I have some bad news about your business and what you sell. Nobody cares. At least not initially. That’s because people, or consumers if you will, don’t care about what you sell until they know how it applies to them. We don’t go out looking for businesses that we can throw our money at. That’s because we have problems. In the marketing world we refer to them as pain points and we’re always looking for ways to address them.
Sometimes those problems or pain points may be related to our health. Sometimes we’re too busy and we’re looking to free up some time. Or maybe it’s related to how to do something. Businesses need to focus on the problem that customers are facing, not on the product or service you sell. People don’t want what you sell. They want what they believe will either relieve, achieve or acquire based on buying what you sell.
That’s why it’s your job as a small business owner to understand the problems people are trying to solve and then match your solution – what you sell – to those very specific problems. It all comes down to understanding your customer’s needs. Business owners need to stop stop paying attention to the fix and focus more on their needs.
Albert Einstein once said, “If I had only one hour to solve a problem, I would spend up to two-thirds of that hour in attempting to define what the problem is.”
Take the Squatty Potty for example. That’s not a product that you wake up and think, I need to find something that will allow me to be in a more natural, squatting position when I’m on the toilet. It doesn’t work that way. Instead, you find yourself constipated. You have a problem. You have a need. The marketing department at Squatty Potty focuses on the problems and needs of its customers. Rather than promoting it’s product, it reaches out and addresses the problems that its customers have. That’s why they’re No. 1 in the No. 2 business. Their words, not mine.
Nail down what the exact problems are that your customers have and start marketing the problem rather than the solution.
