How to Find and Solve Your Customer’s Problems

How to Create a Marketing Plan for Your Business

One of the most important things you can do when you start creating your marketing plan is to find who your customers are and how to reach them. There’s a ton of information out there teaching you how to do this.

Everyone wants you to answer questions like – is your customer a man or a woman? Do they have kids or are they single or grandparents? What income box do they check when describing their income level?

We can ask and answer questions all day until we find our perfect customers. And then we’re left with this really long list of characteristics about this person.

Have you ever stopped to think about how this information will help get these people to buy your products or services?

Because it’s not just about whether your stuff is cooler than the guys down the street. That used to work in the days before we could type out a question on our phones and come up with the answer and where to buy it with a click and touch of a screen.

Now we have to dig deeper to make the sale. We have to do more than just tell everyone why our products and services are better than the others.

You have to show your customers that your company is a problem solver to that question they just typed into the search engine.

Marketing Yourself as a Problem Solver

To put your business in this place, you need to ask yourself this simple question – What problem does my product or service solve?

Let’s break this down even further to be a problem solver:

1. Does my product make my customer’s life easier?
2. Will my service help them do things quicker?
3. Do my products give them more value for less cost than the others?

In other words, you’re doing the work to find your customer’s pain points.

What’s a Pain Point?

In simple terms – it’s a specific problem that your customer is experiencing.

And to extend this definition into something that will actually help with your marketing plans – a pain point is an issue that your customer perceives is the reason that they’ re not able to do something like lose weight or improve their credit score.

It’s the problem that’s causing them some sort of “pain” that they’re actively looking for a solution.

Let me walk you through how this works:

Let’s say that you’re a health coach who helps her clients understand why it’s so important to eat healthy food and get their body moving on a daily basis. You know these steps are important for your clients so she can be there for her family’s events and enjoy every part of her life.

Your client comes to you with this pain point – I want to lose weight to get into my black dress for my high school reunion.

While it’s clear to you what your client needs to do to get into that dress, it’s super important for you to understand what the real pain point is with the problem that she wants to solve. Your client didn’t ask to get on a diet or to get the steps of an exercise program.

She wants to get into a little black dress and show off to her high school friends.

And I get it – she’s not going to fit into that dress until she makes healthier changes in her behaviors. But that’s not what your client believes in her pain point. Her pain is that dress and her timeline is her high school reunion.

Knowing that this is her perceived pain point { and not the pain point that you really know is the truth! }, you’ll have a better chance of signing her up for your coaching services if you can speak to her perceived pain point in your marketing messages.

One of the Best Pain Point Examples

One of the best examples that I’ve ever heard about how to use pain points in your marketing messages has to do with selling a drill for people who want to do some work on their homes.

When we think about how we’d market our drill, the first place we go is to start talking about the cool features like the drill speed or the changeable drill bits. All the things that the drill does and why our drill is better than the one in the other box.

We put out our marketing message saying that our drill is the best one for people why want to buy a drill.

But this message completely misses the idea of the customer’s pain point.

Our drill isn’t for people who want a drill. It’s for people who want to make holes in their walls. The ones who need to make a perfect hole in the wall where a nail and hammer won’t work.

Now if we bring our pain point into our marketing message, it becomes our drill is for people who want to quickly and easily make holes in their wall in their homes.

Taking your customer’s pain point into consideration moves it from what you think is great about your product or services into why the end user really wants to buy it.

 How to be a Problem Solver

Any marketing strategist will tell you that to help your customers you need to develop the right relationship with them. And then they’ll probably also throw in this line: “Remember, it’s not only what you’re selling but who you are selling to that makes all the difference.”

When we talk about how to be a problem solver to our customers, of course we’re going to pull together information about their age, gender, income level.  But for us to really connect with your customers, we need to dig down deeper and learn more about ‘who they are and what they do.’

You need to do a little work and look at the psychographics of your customer.

I realize that’s a big fancy word but it’s really pretty simple.

Psychographics refers to the breakdown of values, interests, behavior and the lifestyle of your customers. Here’s a few examples of what I’m talking about – your customers might be big Star Wars fans or maybe they’re looking for green-friendly products or perhaps, they’re active runners who exercise during their lunch breaks.

Learning more about the pyschographics of your customers helps you not only understand how to discover your customer’s problems but it’ll also help you learn what motivates them to buy from you.

And when you can effectively understand what makes your customers excited, you can create targeted social media marketing messages that focuses on your customer’s needs. Your messages will sound more like you’re talking directly TO them and not just AT them.

There’s nothing more important that gets a person to click the Buy Here button than to read a marketing message that speaks directly to them and how your product or service can solve their problems.

Think about the last time you bought something. You read through the copy on the page, nodded your head and said, “Yeah, that one is me, and number 3, 4 and quite possibly number 6. Where’s that click to buy thingy?”

The More You Know

The more you know about your customers, the easier it is to truly speak to what they need and how your products or services is the solution they’re looking for.

Start thinking about how your product or service fits into your customer’s lifestyle:

• How do my customers use my services or products?
• Is your product seasonal or do they only call you when something is broken?
• Is there one thing that is consistent with them, like they’re all moms or they sell directly to other businesses?
• Do they have an interest or hobby outside of their work that they’ve shared with you?
• What are the challenges are they talking about in Facebook groups?
• What solutions are they saying they want like “I wish someone would give me a guide a video series that helps me do X”?

Spend a little time brainstorming who your customer is and what they’re like outside of just being a customer. Write or type out all your answers to these questions and just keep writing until you have a full description of your customers .

Now let’s look at the wording for your marketing messages

• Do they use certain words when they engage with you?
• Are there certain terms that people in your industry uses?
• How can you define these terms for non-industry people who want to buy your stuff?

Take a look at the characteristics of the person you described as your customer. Then using your marketing message answers that you just pulled together, use this prompt to get you started on developing a targeted marketing message:

My <product or service> will help my customers solve <problem> because it does <solution>.

Keep writing your sentences over and over using different words, phrases and even changing up the order of the sentences. And keep doing it until you have at least 5 different marketing messages.

When you finish this exercise, you’ll find your marketing messages will be more effective to connect with your potential customers. You’ll be speaking their language and showing them that you know how to solve their problems.

And hopefully, they’ll see that you get them and they’ll start their nodding their head, looking for the Buy Here button.

 

 

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