Want More Customers? Solve Their Problems

Do me a favor and ponder these numbers for a moment:

• Google is the world’s most popular website, with a whopping 88.07 billion visits just in the period November 2020 – April 2021.
• Internet users make 3.5 billion Google searches every single day.
• The vast majority of the 1,000 most frequently searched prompts on Google are how-to questions.

These stats tell us a couple of things. First, there are now more internet users than ever before. Second, people go online to find solutions to their issues – and if you learn how to solve customer problems within a few clicks of their Google searches, you could see a massive increase in your conversion rates.

And this doesn’t just apply to how-to searches, either. Even if someone is perusing Pinterest for recipes or Facebook for the latest gossip on their new neighbor, they have an itch to scratch. A want that they are looking to satisfy.

In marketing, we call these “pain points.” We also know that if we offer an effective solution to a person’s pain point, they are far more likely to become a paying customer.

Quick Takeaways

• Identifying your customers’ pain points and providing them with targeted solutions is the secret to building a highly successful marketing strategy and boosting your conversion rates.

• Some ways you could provide solutions to your customers include helping them save money, answering their burning questions, and providing them with step-by-step guides on tasks they are looking to do.

• By giving your audience the information they need when they need it, you can transform your brand into an “influencer” or a trustworthy authority figure in your field.

• Once your potential customers start trusting you, getting them to buy your products or services is the next logical – and easy – step.

How to Solve Customer Problems 101: Find and Quench a Craving

To show you how to solve your customers’ problems, let’s consider a practical example:

1. Identify the Pain Point

It’s a crisp fall weekend. Our potential customer – let’s call her Olivia – has just bought a basket of fresh apples at her local farmers market. She is enjoying the hustle and bustle of the shoppers and the warm October sun, but the apple scent also makes her feels nostalgic for her late mom’s signature apple crisp.

That nostalgia is Olivia’s pain point. It causes her to get on Google and search for “apple crisp recipes.”

The first thing she sees is a recipe someone posted on Pinterest. She clicks on the link and looks over the ingredients: one of the items on the list is cinnamon.

Olivia rushes to her pantry. No cinnamon! Her craving, however, doesn’t let up.

To solve her problem, she heads out to her usual grocer to get some cinnamon. Despite the high price, she picks up a container. While she’s there, she also buys a couple of other things. End of story.

2. Build a Targeted Marketing Strategy

Now, suppose you’re that grocer’s competition. You may be smaller than the other guy, but you’re way savvier.

You know that in October, a lot of women go to farmers markets on the weekend and buy apples because they’re in season in your area.

You also know that the three indispensable ingredients in almost any apple dessert are cinnamon, sugar, and flour.

So, the first thing you do is put those items on sale.

But that’s not all. You also create two ads, one on Google Ads and the other on Pinterest – because you know that compared to social media, Pinterest can be 2.3 times more cost efficient per conversion and generate twice as high a return on retail ad spend. You do not buy banner ads because you know they have 99 problems and a click ain’t one!

But you do you put another ad on Facebook just in case. After all, people love to spend time on social media on the weekends. Surely, the conversation will turn to Mom’s apple pie at one point. It’s fall, after all.

So, you’ve now bought some Google Search ads, promoted a few Pinterest pins, and run a couple of Facebook ads.

You didn’t just throw them to the wind, though. You used those sites’ powerful analytics programs and optimized your content for SEO to target just the kind of people you knew would be on those sites looking for apple dessert recipes:

• Middle-aged women
• Women whose kids are old enough to be off doing something other than hanging around the house on the weekends
• Women who’ve frequented recipe sites before
• Women who buy at sales
• Women who live five miles or fewer from your grocery store

You even targeted the time: Saturday mornings and afternoons in late September and October. Just when your ideal customers are likely to be getting back from the market.

3. Offer a No-Brainer Solution to Your Customer’s Problem

In this alternate scenario, before Olivia heads out to your competitor’s store, she comes across one of your ads.

She sees your promoted Pinterest pin as she searches for recipes online. But to her, it looks just like any other pin – with a lip-smacking photo of a piece of apple crisp, which links to an apple crisp recipe on your blog. Just what she is looking for!

Once Olivia opens the link and reads the recipe, she sees a call-to-action that said, “Buy all these ingredients at your hometown store.” When she clicks on that button, it leads to an online version of your mailer. Topmost among the weekly specials are – you guessed it – cinnamon, flour, and sugar. Bingo.

Better still, Olivia had not one but two chances to see that particular ad: via your promoted pin as well as another ad that pops up above the regular search results.

A second woman, Charlotte, found your ad while scrolling through her Facebook news feed. She, too, followed the link, as she’d been wondering what to do with that bunch of apples in her kitchen for some time. After reading your apple pie recipe, she got inspired to try it out and eventually ended up at your store.

