Depending on your specific business, your prospects may tell you they want a number of different things. When you look carefully, there really are only two reasons why people will use your business.
1. They think you will help them avoid pain.
2. They think you will help them find pleasure.
Savvy marketers use these two motivators very effectively. With a little thought, you can use them in just about every marketing tool you have for your business.
To see how this works, I’ll use an easy-to-understand example: Buying groceries.
You can buy groceries at Wal-Mart. You can buy groceries at Whole Foods. Often times, you can buy the exact same product at both stores. However, the motivation for shopping at the two stores is very, very different.
Both of these retailers have excellent marketing strategies. They both use pain and pleasure very, very effectively.
In this week’s newsletter, we’ll look at how they use pain as a motivator. In next week’s newsletter, we’ll look at pleasure.
Wal-Mart lets people know they can help avoid the pain of high prices. Wal-Mart constantly reminds us that spending too much on food, clothes or electronics is wasteful.
How wasteful is it? If we spend too much on peanut butter and paper towels, we won’t have enough money to buy toys for our children or host a party for our friends, or get a really huge big-screen TV (we’ll only be able to afford the smaller big-screen TV).
Whole Foods takes a different approach. They let us know we can avoid the pain of buying food that is bad for us and / or the environment. By buying a box of cookies at Whole Foods, we are somehow preventing a heart attack and saving cute little seal pups!
(Just so you know, I’m not picking on either retailer. I shop at both stores, depending on what pain is most important to me at the time.)
What does this mean for you?
What pain points do your prospects have? How can you lesson (or eliminate) that pain for them? To get you started, here are some of the most common pain points.
1. Not enough money
2. Not enough time
3. Poor health (or fear of becoming ill)
4. Fear of making a bad decision
5. Fear of looking foolish
Figuring out how you can help solve these problems will be a great way to boost your marketing efforts. How can you help people save time or money? Can you help them feel better? Can you assure them that if they use your services, they will look and feel smarter or more confident?
Next week’s post will talk about pleasure points and how you can use them to boost your efforts even further!
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