliver on its promises. Once you've identified your customer's pain points, revisit your product development to ensure you have a better product than the competition.

Meanwhile, if your customer pain points are about your products, you may have to return to the drawing board and provide updates like new features to address these issues.

Develop solutions

Once you understand your customer's pain points, you must develop solutions to their problems. This might mean creating a customer journey map to reduce friction throughout each interaction with your business.

If you've identified customer pain points outside of your business, you can develop products or update your current offerings to develop solutions to those common issues.

For example, if you're an internet provider, you may have found pain points among customers, including high fees and poor internet speeds. In this case, you would create a better service that addresses these issues, resulting in cheaper, faster internet.

Implement changes

It's crucial to address customer problems and pain points that directly affect your business. If you've seen complaints talking about your products, you must implement changes to address them.

For example, if your customers commonly face long wait times when they submit support tickets, you might want to invest in customer experience automation to improve internal processes and increase response rates.

Follow-up

Customer engagement is crucial when addressing pain points, especially as they relate directly to your business. Customer retention automation tools can help you stay in communication with your current customers to ensure you've properly addressed their pain points and tailored your solutions to fit their needs.

Additionally, you can send out follow-up surveys and collect data on customer sentiment on recent changes.

Enhance customer satisfaction by identifying customer pain points

Identifying customer pain points is time-consuming and complex, but building an effective business and marketing plan is well worth it.

Customer pain points can vary. Maybe your business is concerned about pain points faced by prospective customers as a way to sell your solution to them, or maybe you're identifying pain points from current customers that directly impact your business.

Whatever the case, identifying and addressing these pain points can help you enhance customer satisfaction by learning more about your current and prospective customers, allowing you to create better solutions and stay ahead of the competition.

Fortunately, you can learn about your customers and their pain points with Mailchimp. Our solution makes it easy to collect data and send surveys to your customers to identify and address pain points. Try Mailchimp today and enhance your customer satisfaction.