It’s very established in marketing that when you’re trying to sell something, you need to focus more on how the product solves a problem for your customer. That can sometimes mean agitating pain points in order to highlight how your product solves those problems.
Is this an ethical marketing practice?
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Should you be pushing on pains or drawing in with benefits?
Hi I’m DJ from Rainbow Dragon Digital and in this article I’m going to talk about this really core marketing concept of pains and benefits and which ones you should be focusing on as an ethical business.
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Pains and Benefits, Not Features
There’s this really core concept in marketing where you want to make sure that you focus on pains and benefits. This is really fundamental. A lot of the time businesses focus on their features, what they do, and how they do it, rather than focusing on what it is that your target person actually wants and satisfying the needs of your target person.
Now, a big thing in marketing is making sure that you’re solving a problem for your target person. And when I go through that, you know, Step One of my Content-Led Marketing Strategy, the way my videos are structured and everything, Step One is Understanding your Target Person.
Wants, Needs, Fears and Frustrations
When I do the exercise of understanding the target person with a client the whole thing we’re trying to get to at the end is Wants, Needs, Fears, and Frustrations. And I talk about this in another video but what I really want to talk about here is where you should be putting more of your effort. And in the end what I’m talking about is positive marketing.
What is Positive Marketing?
When I talk about positive marketing, I’m trying to say that you want to be spending more time talking about those wants and those needs. You want to be spending more time pulling them in according to the things that they want to go towards.
That doesn’t mean that you should ignore the problems. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t push on pains. The whole thing that you’re doing, after all, is solving a problem for people.
You Can Push on Pain, But Don’t Create It!
But you shouldn’t be creating pain. If the pain that you’re solving is not something that they have constantly, then agitating that pain can definitely be a marketing strategy but it’s one you should use very sparingly.
The Larger Effect of Negative Marketing
The reason I say this is that in the end everything you do – everything you do – as a marketer, as a business, is contributing to a wider world and to a wider effect. And if you are constantly talking about pain, then you are kind of contributing to a more negative environment in general. And a more negative environment around your business.
Use Positive Marketing and Make Your Business Sexy
But if you find really clever ways to talk about the positive things, about the ways that you are satisfying those wants and those desires – making your business sexy in whatever way it is that you do – you will create a positive environment around your business and you’ll be contributing to a way better business world.
I hope that kind of gives you a bit of an angle to think about when you’re talking when you’re thinking about how you’re trying to communicate your business service or product to your target person.
If you want to go over this in more depth, I’m really happy to have a half-hour, one-hour conversation with you just to go over the nuts and bolts and really dig in deep into that target person that you’re targeting. Just use the form below to request it!
Otherwise please enjoy the other videos and let me know if there’s any content that you want to see more of.