The Pain Point Formula

100% of times your product is all about understanding people & improving the experience with the challenges they face.

Hey everyone👋, welcome to the 37th newsletter.

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I took a huge break from most of my work, including Twitter and this newsletter, as you can see this post hit very late in your inbox. This was a much-needed break, all I did was rest, travel a little bit and stay out of the internet. 🤗

Anyway, I’ll be writing more and be consistent - I have so much to share. Also, because I’ve joined a new startup & it does feel different to work on someone else’s product. 😁

While hiring me, the first question the founder asked was how will I market the product and understand customers better.

The answer to it is usually broad but at the same time very simple. If I ask you how should I market my product, what would you say? How would you decide which strategy is better and why? There are endless ways to do it. It’s more than just limited to a distribution channel, it’s about identifying the challenges and problems faced by customers and how they can be improved.

In fact, the more creative you are, the better and more uniquely you can promote your product. Change the way you think about your customers and your product and you’ll find even better way to market it. Find customer pain points and create a marketing campaign based on them.

The pain point formula

It is a very effective method to understand your users and create product campaigns, marketing strategies and sales based on anticipating the needs that users know they have and the needs they don’t know they have. They aren’t based on assumptions, therefore it’s important to avoid and get the real information from the problem source.

Think about every turn a user will make, starting from what problem they are facing, why will they look for a solution, how will they find your website, browse your content, sign up for a free trial and convert to be a paying customer. As simple as it may sound, at each turn there is a potential drop-off.

If you take time to understand pain points, you are more likely to have less drop-off, increased conversion and reduced churn. Building and selling a product becomes 1000 times easier and clearer when you know the pain points, especially in this ultra-competitive marketplace.

How to find and address pain points

There are 3 ways to find it:

1. Talk to people facing the problem,

2. Go online and hear their pain points loud &

3. Experience it by yourself.

Rather than giving them the solution right away talk about the problem, ask them questions and let them speak. It’s simply not enough to know what the problem is because some problems are so complex that they require external resources.

For context, you might want to build the best quality product and also give the best customer service, which isn’t easy as it seems. To provide the best quality product you need to know the problems your customers are facing and knowing the best solution to it. To provide the best customer service, your customer service team needs to know exactly everything about the product as much as a creator, problem solver and a marketer.

Identify why would people need your product

Once you know about the problem they are facing, you’ll find out the particular times they’ll use your product. List as many scenarios that come into your mind. Let’s say, your product helps users increase their focus while working. Here are some pain point scenarios you can create:

1. Users work from home and it gets easy to lose focus and track of time because of unexpected reasons.

2. Some users might feel burnout and want to get back on track with better focus.

3. Completing work on a deadline, without being distracted.

When you talk to your customers you might come to know surprising reasons why they use your product. It’s not like you have to consider all of them but some might be useful in the future too. At times, it might lead to an entirely different product. Hence, you might want to position it in a way it solves their problem.

Prioritise which pain point makes the most relevance to the product

Each scenario is the pain point which will give you a specific region to target the audience. Suppose you want to go with users losing focus while working from home, then you might want to target people working from home.

While keeping in mind each scenario will require a different message and psychological technique, you’ll need to prioritise which pain points you want to focus on first that will also have easy to target audience and easy adoption in a small well-target population.

Creating marketing campaigns based on pain points

Now, you can clearly see what problems (pain points) your users are facing, know the story around to better feel it and whom to target. It should be easy for you to talk about it and create clear messages, taglines, social media posts, educational content, and campaigns. Target the bigger pain points and try not to talk about two problems together, it can cause confusion.

To test it more, create a landing page and ask the customers/audience if they can easily understand the product just by reading it. Once you see you’ve won over a target audience, expand your product and market substantially.

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👋 PS: I’m Ritika founder, product marketer and advisor for early-stage startups, find more here or connect with her here. If you’re a first-time founder looking for curated resources, download here. If you enjoyed this post, read the past issues here. You can also promote your product in this newsletter.

A big thanks for reading & sharing!