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How to Discover New Consumer Pain Points

Posted: 01 Mar 2020 11:00 AM PST

  • Customer pain points are common issues faced by consumers in your industry. 
  • Reviewing your current website data can help you make informed decisions about your audience and marketing strategy. 
  • Social media and email are two of the most effective tools for gathering customer feedback, which helps you uncover pain points. 
  • Talking to your customer service team can reveal plenty of useful data about your target market. 

Your goal as a marketer or business owner is to reach your target audience. If you don't understand the people that want or need your product, you'll have a much harder time reaching these consumers. 

Consumer pain points are problems consumers experience that you can solve with your business. For example, B2B email marketing firms look for customers that are struggling to generate leads for their business. The pain point for these consumers is they can't generate leads or traffic. It's up to the email firm to take the right steps to identify customer needs and help them overcome this issue. 

Understanding your target audience is vital for building new features, creating content, and effectively communicating with the people who can benefit most from your product or service. Now with that thought in mind, let's take a look at several ways you can find consumer pain points after your website launches. 

Review your existing data

Your existing Google Analytics data can provide a wealth of information about your target audience and their pain points. There are various reports you can use to determine problem areas for visitors. 

One of the best reports to check in this instance is your most popular pages. You'll have access to how many people visited each post, their behavior on-site, and what they decided to do on your website after landing on your blog. Understanding where users spend their time can help you fine-tune your marketing strategy. 

Let's revisit the email marketing firm we mentioned earlier. When looking at the data, the owner of that website noticed that almost 50% of their audience visit blog posts about customer retention. In response to this traffic, the marketer would likely collaborate with the content team to create blog posts that dive deeper into this issue.

Now when people visit the company blog, they are more likely to find a piece of content that helps them with their issue. If you're able to provide value to your customers for free, they are more likely to remain loyal to your brand. 

Send out feedback emails 

Email is, without a doubt, one of the best ways to gather customer feedback. The first significant benefit is the staggering 22.68% average engagement rate across all industries. When you consider that a quarter of your overall customers will likely respond to your email, you can confidently gather information on various pain points. 

The other vital benefit to this technique is you can split test your emails to reach customers based on their purchase history. For instance, if you have an online store that sells seeds for gardens, you can ask for feedback from people who purchased fruit and vegetable seeds versus traditional flowers. 

Understanding your various customer personas can help you find trouble areas across each group. Imagine if you sent out feedback forms and found out that a majority of people who bought your flowering seeds didn't see their plants bloom. Now you know that people are struggling with growing flowers. Use this information to create great content that inspires and teaches your audience proper tips and techniques. 

Ask on social media 

Social media is another excellent way to gather customer feedback. Consider this: over 3 billion people use social media regularly, and a stunning 80% of internet users have at least one social media account. It's hard to deny that social media is best for long-term, personal, customer engagement. 

If you want to hear from your visitors, ask them. Seriously, a simple poll or post where you ask for opinions can help you learn more about customer pain points. The problem many business owners and social media marketers face at this phase – their pain point, if you will – is they can't get consumers to engage with their brand. 

Upon closer investigation, there's a good chance that the business is not taking the steps necessary to ensure that consumers have a reason to engage. You should try to upload content from your blog at least once a day. If you see people talking about something in the comments section of your post or video, don't be afraid to jump in and talk. 

Imagine if you posted a cool video with email marketing tips from your B2B firm. In the comments section, consumers will often explicitly tell you what other problems they are facing. If you see someone comment on the video that says, "These tips are great! I just don't know how to write high-quality email copy." 

There's your sign. Visitors find your tips helpful, but they need more help writing email copy. Now you can start working on a template or list-style post where you give readers tips on how to write great emails. 

Talk to your customer service team

Your customer service team and their data can help you learn so much about your target audience and their pain points. It doesn't matter if you use a traditional help desk support program, chatbots, or a hybrid system, customer service data is always revealing. 

We suggest holding a weekly meeting with your support team to see if they have noticed any trends in customer behavior. For instance, if complaints in a certain category are on the rise, this is a red flag that something is amiss. The problem could stem from an internal bug, or you may be on the path to uncovering a new pain point. 

Keep track of your meetings, and reference what you have learned from your support team and analytics once a month. Over time, hidden trends will usually begin to show. If you notice that customer questions or opinions start to sway one way or the other, it's time to start figuring out the source of this change. Remember, not every change in behavior will translate to a massive shift in sales or traffic. But there are specific scenarios where addressing a change early can have a significant impact on the performance of your brand. 

As an added bonus, you'll get the opportunity to help customers almost immediately through your support team. If there's a surge in tickets about a question, your content team can quickly create an actionable article. Now you can share that content with your support team, which means they can pass the post on to your customers. 

Industries change over time. You would be hard-pressed to find a customer base with consistent pain points over the last decade. If you're willing to look at all of these different resources cumulatively, you'll start to see the bigger picture and gain new insights about your target market. 

Keep in mind that learning about your audience is a constantly evolving process. You'll have to regularly check your social media, email and website analytics for more information on consumer behavior. Collaborating with your support team can help give you actionable insights that you can put into place immediately. 

If you're willing to uncover and solve problems that people are facing, you'll have no problem growing your website and small business. 

5 Ways Leaders Can Boost Creativity

Posted: 01 Mar 2020 10:00 AM PST

A leader that can extract their teams' creative abilities has the potential to drive their business to become standouts in their industry. When your team is operating at its creative best, you'll find innovative solutions to your customer's problems and distinguish yourself. 

