Problem plus solution equals sales. The math never lies.
As sellers of innovative products and services, we depend on the challenges our customers face every day – be that a business productivity issue or sticky fingers while slicing a watermelon.
Without these nuisances big and small, we wouldn’t be able to push the envelope of product design, nor to break exciting new grounds of quality service. We’d be stuck in existing markets.
Every person has problems that need solving, including your blog visitors.
Offer them the most viable solution, and they’ll keep returning for good. But, how do you know what to offer if you don’t know what they need? By learning to pinpoint their pain points, of course.
Though this may be easier said than done, there are effective techniques for detecting your visitors’ problems you can employ right now.
Take notes, for they might mean the difference between bouncing and staying.
Spend Some Time in Your Blog Visitor’s Shoes
Whether you’re blogging to increase your sales or to boost your influence, you certainly have some kind of an idea about who your audience is and what they like to read.
If you’re a businessman, this notion translates to ideal buyer personas. If you’re not, you should learn to create these audience profiles too.
In short, an ideal buyer persona is a “semi-functional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers”.
You’re not blogging to sell but to influence people? This strategy can help you attract more followers if you perceive them as buyers of your ideas, thoughts, and practical know-how.
(In one way or another, all successful bloggers monetize on their writing.)
If you get to know their age, level of education, professional background, and online behavior, you can easily determine their goals, objectives, and biggest challenges. Just put yourself in their shoes and learn to think as they do.
Conduct a Research to Discover Typical Pain Points
Let’s say you’re blogging about project management techniques and tools.
That’s not exactly a topic for kids and elderly, isn’t it? Common sense dictates that the audience interested in this subject would be aged 20-55, employed, and tech-savvy.
Now you need to narrow this down by defining their following characteristics:
Interests
Hobbies
Values
Attitudes
Lifestyles
Start with a person you know who fits this profile and then do some snooping around on social media to discover more people similar to them. Focus on their Facebook and LinkedIn pages.
With some luck, this research will lead you to other popular project management blogs – spend some time analyzing your competition and what they have to offer to their followers.
This will give you invaluable insight into pain points you still haven’t addressed.
Available resources such as Google Trends and Quantcast can also be of help. They collect data on current trends and customer interests and offer these insights for free.
After all this, you should have a general idea of what your target audience needs.
Engage Your Visitors in a Spontaneous Conversation
This is as much information as you can get without approaching your visitors directly.
Not only is it possible to determine their pain points by asking them about their problems but this is actually the only truly effective technique you can employ.
Why do research then, you ask?
Without any idea of who your blog visitors are, you won’t be able to approach them in a way that would make them want to share their problems and preferred solutions.
Now that you know the right way to address them, engage them in a spontaneous conversation using an on-site live chat tool. You can do this as soon as they arrive at your landing page.
A simple “Hello, how can I help you?” can go a long way in determining their pain points.
When you’re blogging to sell products and services, live chat can help you learn more about your visitors’ problems before they make a purchase and after they’ve converted into paying customers.
Send them a Survey Using Your Email Subscription List
If you still don’t have an email subscription form on your blog, install one now. That way, you’ll be able to collect email addresses of people who are interested in what you have to say and approach them with a survey that will reveal more about their problems.
Of course, you’ll need to ask them the right questions too.
The questions you’ll ask will depend on what you want to find out. They can be in regard to your blog visitors’ reading habits or in direct relation to your blog offer.
The main idea behind this strategy is to learn how satisfied your visitors are with your blog offer, what else would they want to read about, and what invention would help them the most.
Create a Quiz to Learn About Their Habits and Interests
Similar to surveys, quizzes work even better when it comes to encouraging followers’ feedback. Their biggest advantage is that they don’t rely on any external channel for distribution.
Instead of using email, you can deploy quizzes right on your blog.
Your quiz questions can be more or less the same as your survey questions, though you can make them even more engaging by adding images, presentations, and videos.
Consider BuzzFeed quizzes, for an example.
They may appear as aimless entertainment (“What Type of Burger Are You?” or “Which Celeb Do You Share an Astrological Sign With?”), but they generate a lot of data simply by being fun.
Besides, powerful quiz creator software can help you not only boost your on-site engagement but also analyze your visitors’ personalities, habits, and interests.
Even if a quiz doesn’t reveal their pain points (and there’s no reason it shouldn’t), it will still provide you with all the necessary information for determining their problems yourself.
Conclusion
Every person has problems that need solving, including your blog visitors.
Luckily for you, every person would gladly reveal their pain points if they were promised a solution in return. Your only task is to live up to your promise and make them an offer they can’t refuse.
Until then, allow yourself to experience the pain your followers are experiencing.
Dive into your research and start walking in their shoes.
And, when everything else fails, simply ask them.
Kamy Anderson is an ed-tech enthusiast with a passion for writing for the consumer market in the areas of product research and marketing using quizzes and surveys. Having a knack for writing and an editorial mind-set, He is an expert researcher at a brand that’s known for creating delightfully smart tools such as ProProfs Quiz Maker