When we hear the fateful words Darth Vader utters, it is shocking. “Luke…I am your…father…”
Over and over again, we ask ourselves, “How is this possible?” How could the evil and corrupt ruler of the galaxy and ultimate Syth lord have helped create the one destined to save it all?
Believe it or not, this could be similar to a question you may have asked yourself about the digital marketing practice at your company. Meaning, how can you make marketing work for you and not against you? How can you use what can be inherently complicated and sometimes dark for good and not evil?
You have attempted to design a marketing practice and website that is effective, but still, something is missing. You need to address your customer’s and audience’s pain points. You need to find out what makes your readers tick before you can appeal to them.
Much like Luke in Star Wars, we need a guide to help us realize our biggest strengths and weaknesses. To overcome our challenges and reach all the success of our hard work. We all have a lot to learn from Yoda.
Strong customer relationships are the hallmark of ethical and appealing business practices. Keep reading to discover how to address your customer’s pain points and be an upbeat guide in their approach, much like Yoda. Give your customers faith in the force (and digital marketing) once again.
What is a Pain Point in Digital Marketing?
Return of the Jedi includes many instances where Luke and Yoda address pain points. As Luke learns the full breadth of his power, he realizes the value of the obstacle. He knows to view his downfalls as instructions.
Luke is learning how to harness the force and what he should avoid within it. He sees the error of the dark side.
When we apply this to business practices, the effect is out of this world. As a company, you should take note. Once you begin to see the holes in your strategy, you can start to find the value of these shortcomings.
Learning where your weaknesses are in your marketing can be the boost your sales and metrics need. You may find that you have a certain audience you were leaving out of the conversation. Are you including everyone with a specific pain point?
Rate Your Pain Point
Whether you realize it or not, you have seen a pain point chart. If you have ever experienced an injury or illness and gone to see a doctor, they probably asked you to rate your pain on a scale. You know the one, with the six faces either smiling or in distress ranging from green to red.
The green level or number one is the least amount of pain, and the red level, number six, is the most intense pain possible. In marketing, we refer to these pain points as a situation relating to our customer base.
Taking your audience into consideration, we can rate these interactions or how we are helping them, on the same similar scale.
When a potential customer base is experiencing a pain point in marketing, we need to address it to prevent further conflict and any marketing disturbances. This speaks for any challenges or problems the customer could be experiencing.
As marketers, we must address pain points as problems. In our role, we attempt to help our customers solve our products, goods, or services. Or, we may do damage to our user base and deter them from our company once and for all.
Your potential customers could be experiencing many different types of pain points. To get yourself familiar with what they may be experiencing, you need to understand the various stressors. Pain points appear in a few varieties:
Productivity Pain Points
Your clients are spending far too much time on their present marketing strategy or choosing to make inefficient use of their time. For some business owners, marketing doesn’t feel like a necessary step.
They may feel as though they don’t have time to think about how they can help their business thrive, and to them it may be unnecessary. Most of the time, their strategies fall to the wayside or do not see any development at all.
This can put a business at a major disadvantage. A business owner should be responsible for their message. Sure, hiring a team is a great option. But, it is the owner whose name is behind their product. They should make sure their message is on-brand with their voice as a company.
This business owner may also have issues with time management. They probably need better administrative planning and implementation. You can show your client how to put effective systems in place by using a bountiful marketing strategy.
When they see the effects of efficiency on their business model, they will see a change in their old unproductive ways. You have the power to change their ways, and to steer them in the right direction.
Financial Pain Points
Your prospects are paying a premium for their new marketing solutions and want to scale back to reduce their spending to improve their operations. Show them that there are many ways to get this done. You can remedy your customer’s pain points in this situation by first showing them all the important ways they are already saving money.
This can demonstrate to them that they can spend responsibly for their business, and may motivate them to make a similar change in another aspect of their company.
You could even show them a few new ways to increase their productivity as this is generally a smart place to begin if your customer is concerned with finances. Productivity can help to make your client’s dollar stretch much further. Employees will often be able to implement and create procedures in record time.
Support Pain Points
Your customers aren’t getting the help they need at key points in the consumer path or sales process. This could mean the current inquiry or customer service team needs more training. The metrics of how these operations are serving your customers are miserable.
You can improve your work by including elements such as customer satisfaction surveys. The support pain point is remedied with a simple change in procedure.
