What Is a Pain Point? How to Identify Your Customers’ Pain Points

In marketing, once you correctly identify the the target customer portrait you already hold 50% of your campaign's success. We need to understand what they want, what they need that your product or service can provide, and above all, what their "hidden pain" is. Marketers call this hidden pain a "pain point". So what is a pain point? How can a brand find its customers' pain points? Let's Mona Media look for the answer in this article.

What is a pain point?

As mentioned, a pain point is a customer's source of pain: the specific problems your target and potential customers are facing. If your business can quickly grasp these pain points and improve your product or service in time, you will be closer to customers and able to ease that pain for them. Customers will then be willing to pay for your product or service to meet their need. Example: Customers today care more and more about social issues, including the environment. This directly raises demand for eco-friendly products and products made from natural materials. They also feel less favorable toward online food shops that keep using plastic to pack and store food. So to keep their revenue from sliding, many online shops have switched to paper or reusable plastic packaging to cut down on waste. Even if a shop raises its price by 3,000 to 5,000 VND, customers are still willing to pay extra for an eco-friendly experience. This example shows how important it is to understand customers' psychology and pain points.

The 4 main types of pain point

Financial Pain Point

At certain times, target customers face financial problems, so they decide to cut spending with the brands that supply them. Example: A woman who usually spends 500,000 VND a month on skincare now wants to cut that to 300,000 VND while still getting decent product quality.

Productivity Pain Point

This pain point shows up when your customers feel that experiencing your product or service takes a lot of time. They want to save time so they can spend it on other things. Example: A household using an air fryer spends about 10 minutes per use, but now they want it down to just 5 minutes.

Process Pain Point

This pain point appears when your customers find your business's process too tangled and complicated. For example, they find it a hassle to use the e-commerce site for shopping. They want a simpler, lighter solution. Example: Customers want an e-commerce site that is easy to reach and easy to pay on, where they can enter their details and choose products in just a few clicks.

Support Pain Point

Customers are easily ignored just when they need advice from customer care. This leaves them dissatisfied and may lead them to turn their backs on your business. Example: Customers need support with shipping, warranty or payment methods. See more:

• Experience building a professional online customer service system
• Guide to building an after-sales customer care process

How to identify customer pain points

Our advice when looking for customer pain points is to use qualitative research rather than quantitative research. Qualitative research focuses on customers' detailed, in-depth answers through conversations, in-depth interviews and so on. A pain point is subjective: even when 2 customers share the same pain point, it does not mean it comes from the same cause. That is why statistical, big-picture methods such as quantitative research will not be as effective as you would like. MONA will show you 3 ways to find pain points accurately from your customers.

Talk to and ask your current customers

If you want current customers to keep spending on your product, your business needs to meet almost all of their needs, wants, preferences and even their budget. On top of that, you must know how to ease their hidden pain. To collect this information for research and product development, marketers can use common methods today: direct interviews, informal conversations or surveys about the problems customers face. This approach is considered cost-efficient, but it takes time and people to carry out. Example: If your business sells Japanese skincare products, the questions to ask customers might be: What difficulties do women face? How much are they willing to spend on daily skincare? What makes them decide to buy? From a survey of current customers, you can apply the findings to potential customers. Your business should start discussion topics for potential customers, which lets them discover their own pain points in your industry. Through those discussions, if they potential customers agree that they face the same pain points as current customers, it means they will also find your product extremely useful. See also: How to use testimonials properly

Talk to your salespeople

Salespeople understand their customers best because in the course of selling they collect all the valuable information you need about your customers. Many businesses even give the task of finding pain points to salespeople, especially telesales. Their job is to talk and ask questions directly with buyers and then find common ground for both sides. Marketers often use the salespeople's direct questioning to draw up a profile of potential customers.

Look at your competitors' pain points

One very simple and free method is to rely on information from your competitors. Research competitors is an important step in the process of drawing up customer profile. One question to ask is: which pain points do competitors use? Visit the websites and social media pages of competitors in your industry to see which pain points they target. Above is the information on What is a pain point? that many people still wonder about. We hope this has helped you understand the topic better, and we wish you success in building strategies that solve customers' pain points effectively in the time ahead.