Some marketers base marketing on relieving customer “pain points”, an effective starting point for selling. Too often, however, marketers don’t go deep enough into the pain for maximum persuasion.
For example, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) company might identify a potential customer’s pain point as being unable to find a given document in a timely manner—say product specs, budget forecasts or planning documents. In this case, ERP software does a fine job at easily retrieving a document, thereby solving the customer’s problem or pain point.
That’s great as far as it goes. But brain science tells us that people decide to buy for emotional reasons (and justify these emotions with logic). And in our example, being able to easily find a document isn’t, in itself, an emotional appeal.
Unless you can dig beneath the pain to the emotion beneath it, you will have a much more difficult time getting customers to pay attention to, and ultimately, purchase from you.
The questions below are a way to uncover the emotional rewards of your product or service. Whether writing a tweet, a blog, a brochure, a video or other marketing material, asking yourself or your product managers questions like these can give you the tools to empathize with customers and, therefore, make them more likely to connect with what you’re selling.
If you have difficulty finding answers to these questions, you may need to dig deeper into your customer desires using empathy mapping, focus groups, formal and informal feedback or the like.
Empathetic questions (use these questions to find the emotions underlying your product/service attributes.)
- What benefit does this product/service bring to your customer?
- Why is this benefit important to your customer?
- What will customers gain from this benefit in human terms? (think about things like more prestige, job security, more time for family, pride, etc.)
- What is the customers’ underlying emotion that makes this an important benefit?
Start with the most important benefit and repeat until you understand the underlying emotional drivers in your customers’ buying journeys. It’s the best way I know to interest people in—and ultimately to get them to buy—what you’re selling.