But even so, as useful as your sales team’s input may be, it’s important to separate your sales agents’ pain points from your clients’ pain points. Your marketing representatives’ issues may be very genuine, but you’re not creating a product or delivering a service to make their situation simpler.
You are, however, indirectly responsible for their well-being. Unlike your client, if you want to overcome any big business overhauls or ventures, you must keep your trained staff intact.
It is your job to make sure people are taken care of on all fronts.
Process Pain Points
By categorizing consumer pain points, you can begin to see what you may have overlooked. You will see how to position your business or product as a solution to your prospects’ issues, as well as, what you need in order to keep them satisfied.
For example, if your prospects’ primary pain points are financial, you might highlight your product’s features in the sense of a cheaper monthly payment package. You can emphasize the improved ROI your happy customers see after becoming a partner.
Even though this is a reasonable starting point, it is not as simple as defining price as a pain point before you start highlighting the product or services that are less expensive than the competition.
Many prospective customers’ challenges are nuanced. They may entail concerns from some of the categories mentioned above, or they may not. That is why you must consider your customers’ pain points and position.
See your business as a solution to one challenging pain point. Ask your customer how you can enhance their experience. They will be impressed that you did and you will learn a lot about your base.
You are like Yoda to your customers, a trustworthy advisor who can assist in resolving a variety of problems. You can give guidance from experience.
The B2B consumer is always, by definition, trying to buy a solution to a dilemma. Pain points matter much more in B2B marketing than in B2C marketing.
It is helpful to position yourself in a metaphor you understand to clarify the pain points better. How can these points help (or hurt) your customer interactions? How can they help to drive home a specific voice?
The Pain Point Take Away
By categorizing consumer pain points, you will begin to consider how to position your business as a solution to your client’s issues.
You can learn what is required to keep them satisfied as a customer. For example, if your prospects’ primary pain points are financial, you might highlight your product’s features. Such as a cheaper monthly payment package or the strengthened ROI your customers can receive.
Although this is a reasonable starting point, it is not as easy as defining expense as a pain point. This would be only pointing out that the product or service is more affordable than the competition.
Many prospective customers’ challenges are layered, and they may have concerns from a few points.
You must consider your customers’ pain points holistically. Position your business as a solution to more than one challenging pain point; as a trustworthy advisor who can assist in the resolution of a multitude of problems.
This is not far off from being in almost the exact situation that Luke and Yoda find themselves in. Yoda teaches Luke how to read the room and how to interpret what he can learn from others.
“A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack.”
You should always use knowledge to learn from others, and never for an attack – is a great marketing strategy. In this case, use your customer’s pain points to address their needs and learn from them, never attacking them.
Or anyone for that matter. Marketing for your company should come from a place of empathy for others and a sensitivity to a variety of experiences.
Pain Points According to Star Wars
A great and simple way to imagine pain points metaphors is to look at Star Wars. This is a familiar story we all know; this is a rather simple (and complex) battle between good and evil. The Syth being evil and the good being the Jedi warrior with the power of “the force.”
We like to think of our clients as Luke Skywalker. By seeking guidance to understand their deepest talents and processes we can reach our goals. Think of Bear Fox Marketing as Yoda, trying to help our customers carve a path to the goal of being a light in the dark.
The company that wants to help you achieve your digital marketing goals. We realize the need to conquer the dark and evil parts of the interweb.
Think of us as Yoda, your trusty guide through the perils of the digital branding universe. Yoda always has wise words and has the valuable experience his students (like Luke) can learn from. Yoda’s teachings allow others to find the most rewarding parts of themselves so they may trust their own intuition.
We can think of pain points as Darth Vader, the ultimate Syth lord, as a chancellor of evil and fear. These are pain points. Pain points, much like Darth, have the ability to compromise everything. Pain and doubt work through a wrench in the ever-evolving concepts of marketing and speaking to a larger audience.
A pain point is a specific problem that prospective customers of your business are experiencing. In other words, you can think of pain points as problems, plain and simple. Like any problem, customer pain points are as diverse and varied as your customers themselves.
Much like Darth Vader’s pain and those experiences that may draw someone to the “dark side,” pain points involve many details. Details that may seem unclear at first glance.
Building a Brand and Customer Relationships
We position ourselves as a formal guide through the vast and sometimes questionable ways of the internet.
What exactly should you be in search of for your content? What content is the most beneficial to your strategy? What are some actions you can take to gain confidence and understanding in your brand?
