Customers need to know you understand their problem
You’ve got a great product. It’s got features your competitors would kill for. Your innovator and early adopter customers are raving and evangelising about it. The product works and you’ve got a roadmap that is going to deliver even more cool stuff that your early customers can’t wait to get their hands on.
But your marketing campaigns are not having the impact you expected and they’re not generating as many leads as you’d like. The sales team is struggling to get prospects to engage. In short, you’ve stalled.
Why?
There could, of course, be lots of reasons. One possible issue is simply that your customers (or, more accurately, your prospects) are not responding to your marketing efforts because you’re not empathising with them. You’re not demonstrating that you understand their problem (the one you know your solution solves).
You understand their problem
Assuming for a second that you’re running an awareness campaign to generate leads to fill the early stages of the sales funnel, you are looking to create awareness of your solution. The most effective way of doing this is to not actually talk about you or your solution at all. At this stage, just focus on communicating that you understand the customer’s problem and that you have a solution. You don’t need to talk about how you solve the problem or who you are — right now, they don’t matter. This is because the people you’re reaching out to don’t know who you are or what your solution is — they simply don’t care.
They don’t care about you
Your customers are interested in themselves and their problems. They have no time for you, your products, or what they can do or how much better they are compared to the competition. They are only interested in solutions. Once they know that you are a potential solution, they will be interested in learning about how and why you solve their problem, but not before. In fact, when they get to that point, they will be further along in the buying process — they will have identified a solution (maybe multiple solutions from multiple vendors). It’s at this point that they will in fact want lots of information about you, how your solution works, what capabilities it has etc. so that they can compare your solution to your competitors’.
Your campaigns at this early stage need to talk the language of the customer and be all about ‘the problem’.
You are the hero
Here’s an example.
Imagine your product is a cloud-based accounting package that you are selling to accountancy practices. It’s very similar to your rival’s product but you know that the massive challenge the practices have is on-boarding their hundreds of clients (plumbers, builders, garages etc.). Your campaign needs to lead on the fact that you know that on-boarding is THE issue and that yours is the only solution that addresses it.
Your solution is now the hero. You’ve shown you understand their problem. They will now engage and want to learn more about who you are and what your solution does (and how you solve the on-boarding thing of course).
They’re hooked!
