Feel the pain 💊

Hey 👋

Welcome to Neighbourhood Post issue #21 - easy to implement digital marketing ideas straight through your metaphorical letterbox.

I hope you’ve had a good week.

How is your tolerance to pain? Because that’s what today’s newsletter is all about - how to kill your audiences pain.

👉 By the way, if you’ve missed previous newsletters you’ll find them here.

📩 And if you’ve been forwarded this email you can subscribe here.

Do you really know what your audience wants? 

There are a lot of theories and frameworks about how to identify and talk to your audience. 👥

The one you’ll probably most be familiar with is personas.

Marketing strategists love personas.

Basically, creating very specific profiles of the different segments of your audience. Give them a descriptive and slightly ironic/funny name that you definitely wouldn’t call a newborn nowadays, and you have your personas.

We craft them with the best intentions, but at the end of the day Donor Dave, Millenial Max and Left-leaning Lynn end up filed away in a draw, never to be referenced ever again.

Framework’s are helpful, but often not simple.

But at the same time, simple approaches (e.g. “benefits not features”) don’t cut the mustard.

So how do we boil the problem down to a simple but effective solution?

Answer: Pain 😰💊

If you can solve your audience’s pain points, you win.

Many studies have found that humans are provoked to take action by negative emotions rather than positive emotions.

We are more motivated to stop pain than we are to experience joy.

So if our brains are wired that way, how can we use that to better communicate what we have to offer the world?

Can you name half-a-dozen or so pain points your audience experiences that you can solve?

Once you have 6, don’t stop there. See if you can work out the underlying layers of each one.

For example, one of the pain points we solve is helping marketing leaders feel less busy. That’s painful itself, but dig deeper and the real pains starts to show…

They don’t want to work evenings and weekends. They don’t want to miss targets and look like they’ve failed. They don’t have time to focus on the things that interest them. They don’t want to run a painful, tiresome recruitment process.

When thinking about your audience’s pain points, you have to dig beneath the surface a little bit.

If you can uncover a few layers of pain, all connected to what you offer, you’ll see more success.

Take this example I saw in Eastbourne train station.

It’s an ad for business insurance.

The ad focuses on the example of a cyber attack, where you’d think the pain point would be losing sensitive information, equipment or money.

But instead, they’re identifying the deeper pain point; small-medium business owners don’t have the time or resource to think about potential disasters. They’re under-resourced and they feel alone. When running a business they don’t have time to think about cyber security.

Pain points become a very powerful tool when crafting marketing messages.

If you get them right, you can even build a whole business on your audience’s pain points.

I saw this van driving down the road last week

You can’t quite see the writing on the side, but it says:

Estate Agent Board Management.

I’d never heard of it before (maybe you had?) but this company literally goes round putting up and taking down estate agent boards.

Their whole business is based on the pain point that estate agents have; keeping track of installing and uninstalling boards.

But back to marketing.

Where do you look for customer pain points? Here are a few ideas:

#1 Customer research - Ask them. It’s usually the most accurate way to find out. Dig deeper to find out what the underlaying sources of pain might be

#2 Reviews - Look at reviews for your sector on Google, Amazon, Trust Pilot and similar platforms. What do the 1 star reviews say? Usually that will give you an idea of what people struggle with when it comes to your sector.

#3 Your expertise - Chances are you know your audience pretty well. Spend some extended time brainstorming pain points, and how your organisation helps solve them.

That’s all for now.

See you next week ✌️

What we’re looking at 👀 and listening to 👂

📺 “CONTENDERS, YOU WILL GO ON MY FIRST WHISTLE”. Rosie has loved the reboot of Gladiators - nostalgia for her, fun for the kids. 🤼‍♀️

📺 Lillie is onto The Morning Show - Jennifer Anniston, Steve Carell & Reese Witherspoon...what more could we ask for?

Before you go - we’ll never use these newsletters to directly sell you our services, but we’re always here if you need any expertise or support 👍