No matter what industry your business is in, the products and services you offer should be designed to present solutions to real problems and make your potential customers’ lives better. Having said that, why is it still difficult to convert some of these potential customers even with carefully designed solutions in place? One reason might be because we do not understand our target market as much as we should or that we are not putting enough time to discover our customers’ pain-points.
What are consumer pain points?
In the marketing world, there is always one term that gets tossed around more than salad at a vegetarian dinner party – that is customer pain-points.
A pain point is described as any particular problem that your prospective customers are experiencing. You can also translate this description as the pain-point being the specific reason why a consumer finally decides to use your product or service.
How do you determine them?
Like any problem, a pain point can be as varied and diverse as consumers themselves. That is why you should never overlook the most important part of pain point discovery – asking the right questions.
Preconceived notions and wrong assumptions can influence your interaction with clients, whether you like it or not. Oftentimes, we inadvertently lead the conversation by asking questions differently thus being unable to collect new insight or information into where the client could use assistance. There is no standard set of queries that can be applied to make discovering pain points the same across all industries. Questions will always vary according to the business, individual, or target market and every conversation will differ.
Aside from this, there are other ways on how to discover your customer’s pain points:
- Creating or hosting customer feedback surveys
- Search for non-branded company mentions on social media
- Making personal calls or asking opinions in person
- Implement a live chat feature
- Run qualitative research to confirm your theories
The most important thing to remember when communicating with customers is to always listen to understand what they are trying to get across. Aside from this, always ask open-ended questions and let them do the talking.
The Common Pain Points
In the world of outsource search engine optimization, generating traffic for websites is one of the main goals. However, customers are what really matter and addressing their problems can easily help in boosting the quality and quantity of leads.
Financial
One of the most common questions that sales teams would usually get from prospective clients has something to do with pricing. This pain point includes the dilemmas that consumers experience regarding money like the unnecessary cost of repeat purchases of everyday items, membership and subscription plans, and low life-expectancy of an item that’s created to last a significant length of time. However, it was found that by addressing price before a prospect decided to convert, the sales rate was able to improve. Furthermore, the financial pain point was resolved by emphasizing the importance of long-lasting products.
Location
It’s not surprising that some consumers are not willing to travel far for something when they can find alternative options nearby. This is why it’s important for businesses to determine which market would best fit their target demographic. In order to tap into these target markets, local websites must be created which will enable businesses to hyper localize content for each area. These local sites allow for customised user experiences such as local numbers and detailed driving directions.
Shopping Journey
This pain point can be classified into two kinds: online research and website navigation. For online research, modern consumers expect to find answers to their queries on blogs and authority websites. From there, products that they need to find must be easy to locate from anywhere. Your content should be branded and visible which is something that an SEO company in Singapore can help you with.
On the other hand, once the consumer clicks on your link, your website must be simple and straightforward for easy navigation. Aside from this, a search bar is also important to help customers find a product they’re looking for without thinking too much.
Using pain points and SEO to improve copnversion rate
In our previous article, we discussed the relationship between search engine Optimization (SEO) and content and how the former is strategised around the latter.
Traditionally, an SEO agency in Singapore would utilise these two in a volume-driven strategy wherein keywords that have the highest traffic potential and easiest to rank are prioritised. However, this approach is based on the metric of success in an increased percentage of traffic instead of leads growth and it does not take into account the searcher intent.
On the other hand, SEO content can be strategised to start with the intent of a buyer (customer pain points) and then optimise keywords and topics that present solutions to the searcher’s problems. By doing so, the intent of the searcher to the buyer’s journey can be mapped out and acquire a better predictor of which SEO content will generate leads instead of just measuring which posts generate traffic.