How do you discover your audience's needs and pain points?

Throw a poll up on LinkedIn or Social. Then use that data as your own and roll with it. Give people answers to choose from otherwise you will get some fairly skewed results and that does no one any good.

In addition to the 'direct ask' to your customers, seek out other active professionals in your industry. In both cases, there is a formidable chance that you will have to supply some form of incentivization in order to achieve enough results (data) to make a productive analysis. Although incentivization will skew the 'purity' of your results (people tend to be more agreeable when there's a prize waiting for them), you are asking for someone's time - rewarding them with knowledge, gifts, or compensation will increase the likelihood of them giving it to you, and help maintain/improve your relationship. Whether it's a gift, discount, or cup of coffee - make sure the value of the transaction isn't a one-way street!

The industry you are in can also play it's part. For us being a distributor we leverage not only the feedback from our clients and prospects but also rely on our meetings with Suppliers. This is an avenue we use to dig into what other distributors have brought to them in regards to audience pains they have come across. Aside from that we use surveys formatted in 1 to 1 persona and to take it a step further if they give us a few minutes on a zoom, feedback on an email, etc. we offer something back such as a gift card or coffee.

#1 Ask great questions from the beginning. #2 Listen to their pain points. #3 Keep asking great questions. #4 Provide key differentiator, benefits and add value.

LinkedIn makes it easy to throw up a poll and find the most popular option. Look for any trends or patterns in your results. Based on these results, take it to the next level and conduct focus group sessions, as they can be a great source of qualitative feedback. We use this throughout the advertising industry, and it works perfectly.

There are untold ways to use website and social media data to determine audience needs and pain points. In particular, leveraging demographic and psychographic data to identify who is the most engaged with your brand, from buyers to evangelists and beyond, can help unlock hidden insights and targeting opportunities. Often, there's a disconnect between the profiles of the actual high-value users and who a brand *thinks* their most valuable users are. In the post-GDPR world, though, there's a need for brands of all sizes to make a compelling reason for users to opt-in to tracking and analytics measurements, and without compellingly making the case, users are increasingly opting out and depriving brands of valuable insights.

In my experience, there are different tools that you can leverage to analyze website and social media data. For social media data, you can leverage each individual social media channel, or what I prefer is to utilize tools such as Hootsuite, that can break down the demographic data across all social media platforms. With these tools, you should be able to identify the traffic sent to a website from your social media platforms versus visitors that come from web searches. If you break it down between search and social traffic the key things you want to remember: - from web searches are looking to solve a specific problem - from social networks are typically browsing or clicking on a link that was marketed to them

When analysing traffic to your website, pay particular attention to users coming from SEO and referrals, as these will often have proactively sought out information relating to your site.

One of the most underutilized tactics for this is easy and fun. Listen on Reddit Respond on LinkedIn Reddit can be a moshpit however it is also where you can uncover some real, unbridled and raw pain. People share so willingly on Reddit. So take those painpoints and articulate how to cure what ails them on LinkedIn.

long-tail keywords, typically have lower search volume than short keywords, but they deliver a higher conversion rate. They are much easier to rank for than more general, competitive keywords. To optimizing your site’s pages, make sure you include closely related long-tail keywords throughout your page’s content. by doing some SERP research, you can easily find the long-tail keywords that are most relevant to your business.

Reddit is a gold mine for unfiltered, realistic research. Whenever I need an honest opinion I search Google with the question and type Reddit at the end. 100% agree on this point.

Using AI-generative tools like ChatGPT, Google Bard, TinyWow, and beyond are great ways to develop long-tail keyword lists and create topics for content generation and new approaches to covering tried-and-true topics.

In my opinion, brands like culture, are shaped by their people. It's important to listen and see what your consumers think you are --- and reflect upon what you want to be seen as? The best campaigns are community-driven, and if knowing what your community wants is as simple as analyzing their comments in forums and online spaces - there's no excuse to be lost in the digital clutter of things. Listen. Test. Repeat.

