How to Figure Out What's Keeping Your Audience up at Night When They Don't Have a Clue

How to Figure Out What's Keeping Your Audience up at Night When They Don't  Have a Clue

Most marketers these days will tell you that the most convincing way to write your web copy is to solve a problem for your audience. You cannot expect your audience to read your site or watch your videos and guess whether you're good for them or not. Instead, you need to connect the dots for them. You have to be exceptionally clear of the solution you provide and it has to be the answer to the problem they're struggling with.
 
But sometimes your audience isn't aware of the problem. It may be that the problem is not acute enough yet for them to be entertaining a solution. Sometimes they know there's a problem but they're unable to define it. Maybe they're not sure of the cause or maybe they can't quite separate it from other difficulties they're having. Whatever the case may be, if they are unclear about the problem, you'll have difficulties providing solution-based marketing.
 
In these cases, you need to find a way to help them better understand their problem before you can provide a solution.
 
But how do you do that if they don't know what their problem is? And how do you figure it out? As in other types of marketing, the best way to do this is to be as transparent as possible in the following ways.

 

What is solution-based marketing?

Solution-based marketing is the approach that focuses on the customer need behind particular businesses. In solution-based marketing you use a problem to shape your web copy. Don’t focus on the negative. Instead, present an opportunity for growth or potential for your customers. For instance, remember the McDonald's catch phrase “ you deserve a break today”?  That is an example of (assumed) solution-based marketing.The problem that is not directly names is that people are stressed and overworked. McDonald's is jumping in and suggesting (without directly saying it) they can provide the solution to that stressful existence. They can provide a much-needed break.
 
Solution-based marketing is its most efficient when the problem it’s solving for is known by the potential customer. However, in the case of the McDonald's example, the customer may not even realize how stressed they were until McDonald's presented the solution in suggesting that they deserve the break.

How Do You Know There's a Problem?

If your customer doesn't know there's a problem, how do you?
 
Every business has a problem the question is whether the business owner has taken the time to define and understand it.
 
In many cases what they recognize as the difficulty is not the actual problem but how it is presenting itself. This situation can be compared to a very painful headache. When most people have one, they refer to that as the problem or the reason they can't do something or why they’re in a bad mood. However that's just how the problem is presenting itself. There’s an underlying cause of the headache like maybe dehydration. While the headache feels like the problem, it's really the dehydration that is at the center of the issue. If you really want to solve the problem, you have to fix the dehydration.
 
Most people look to stop the headache because that’s the pain. This is only a temporary solution. If you're using solution-based marketing you want to alleviate the pain by getting to the heart of the problem, not just solving how it's presenting. You can do this several ways.
 

Look at reviews

Examine your reviews and that of your top competitor. What are the phrases that keep coming up over and over again? Use those words and comments to shape your content and web copy headlines.
 

Talk to Your Customers

Create a panel of your most loyal customers or if you don't have loyal customers, talk to some of your most recent ones. Ask them why they bought from you. And if they bought from anybody else. If so, ask them why they bought from that person.
 
They may bring up price, proximity, or referrals as the reasons why they chose one business over another. These are symptoms just like that headache. You want to dive deeper. Use the words they mention to get to what they’re really concerned about. For instance, if they refer to budget as the reason they selected someone, they're likely watching the bottom line.
 
You want to make sure you talk about the danger of the competition that doesn’t stay within your budget or expensive up-sells and charges that aren't negotiated in the original conversation when creating content.
 

Look at Requests on Facebook

Have you ever noticed people on Facebook asking their following for recommendations on local businesses? When they do, very few people get right to their immediate need such as asking for a veterinarian in New York City. In most cases, they have a story to tell before they launch into their need.
 
Maybe they've gotten burned before or want to make sure they give all the background. Maybe they don't want to waste anyone's time or they want to get the ideal fit. But whatever the reason, they tell a story instead of asking for the referral directly.
 
Because of this, business recommendations can be a wealth of information. Peruse these in your local city group on Facebook or read your friends’ by clicking on the recommendations tab on the left hand side of your Facebook profile.
 
If you still can't figure out what the problem is plaguing your potential customers and what's keeping them up at night, do some research on your ideal demographic. By using your target demographic, you can search for their most common struggles. Through identifying their most common struggles, you can then create content around those difficulties and test how your audience responds to that content.
 

• Is that content shared?
• Do they click on it and interact with it?
• Did they leave you comments or ask additional questions?
• Is it a heavily visited post?

 
Any of these things can indicate that you have struck content gold and are providing something that is a great value to your audience. 
 
While you could create content that reflects all of the problems that your ideal demographic might face based on research, the easiest and most efficient way to figure out what's bothering them is to do some A/B testing with questions on social media.
 
No one has time to write to every possible concern in the world. You have to narrow those things down. Focus on the top three reasons your customers may be struggling. Ask a couple of pointed, open-ended questions on social media that would help you better understand your active audience. Using this kind of crowd-sourced R&D can assist you in creating valuable content without a lot of trial and error.
 
This tactic won't completely remove the need to do some testing to see what people respond to but it will get you halfway there and provide you with good insights as to what people need from you most.