4 Ways to Find and Treat Customer Pain Points to Make the Sale

Good marketing medicine: You have product and service solutions, but do your prospects actually understand how to ‘apply’ them? Here are four ways to find and treat customer pain points, so that you can make more sales.

Good Marketing Medicine to Help You Treat Customer Pain Points

Truly effective marketing has the ability to focus its messaging with laser-like precision, targeting the exact point of pain experienced by customers and prospects saying, “Have no fear, help is on the way!” But most marketing misses the mark; often, by a wide margin.

Many business marketing strategies fail to identify the specific points of pain most appropriate for their products and services and so – no surprise – also fall short when it comes to conveying the right “treatment plans” for their prospects and customers.

These four marketing ideas can help you translate your organization’s points of differentiation into prescriptive remedies for the problems that are causing your customers pain.

Getting to the heart of prospect and customer pain – the challenges or problems they really want to solve – requires an in-depth study and analysis of your target markets including their pain points as well as the best ways to reach them with your marketing. To take the analogy one step further, you either have to get the patients to come to you, or you need to make house calls.

By Tom Fishburne – marketoonist

Unfortunately, many business leaders can’t even get past step one: knowing the customer. In How Well Do You Know Your Customers? we shared data citing recent studies in which only about half of executives claimed to know their markets well, and identified five key areas where gaining customer intelligence can give your business a competitive advantage.

Once you have identified the pain points common to your customers, prospects and members of your target markets (a.k.a. “ideal customer types”) – and you know which marketing channels they are utilizing – only then can you deliver ‘prescriptions’ to them based on the unique customer benefits your products or services provide. Inc.com recently suggested that when it comes to unique value propositions (or UVPs, also known as unique selling propositions or USPs) there are 4 basic types.

Let’s take a closer look at four types of unique value propositions laid out in an Inc.com article and see how they can help when it comes to finding and treating customer pain points in order to make the sale.

4 Unique Selling Points to Boost Your Marketing Strategy

1. A UVP based on low cost.

If members of your target markets are driven primarily by price, then competing on low price or highest value for the dollar may be your most effective marketing message. Even if you do have the lowest price, it’s often desirable to focus on value rather than your claim of being “cheapest.” Words like cheap, economy, bargain, discount, etc. can also give birth to perceptions of lower quality, and not very many business owners want low quality associated with their brand.

Just because you happen to have the lowest or be among the lowest cost for products or services in your category, doesn’t mean you must compromise on value or the customer experience, and it’s the customer experience, value and quality of your brand that will produce repeat sales and referrals, not price.

2. A UVP based on a product (or service) that is uniquely better.

Being better is not enough. To rise to the level of a prescriptive remedy for your customer or prospective customer’s pain points, your product or service must be uniquely better in a way that matters to members of your target markets. Rather than throwing all of the features and customer benefits up against the marketing wall to see what sticks (so to speak), you need to have a clear understanding of the shared values, needs and desires common to members of your customer base and target markets. And knowing what those values, needs and desires are, limit your marketing messages to highlighting those that are most compelling to your target markets.

3. A UVP based on a customer experience that is uniquely better.

Remember Staples® “Easy Button” marketing campaign? It was all about making the shopping experience easier for business and retail customers who needed to buy office equipment, office supplies and school supplies. If the way that you do business is uniquely better than that of competitors – in ways that are meaningful to your customers and prospects – than communicating this unique selling point can be a valuable way to speak to your customers’ common pain points and shared values.

4. A UVP based on customer outcomes that are uniquely better.

The Inc.com article identified unique value propositions which “take ownership of customer results” as the holy grail of value propositions. It conveys the idea that you are in the same boat alongside your customers and prospects and that your success is inextricably linked to theirs.

***

When it comes to our clients, this is exactly how we feel. We understand that – ultimately – our success lies in whether or not we fulfill our goal of helping our customers mitigate their pain points when it comes to cash flow and working capital so they can grow their businesses from where they are today to where they want to be tomorrow.

We are proud to offer quality products in the form of business financing services that are flexible and can be tailored to meet the needs of our clients, and to be able to offer them at competitive rates. Find out more about our business financing tools on our website or complete the form below for a free, no-obligation quote.