The challenges that prospective consumers are attempting to address are encoded in pain points. They involve difficulties, deficiencies, and roadblocks to progress, distribution, and performance. These are the obstacles that we can think of as fear and pain.
In Star Wars, we watch the Jedi warriors work to overcome their pain with the help of Yoda, the trusty guide.
As the audience, we see that Luke’s pain is what fuels him. Skywalker uses his pain points to move him forward away from the toxic energy of so many around him. This is a wonderful approach to a marketing strategy.
Cut out the negativity. Learn from your mistakes. Approach each customer and potential client relationship as your first.
Strive above and beyond that; you can build a reputation of value and appreciation.
Strong communication approaches these pain points from the consumer’s view. Assisting them in exploring options and determining whether a given product or service is a good choice. This is done through education and awareness.
Is Your Service Agile?
If a product or service is set up in an agile manner with the starting point – “As a buyer, I want to do X to accomplish Y ” – companies can lose sight of the customer’s viewpoint. They can only become engrossed in their own revenue goals.
While they are the entire point of marketing, revenue goals should not be the main focus of a team or enriching your voice as a company. If used, revenue goals should be a bonus, especially if they are too high. Having money as your main focus is dangerous.
Ignoring your clients and your employees’ interpersonal skills is an invitation to the dark side of the force.
Your branding and marketing voice’s goal is to help you gain traffic and expand your business. This will improve your company no matter which way you spin it.
But, there is a reputable and solid way to do this. Think of using good old-fashioned marketing tactics and advertising as the way of the Jedi. Then, it is easy to imagine pain points as the aspects that could compromise all the good intentions. Possibilities that hang in the balance, much like the darker ways of the force.
What Star Wars Can Teach Us about Pain Points
Every contact a customer has with your company should be as frictionless as possible. So the material should be simple to find and, above all, useful. We’ve learned from experience how to cut the inadvertent pressure points that ads can cause.
Make sure you include people with disabilities, whose first language is not English, and low-vision people. Not only is it important to be inclusive, but setting this message as a guideline may influence other companies to do the same.
This Star Wars analogy shows the importance of ethical treatment of marketing practices. If this type of work is done wrongly, it can lead to many negative or hurtful situations.
This works much like the force here; if we do not balance our ethics and practices to ensure good work, it is easy for the light to give birth to the dark.
The darker side, in this situation, would be not to keep the customer in the forefront, take untrustworthy shortcuts, and ultimately let our monetary gain get the best of us.
Star Wars provides valuable business lessons about being proactive and cautious while performing business transactions. You should consider ethics in all business decisions you make; much like Luke, you’ll want to be careful about how you move through the world.
Being proactive means thinking about how a situation can negatively affect your business if you don’t see the potential problems before they occur. Learning the gift of foresight can help you succeed, much like the force.
Using the Force to Your Advantage
By keeping an eye on the material that receives the most engagement, we have learned to think more about the bottom of the funnel, which means thinking about possible options and prices up front rather than about ourselves.
We have refocused our content to be more “behind the scenes” and “what’s next.” This helps to shed a positive light on differences and not view them as obstacles. Differences and acceptance should be a force in your marketing and content strategy.
It’s important to focus on inclusion in order not to further marginalize people. By appealing to many different people keeps the conversation well-rounded and sets a standard for your company to embrace diversity.
Customers, it turns out, want to be informed shoppers. They want to see what a salesperson would think in an introductory call before anything happens. This is a strategy we recently used for one of our virtual customers.
As a result, we were able to create a significant amount of content centered on demystifying operations. We focus on demonstrating what collaborating with them “looks like.” We described the initial preparation and information collection phase, then creation of a security and implementation schedule.
May the Force (of Pain Points) be with You
Making connections to popular culture is an important part of branding and marketing. Providing these touchpoints for customers and your audience makes things familiar and gives us an easy way to explain complicated concepts.
Like pain points in business, Luke Skywalker uses his painful associations with things in his childhood, and realizations as an adult to fuel his rise to full Jedi power. Think of yourself as Yoda, and as your customer rises to greatness, you will be there to consider their points of pain to determine a strategy. If you want to know more about a personalized strategy to help your business address its shortcomings productively, check out our blog; while you’re there, drop us a line and begin your new marketing adventure— and let us help you avoid the dark side.