In addition to creating buyer personas and customer journey maps, you can also empathize with your audience by putting yourself in their shoes. Try to spend a day in their lives. Go through the same customer journey as they do. Follow the same steps and interact with brands as a consumer would. How is that buying process? How do you feel as you interact with a brand? What works and what doesn't? What emotions are you experiencing? The goal is to get a firsthand look at their daily challenges and experiences, taking a step back from the strategic planning process, and empathizing with your customers.

Creating buyer personas are a great way to really hone your understanding of your customers. As with everything, it should be a working document that can be changed so it reacts to new info/data. However, this is still your insight. One way to ensure you have a correct customer snapshot is to interact with an actual customer in mind. Providing they are happy to, you have a good relationship with this customer and you are mindful of how you share this information with them, explain what perceptions you have. You maybe can't do this with everyone but it might be worth selecting a satellite customer in each wider area to give you a benchmark.

As marketers and brands, we often're so "in the weeds" that we lack the perspective of new users. As a result, user testing and gathering insights from prospective customers can unlock insights that internal teams are likely to overlook.

Testing is so critical to success. So often, when a brand only goes to market with a few creative variants, they miss out on the benefit of multi-variate testing. Time after time, I've seen myself and my colleagues surprised by the insights uncovered from testing a wide range of messages and creatives that would have been otherwise lost or missed by focusing on a few messages that achieve the largest group consensus among key decision-makers. Be creative and adopt a "fail fast" mentality with messaging; you won't be sorry.

If you want to succeed in your marketing efforts, you need to test and optimize your campaigns! ?? By using tools like Google Optimize or Facebook Ads Manager, you can discover what resonates with your audience and improve your conversion rates. Don't just hope for the best, make data-driven decisions and watch your campaigns soar! ??

To date one of the best methods to discover audience needs and pain points is to conduct review mining. The idea is to find tons of reviews and testimonials in your vertical and scour them all for reoccurring themes. This method is called "Review Mining" and after reading hundreds of testimonials you'll be able to extract tons of pain points from your exact audience. You can think of each review as a direct link into the mind of someone who had already expressed the need for a product or service. With this type of user insight, crafting compelling copy becomes a breeze. You are able to use the exact word that resonates within your audience, beacuse it comes from a real live person.

Actually talk to them! One-on-one. A genuine conversation versus it feeling like you are doing an interrogation. No, you can’t automate it, but that’s what I’ve personally found to be the most effective. Also, don’t rely on yourself to see all of the patterns in the conversations you have. Run the conversations through AI. Have AI double check your blind spots for patterns in comments, questions, feedback, etc.

All of the items in this post are great tips but I believe that the most valuable thing you can do is listen to your client facing employees. What issues are they facing every day? What needs do they see or hear about? This reveals the pain points not only for customer service, but provides opportunity to use the feedback for further product development, marketing ideas, blog posts, and also enables you to keep a pulse on what’s happening with the client facing service teams and their day to day experience. This can also give them a voice and help them to feel valued as major contributors to the research done in providing solutions or crafting new services& ideas. Listen in a natural environment.

1:1 face-to-face belly-to-belly or phone type interviews are best. Called Customer Discovery Interviews in Lean Startup parlance. They're done the least often due to time and access. There are basically four formats for doing customer discovery research. Three more: The Embedded method; joining your customer segment’s community. Heck—maybe you already are if you are already part of your customer segment. Surveys can be a viable method—but they're less personal and less dynamic—thereby not allowing you to follow a vein of interest that you might otherwise uncover using one of the first two methods. And finally, the Sleuthing method. Looking in from the outside. Obviously, the opportunities to do this on the internet are infinite!

To discover the pain points of your target audience, you can follow a few of these steps: Social listening, Competitor analysis, Customer interviews, Analyze website analytics. By combining these methods, you can gain a comprehensive understanding of your target audience's pain points. This knowledge will enable you to develop effective solutions and tailor your marketing messages to address their specific needs.