- 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.