Define your audience’s pain points v2

1. Interview your customers to identify their pain points. Select an interviewer who can get the customers to feel vulnerable yet comfortable to share their opinions and thoughts.

Include customers you have a successful relationship with and those who are challenging to work with. Also interview consumers who have chosen to work with your competitors. Focus on the customer’s specific pains and note down their exact words. Ask questions like: What initial challenges prompted you to start working with us? What are the top three benefits you’ve received from ? How could we improve to meet your needs better? What would you likely use as an alternative to if it were no longer available? What’s holding you back from using ?

2. Use customer experience software like Miro to consolidate customer research and draw insights from it.

Customer experience software like Miro allow you to communicate and collaborate with teams across different time zones, channels, tools, and formats. It also provides customer journey mapping templates that can help you better understand the customer experience.

3. Use the customer pain points you identified to identify solutions that your product offers.

For example, if a customer prioritizes productivity, highlight a reduction in wasted time and emphasize easy-to-use features like the centralized dashboard or at-a-glance overviews.

4. Map out your entire customer journey to better understand pain points and how a consumer comes to understand the benefit your product offers.

Start from the beginning when the customer finds out about you all the way to the post-purchase process to fully understand their pain points throughout their journey. A milestone can be to sign up for a free product. But before a user gets to that point, they need to understand your solution, what it does, and how to get there. If they’re unable to access or understand any information in between, that can be a pain point. A milestone can also be adding a product to the cart. Your prospects want to find what they need quickly and at the right price. But if the pricing is unclear or the checkout process is complicated, it can cause frustrations that lead to cart abandonment.

5. Classify and rank your customers' pain points to position your solutions and tailor your offer to their needs.

Financial pain points: Customers who are spending too much money on their current products, services, or provider and want to cut back on their spending. For example, expensive membership fees, low-quality products, lack of transparency about the final price, fees added on or at checkout. Productivity pain points: The customer wants to be more efficient or to have a smooth experience when dealing with providers. For example, too many checkout steps, or a manual process that takes too long to complete. Process pain points: Areas in which sub-optimal processes are causing pain for customers. For example, a customer has to go through lots of resources on your site to find the information they need. Support pain points: Customers feel they are not getting the right customer support particularly at critical stages of the sales process or customer journey. For example, a customer not knowing who to ask when they have an inquiry.

6. Develop messaging that speaks to your customers' pain points and describes how your solution uniquely addresses them.

Craft copy that speaks right to the problem. With the right copy, you’ll be able to educate your customers and make them aware of your brand’s relevance in their lives. Remember, a pain point is an action a customer ultimately wants to do. For example: Pain point: A customer wants more website sales. Solution: They need more of the right clients landing on their website. Copy: We drive carefully targeted traffic to your website, increasing the chance of sales. Pain point: A customer needs to hang their clothes. Solution: They need a cloth hanger and maybe a wardrobe. Copy: We sell cloth hangers and wardrobes.