Customer-Centric Marketing: Identify Pain Points
Before understanding why pain points are key to your customer-centric marketing strategy, you must first understand the difference between product-centric and customer-centric marketing and why the latter approach is preferred.
The idea behind product-centric marketing is to create the best product possible and then put that product on display, hoping the product will attract as many customers as possible. The marketing for many soda brands, for instance, is a good example of a product-centric approach.
Customer-centric marketing is just the opposite: The focus is on the customer first and the product second. The goal of customer-centric marketing is not to get as many people as possible buying a particular product (eg. brand of soda), but to get one customer returning again and again.
Identify Pain Points to Better Anticipate Needs
Understanding pain points is essential when targeting patients as individuals because not every person will come to you with the same problem. To turn prospects into returning patients, you need to make them feel valued; and to make them feel valued, you need to treat them as individuals and have an in-depth understand of why they came to you in the first place…and what will keep them coming back.
Right now, you may have a general understanding of what makes your patients walk through your door the first time (be it back pain, blurry vision, a coughing cat, or something else) but now it is time to tease out what keeps them coming back — or conversely, what stops them from coming back a second time.
Get Talking!
The most immediate strategy to discover your patient’s pain points that you can put into action today: Talk to them. Ask them about what brought them in, what was the tipping point that made them decide that NOW is the time to schedule an appointment with you. While speaking to your patients or clients is the most actionable plan, it is not always feasible — often people are more forthcoming in online surveys. (If you are signed up for iMatrix’s Reputation Builder package, we make collecting patient feedback easy!)
By knowing the initial pain points that made someone come to you, you can anticipate the rest of their complaints and provide them with an out-of-this-world customer experience catered to their needs. It’s this type of experience that not only increases the likelihood they will become a regular patron, but also that they will recommend you to all their friends. It is the difference between going to a fast food restaurant where you order by the menu number or a steakhouse where they know your name and exactly how you like your steak.
Taking this concept one step further, you can speak to your patient’s pain points through the content you put on your website. Yes, having a treatment method that can fix a cat’s cough is impressive, but when a potential client is faced with this problem and turns to Google, they are going to search for more information on the problem and not jump directly to the solution (ie. your method) because they have not discovered the solution yet. Instead, they will Google the problem, “Coughing cat.” When your website has keyword content that matches their problem of “Coughing cats,” it is more likely to be returned in the search results where potential clients can find it. If your website has robust content on this pain point that visitors will find useful, they are more likely to trust that you are the one they should book an appointment with to solve their problem.
This might seem like a lot of work, but don’t worry, we can help! Give us a call or schedule a website evaluation today to discuss how we can be the solution to your marketing pain points!
