I’ll often see companies use their marketing material on social media to try to summarize their entire product or the brand. They’ll put their entire company story into a single piece of content, all the while not realizing that customers just scroll by. Instead of trying to shoehorn everything about the brand into every piece of content, companies could be using their marketing material to address their customers’ key pain points.
By targeting pain points, you’re speaking directly to the core problems your customers have in life. If you can articulate the nagging problems that keep your customers up at night, and you can do it better than they can themselves,, you have the greatest chance of winning their attention and getting them to engage with your content.
Let’s say I owned a bank and I was looking to come up with a Hook Point for paid social media ads. I could go with something like “we value your trust,” but is that really offering a solution to my customers’ pain points? Most customers don’t really care if a bank values their trust or not. They don’t need their bank to trust them, and they don’t choose a bank based on the concept of trust.
So let’s try another Hook Point. “No fees. Ever.” Now we’re speaking to a huge pain point bank customers have – getting hit with an overdraft fee or an ATM withdrawal fee and feeling like their bank is unfairly taking money out of their pocket. By focusing our marketing around on this pain point, we’re speaking directly to the real issues customers have with banks, and offering a tempting reason to switch.
Let’s look at a real world example: Blockbuster. When the Big Red N was going up against Blockbuster, they didn’t run ads that said, “we have the best movies.” Why didn’t they do this? Because the quality of the movies wasn’t a significant pain point for the vast majority of customers. Nobody was being kept up at night annoyed at the selection of titles available at Blockbuster. Instead, they created an ad campaign around the Hook Point of “no more late fees.” This both addressed and solved the annoyance of having to pay late fees because you forgot to return a movie on time. By focusing on a key pain point, everyone’s favorite streaming service was able to surpass Blockbuster and become the giant it is today.
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