Top places to find pain points
Tapping into persona pain points is simple enough… when they’re listed out for you. But what if you don’t have them, or what if you aren’t satisfied with existing documentation?
As a content strategist, it’s time to examine your two options:
Go through an in-depth brand analysis, likely with an external agency
Find creative ways to get them yourself
Here are some quick and easy ways you can find pain points with minimal effort.
Read your reviews
Depending on your business model, you might have reviews on your website through Yotpot, on your Google profile, or in Yelp. Check all of the places you would expect to see reviews and start reading!
Do you see any trends in what people like and dislike about your product? Going straight to the source helps you uncover people’s true feelings.
2. Leverage surveys
Take a look at existing survey results. Is there any insight into how people feel about your product, or why they chose it?
If not, you could pretty easily run surveys on your own. Ask 5 multiple choice questions about why people chose your product, what they like about it, and what helped them make their decision. (Note - multiple choice questions are much simpler to analyze than open-ended questions.)
3. Read form submissions
Does your website generate leads through forms? Read the comments section to get a better feel for the problems they have and solutions they seek.
You could also, in the future, include some form fields that give you more data. You might ask: “What do you need help with?” with a dropdown menu of options.
4. Read webinar questions
If your company conducts webinars to generate leads, see if you can watch recordings or export the comments. People are bound to ask questions around the pain they are feeling, whether or not it directly ties to your product.
5. Conduct interviews
Talking to your customer-facing teams isn’t always the simplest option. It takes some time to craft your questions and schedule meetings, and you’ll have to work around inconsistencies in people’s answers.
However, it’s absolutely worth the effort to talk to your sales teams, customer support, and other customer-facing roles. They have insight that is under wraps (unlike a public product review that competitors can find).
Here are some questions to help get you started:
What are the most common reasons people reach out? Does this differ between persona a, b, and c?
What do people hate about competitors that we do better?
What are the most common things that convince people?
What does a true persona analysis look like?
These methods won’t work for everyone. For instance, if you work with a newer brand, you might not have the luxury of tapping into existing customer information. And larger brands might not be keen on taking shortcuts for persona work.
The alternative is going through a formal persona analysis - or outsourcing the process to specialists.
How it works: specialists will conduct workshops with your team, perform user testing, and conduct thorough user research. They could run surveys to large groups of people, use smaller focus groups to zero in on behavior, or purchase third-party data.
Brand agencies and UX researchers have the resources to go above and beyond the basics. But, they will be much more costly and time-consuming than the initial methods covered.
What’s next?
You might be surprised by some of the information you find. Be sure to carefully document your insights; your research can support decisions to adjust positioning.
However, if you are able to turn these pain points into keywords and rank for them… you’ve already repositioned your brand all on your own. When you’re good at SEO, you have some extra power as a content specialist!
Read next: A Content Marketer’s Guide to SEO