4. Reap the Benefits

Both Olivia and Charlotte, like most impulse shoppers, bought way more than they needed. Not just your sale items, but also your other stuff.

Keurig coffee pods – because what good is a hot apple crisp or a piece of homemade apple pie without a cup of steaming coffee to go with it? Whipped cream. Ice cream. Half-and-half for the coffee. And so on.

They bought all of that because you scratched their emotional itch. You provided content that solved your customers’ problems – and you reaped the benefits.

Solving Customer Problems Using Online Content: Practical Examples

It’s not just apple pie recipes that solve problems.

Every product or service a business offers for sale can do that.

So does the business owner’s expertise. When you share your insider’s knowledge, customers will see you as an expert in your field. They’ll believe in your products and services because you’re good – maybe even the best – at what you do.

Our hypothetical grocer, obviously, is a connoisseur of good foods. Her innate sense of seasonal produce and the right ingredients to turn that produce into delicious desserts led her to create and publish two fine, highly converting recipes.

Here are some more examples of how business owners can attract more customers simply by publishing free, high-quality content that solves people’s problems.

• Soothing customer worries. Imagine you’re a pediatrician. Why not publish content to help parents of young children know when an illness is serious enough to call a doctor? What about an article about the symptoms of a cold versus those of the flu? By solving some of your patients’ biggest worries, you can expand your patient base.
• Making people’s lives easier. Did you know that fashion stores rake in sales with Instagram photos featuring one of their items paired with shoes and other accessories to accent the garment? By providing complete outfit ideas, they make their customers’ lives easier and solve the perennial problem of “What in the world should I wear with this dress?”
• Helping your audience save money. Smart automobile dealers post articles and videos that help owners take better care of their cars, giving readers free advice that can save them money. You can bet that those dealers will be the first ones their readers will contact.

How to Solve Customer Problems: A Real-Life Case Study

Influencers are not social media personalities. A business can become an influencer, too – or rather an authority in their field that others look up to – as they solve problems for their target customers.

Here’s an example of a music school that did just that:

A Music Success Story

Back in 2009, this Los Angeles guitar academy started posting videos of its director’s guitar renditions of popular classical pieces on its YouTube channel.

Those posts attracted a huge number of fans among guitarists and other music lovers – and have helped guitarists hone their technique simply by observing that of the director. Not only did the school solve the problem guitarists face of finding something to play, but it also showed them how to play it with their demonstration videos.

Thanks to these posts, the school has now expanded its business beyond music lessons to also include selling sheet music for the pieces from the videos – a much more scalable product.

But the benefits don’t end here. When a sheet music purchaser finds that they cannot play the piece with the same finesse as the director, they sign up for lessons at his school. This is how by solving people’s problems, the school also managed to expand its customer base.

If you, too, would like to draw customers to your business by providing solutions to their challenges, find out what keeps them up at night. What are their pain points? Once you know that, you can create and post the kind of content that will scratch their emotional itch.

A Quick Note on Video Marketing

The music school case study is demonstrative of one of the biggest trends in content marketing right now.

Because it’s so effective at increasing brand awareness and new lead acquisition, video is currently the number one media type used in content marketing. Just consider these stats:

• 66% of consumers say they’d rather watch a video than read about a product
• 68% of viewers will watch a business video in its entirety if it’s less than a minute
• YouTube watch time on TV screens only is 250 million hours per day

These numbers mean one thing: in addition to blog posts and online articles – which can be incredibly effective in their own right – you may also want to explore video marketing as a way to advertise your business. Trust me, the results (and your bottom line) will not disappoint you.

Source: Social Media Today

The Power of Content Marketing: The Numbers Speak for Themselves

The results are in, and they are unequivocal: content marketing is one of the most effective strategies to promote your business and boost your conversion rate.

I already touched upon video marketing in the previous section, so let’s take a look at the stats for good old blogging here. We now know that businesses with high-quality blogs report:

• 55% more site visitors
• 67% more leads per month
• 97% more inbound leads
• A staggering 434% more indexed pages

Source: Social Media Today

Now, if that didn’t convince you to start a weekly blog subscription service and all a content marketing agency right now, I don’t know what else could!

How to Solve Customer Problems: The Bottom Line

In-depth, high-quality, and targeted content is the single best way to solve customer problems.

And the best part is you don’t have to go it alone. Our Monthly Content Builder Service can do all the heavy lifting for you and help you to:

• ​Increase organic traffic to your site
• ​Boost lead quality and conversion rates
• Only use your marketing budget on tactics that work and bring results that compound over time, giving you a higher ROI

Want to find out more about our Content Builder Services and how they can take your business to the next level? Just hit the contact button above. Tell me about your business and I’ll do a free assessment of your content marketing!

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