Creativity has a very direct role in shaping the outcomes of your marketing efforts. To boost your SEO and build thought leadership, you need to create engaging content on a regular basis. Producing content daily and coming up with something new to say needs creative thinking.

There are several other areas in business where innovativeness matters. 

For example, the top three problems in sales are getting responses from prospects, engaging decision-makers, and closing deals. In situations like these and many others in your business, the ability to generate new ideas matter. Finding a new and interesting perspective to problem-solving can shape success. 

As a leader, you need to build a conducive environment for innovation and out-of-the-box thinking. You also need to apply uncommon and challenging techniques to push your team to think differently. 

Here are some highly effective ways that you can lead your team to be more creative. 

Encourage your team to doodle

We think of doodling as a meaningless activity that we do when we're bored. The scribbles in the margins of a notepad during a meeting, however, hold the potential for new ideas.

According to Sunni Brown, the author of the Doodle Revolution, doodling is a powerful way to unleash one's creativity. 

When you doodle, you compel your mind to transform abstract mental concepts into pictures. You engage the visual part of your brain, using more of your mind and more learning modalities. 

When you're brainstorming as a team and trying to process a large amount of information, doodling can help. The act of doodling lets you process more information easily by using pictures. When you try to represent difficult concepts, an image can convey information more successfully than large pages of text. The phrase "a picture is worth a thousand words" has a very real meaning in processing information. 

People who doodle are also able to retain information better. When you have a team meeting for idea generation or problem-solving encourage your team to doodle. Use a marker and a whiteboard, or just pen and paper, and start shaping out the topic. Draw simple images, arrows, shapes, and words to flesh out a problem or concept.

Doodling is an effective group brainstorming activity that will engage your co-workers and act as a team-building effort. You can lead thinking exercises using doodling and ask your team to collaborate on creating visual solutions for business problems.

Use doodling as a fun and practical way to boost innovativeness in your team. 

Use improvisation techniques

Improvisation by nature involves thinking on your feet.  You have to be able to create content from a prompt and work with other people to make engaging material. In other words, improvisation naturally demands creativity, and this makes improv techniques useful in business.  

One improvisation technique you can use when you're brainstorming with your team is, the "Yes… And" technique. The "Yes... And" technique is a basic improv concept that compels people to explore a topic or an idea to its fullest. 

During meetings, shutting down a person's idea disrupts the flow of creative thought. Criticizing or pointing out problems with an idea is not conducive to new ideas. The "Yes...And" technique forces people to keep the flow of ideas open-ended during brainstorming sessions.

When one person in the team comes up with an idea, the next person to speak has to accept it completely by saying "Yes". They then add on to the idea by saying "And" and then following it up with their thought or suggestion. 

For example, if one team member suggests that customers are given a free upgrade for becoming a member on your site,  your response could be "Yes, and let's also ask them to follow us on social media."

Using a "Yes… And" way to explore every idea allows you to keep your mind open to alternative solutions. You can explore an idea until it's completely exhausted and then move on to another topic. 

Working with this improvisation technique will make people more comfortable sharing their thoughts and will easily lead to innovative solutions. 

Freewriting

Freewriting is typically an individual endeavor that you can apply to a group with great results. The idea behind freewriting is to set a timer and let your hand move, writing down whatever comes to your mind.

The key is to refrain from pausing or editing at all costs. When you edit or censor your words, you place a stopper on the flow of your thoughts. This impedes creative ideas from emerging. 

When freewriting, you also need to write very quickly, getting all your thoughts typed out. Doing this drives your mind into a corner where it's compelled to come up with something new. 

In this way, freewriting forces your brain to generate ideas that may otherwise not surface to your conscious mind. 

You can improve your team's creativity and productivity for the day by asking them to freewrite for 15 minutes every morning before starting work. You can also work as a team by writing on flipcharts and inviting team members to quickly jot down their thoughts. 

Freewriting is especially useful in supporting your content marketing activities. A business needs to produce fresh and informative regularly to boost SEO. Content creation also has a significant impact on your business goals. A company that produces more than 16 blogs a month gets 3.5x more traffic, and 4.5x more leads than companies that create fewer posts. 

Freewriting can help create your content marketing team come up with new ideas for blog articles and social media posts. It can also be a tool that pushes creative thinking in other areas. 

Ask for bad ideas

When you reach a standstill in your creative discussions, channeling your thoughts to unusual directions can give you new perspectives. 

Ask your team for bad ideas to solve the problem you're facing. Don't reject or criticize any of these ideas. When you look at poor ideas that obviously don't work, it can bring helpful solutions into focus. 

Getting your team to come up with terrible ideas will also infuse humor into a meeting and re-energize the session. Use this technique to create a break and to jog the mind for unusual ideas. 

Think and talk fast

People can block their best ideas from emerging when they process their thoughts for too long.  

An effective way to get a steady flow of ideas is to encourage your team to think and talk fast. When you talk fast, there's little time to edit what you're saying. Done correctly, this will lead to a free flow of thoughts around a specific problem or topic. 

Your team members will get their ideas out into the open and avoid overthinking. When this is done long enough, there's bound to be a  breakthrough that you can work with.

The key to creative thoughts is letting your mind explore all ideas without filtering them. It's always possible to edit and remove ideas that won't work after your team has come up with enough solutions. 

Today, the business landscape can change virtually overnight as new technologies and trends emerge. It's essential for you and your teams to be at your creative best to grow your business in a swiftly changing environment. 

We've looked at some of the ways that you can encourage creative thinking in your team. The different techniques mentioned here can help you generate innovative solutions to key issues. Work with them to create lively discussions and brainstorming sessions. All you need is one concept or idea to spark growth in your business. 

 
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