How to Build an Inbound Marketing Strategy Around Business Pains

Using business pains is a great way to increase leads from your inbound marketing strategy – here’s how!

Pain doesn’t often equal pleasure – except when it comes to creating a successful inbound marketing strategy! Start targeting business pains and you’ll be able to generate more leads. After all, who can resist an offer to help solve a problem? Using prospects’ problems as a basis of your inbound marketing will open up a host of new opportunities.

What are business pains?

Each potential customer will have a problem they are trying to solve. Perhaps they are a freelancer who needs help with their tax return? Or they could be a company who needs to drive down their mobile phone bills?

There are two types of business pains:

1. Main business pains

These are the pains the customer is already aware of e.g. they can’t do a tax return.

2. Latent business pains

Customers are not aware of these pains and may need your help to find a solution. In the case of high mobile bills, the latent pain is that they need to be on a different contract.

So how do you turn these pains into an inbound marketing strategy?

Step 1: Play detective

While we’re not suggesting you don a deerstalker and ‘do a Sherlock’, you do need to do a bit of detective work before you can implement your inbound marketing. Start by developing your marketing personas. These will then help you identify the unique business pains for every potential customer.

Begin with the basics such as:

• Job title
• Age
• Gender
• Business goals
• Job frustrations

Then it’s onto identifying what their business pains are – both obvious and latent. What problems do they need you to solve?

Need help gathering this information? Here’s how some companies are identifying customer experience pain points.

Step 2: Solve their problems

Now you know their business pains, you can help resolve them. Take a step back and think about how your service/products can solve their problems. Working this out will inform the content you will develop as part of your marketing strategy. The content you create should:

• Show potential customers how their problem can be solved
• What you will do to help them
• How you’ll do it

Don’t forget to add calls to action. You need to guide customers onto the next step where you can help them further.  

Step 3: Choose your medium

Understanding business pains is only part of the picture – you also need to understand how and where your personas consume information.

• Do they visit social networks? If so, which ones are they most active on?
• Is Google their main way of finding information online?
• Do they prefer to receive their communications via email?
• Do they read blogs? Or prefer to download white papers?

If you’re not already in these content hotspots, make yourself present and work on enhancing your credibility in these areas. These tools can help people find you on social media networks.

Step 4: More detective work

It’s time to play detective once more and discover if your marketing messages are having the required impact. Analytics will help you learn more about your customers and their needs. Your content-specific KPIs should be closely aligned to your overall business goals.

Once you’ve solved the inbound marketing strategy mystery, the results should speak for themselves – 93% of companies using inbound marketing increase their lead generation. Get it right and so could you.

Is the world of inbound marketing still new to you? Get your free eGuide now: What exactly is inbound marketing?