By Martyn Cook
In my first book, You’re Just One Great Ad Away From Success, I wrote about knowing your customer and building out a customer avatar. If you were a consumer of my first book then you may well remember the chapter. I drew a terrible stick figure with speech bubbles around it containing interests, celebrities, niches, and so on. It was good fun, and we received lots of positive feedback about that chapter.
But knowing your customer is so important, that despite that detailed chapter in my first book, I feel there’s more value to be had from delving even deeper into the subject.
Put simply, the more you know about who you’re selling to, the better you’ll be able to sell to them. If you know exactly what makes your target customer tick: their fears, desires, routines, habits, struggles, friends, family, interests, taste, likes, dislikes, turn-ons, turnoffs, who they’re trying to impress, what they’re secretly trying to say, what’s going on inside their mind, and so on, you’re going to be able to position your products far better to suit them.
Get to know your customers’ pleasure and pain points
Now, realistically speaking, we’ll probably never have the luxury of knowing all of that information about our target customers. But one thing we know for certain is that, typically when we purchase products or services, it’s for one of two reasons: to move towards pleasure or to move away from pain.
Let’s look at an example. Say you’re an ice cream seller. You sell ice cream. Your customers come to you, craving the cold stuff. Maybe they’ve had a particularly hard day at work. They’ve been stressed, they’ve had challenges, they’ve faced issues, and it’s been hot and stuffy in the office. Their sweet tooth is craving something to satisfy it. They’ve got a hankering for your product.
Despite them knowing that it may not be a good health decision in the long term to be chowing down on ice cream, they don’t care. Right now, they’re going to throw caution to the wind and buy their favorite ice cream flavor from you. They’re going to take in the creaminess, the soothing cold, the taste—and move one step closer, even temporarily, towards pleasure.
Now, I guess that’s a fairly easy scenario to understand. As an ice cream seller, you’re selling pleasure. So any marketing material, any kind of messaging that you put out, would be best positioned as a move towards pleasure, the pleasure that your ice cream is going provide future customers.
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Now let’s talk about moving away from pain. A close friend of mine has a brother who is a chiropractor. In fact, he’s a very good one. But despite that, typically, his treatments hurt.
Take it from me, he solved my migraine once. I had a terrible one after I’d spent a long day in Budapest. He sat me down on a stool, played around with pressure points on my neck, head, and shoulders. Whilst it did hurt (don’t get me wrong—it hurt a lot), it was a very short pain that lasted around 20 seconds. And then my migraine went away, the migraine that I’d been struggling with for over an hour at that point. So, although his treatments do hurt, he’s extremely popular.
Why is that? It’s because the pain his patients are currently experiencing is way more than the pain of the treatment or even the price of the it. They come to him and he moves them away from pain. It doesn’t matter that the way he does this involves a little bit painful in itself. The overall net gain is that less pain felt by that customer.
Now don’t get me wrong, pain doesn’t have to be actual pain. I’m not suggesting for one second that you change your product or service so that it physically hurts your customers. Quite the opposite. Their pain could be simply wanting to look fashionable, obsessing over the latest pictures in those celebrity magazines and wanting friends and family to comment on their style. It could be trying to reduce acne, and you don’t want that beautiful face of your potential customer to be spoiled by a big red, glistening spot for all to see, and so you offer the perfect solution. It could be not having the right information to make a decision or to run a business, and you have just the right content to ease their frustration.
What are your customers thinking?
Many data sellers know, and particularly analytical data sellers, that their customers are looking for more information so they can make those big, hard decisions, and make them armed with the right data. They know that their customers have a lot of emotional pain, because they don’t fully know in which direction to go. Their customers know that making the wrong decision could be costly. So they’re looking for the data that will inform their decision—some stats, some analytics, some support in making the right choice.
One tool that I love to use that tells you the exact questions your customers are currently asking, and thus gives you insight into their current pain points, is a website called AnswerThePublic.com. It’s a free tool with a pro plan, and it’s definitely worth checking out. You type in your niche or a keyword, and it’ll give you a list of different questions and search queries people are using related to it. It’s a great way to give you an idea of where your audience’s heads are currently at, and what it is they’re looking for when it comes to that particular topic.
Once you know your customer well enough, you’ll have a much better idea of what their pain and pleasure pressure points are. In fact, even after analyzing just a small sample of your customers’ pain and pleasure points, you’ll begin to see patterns so that you no longer need to work on a per customer basis. You can end up comfortably making generalizations that would apply to hundreds, if not thousands, of future customers. And once you can describe how your product reduces their pain or increases their pleasure in a way they care about, and translate that into the real lifestyles, issues, and questions that your customers have, your product will fly off the shelves.
Marketing through the pleasure or pain lens
By understanding both your audience and your message better, your conversion rate will improve. The 1% improvement here is found by leveraging the “towards pleasure” or “away from pain” principle in your business, to tap into the fundamental decision-making part of your customer. In short, a better understanding of why your customer may want your product will result in being able to position and sell your product better to address that need.
A fun example I like to think about is the humble drill. Think about it. Why do you buy a drill? Do you buy a drill because you want to drill or do you buy a drill because you want a hole? Many people make mistakes, and when they are selling a drill, they’ll talk about the features of the drill. They’ll say, “The drill spins at this particular speed. It’s lightweight. The battery lasts this long,” and so on. And whilst these features are important, really, if they just pointed out to their future customers, “Our drill makes the hole that you want in the fastest, cleanest, easiest way possible,” that could easily be enough to sell it.
So, does your product or service bring customers towards pleasure or away from pain? Maybe it does both. Either way, write down at least three bullet point ideas for your customer avatar, and what pain or pleasure point they may currently be facing. How can you position your product to clearly demonstrate the increased pleasure or decreased pain that your customer will experience as a result of using it?
Take a look at other products in your industry, or similar comparable products that are popular, and view their marketing through the pleasure or pain lens. How are they doing? How would you improve it? What learning can you take away from analyzing other organisations’ marketing that you can apply to your business?
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