What Are Marketing Pain Points And How Do You Spot Them?

The key to successful marketing in life sciences is establishing a dialogue with your prospective customer. It is not just about offering a product or service but something that fulfils a need or solves a problem that they may not even realise is affecting them.

More specifically, successful marketing of instruments or services is about identifying pain points within your customers’ operations and offering an answer to reduce or remove these as much as possible.

As pain points will differ by product and sector, here is a definition of pain points, some historical examples of how life science equipment has helped and the techniques you can use to identify them.

What Is A Pain Point?

The broadest possible definition of a pain point is a need that is currently unmet, although the term is usually more specifically used to define known problems, frustrations and issues with a customer’s existing processes using the type of product or service you are selling.

As with physical pain, a customer’s pain points can vary in intensity, seriousness and level of disruption, from merely being annoying on a bad day to potentially costing a research facility considerable amounts of money through disruptions or outages.

The root cause of these pain points can also vary from the structure of the business to the technology solutions they use to individual concerns, and much like with a physical pain or injury, identifying the underlying cause can help to relieve it.

What Are Some Examples Of Pain Points?

A pain point that affects a lot of businesses but can be particularly frustrating in the life sciences sector is incompatibility between an instrument outputting data and an interpreter for this data.

For example, a business undertaking research on bloodwork or biomarkers would ideally want the results of any tests to be output into a format that would be easy to add to a wider data corpus or meta-analysis.

In some cases, this data needs to be formatted, a process that can be quite time-consuming if it needs to be done manually. This is a classic example of a pain point, one that can affect a wide range of business operations.

Other examples of pain points would be equipment that has a lengthy start-up time or needs to be set up manually each time it is used in a way that leads to frustration and wasted time.

Service pain points include opaque customer service, delays in fulfilment and unclear timescales, which can cause varying levels of disruption depending on context.

How Do You Identify Pain Points?

Pain points vary so considerably by industry, so a lot of the biggest issues found by one part of the life science sector may not be shared by another. This means that research into pain points, customer needs and the wider market is essential to ensure you identify the pain points to be solved.

Open A Dialogue With Customers

In life sciences, customers are insightful experts that are naturally sceptical of a hard sell approach, so the best way to find out their issues with research is to ask them and discuss their research.

Whether you are offering products, services or a combination, any sales relationship has the potential to be long-lasting, and this allows you to gain access to meaningful feedback.

This is something we can help with through our conversational marketing methodology but should be extended to your sales and customer relations divisions as well.

This active listening approach is not only beneficial from the perspective of getting valuable information, but it also demonstrates empathy and care.

Analyse Feedback Within The Sector

Unless your product is entirely unique, there will be other products on the market that can act as a benchmark for what your product or service needs to do as a minimum, and how it can improve on what already exists.

There will always be room for improvement and room to adapt, and taking an active role in seeking out and interpreting feedback can help maximise flexibility, adaptability and customer satisfaction.

Engage With Customer Facing Departments

There will typically be several channels where your organisation will interact with customers, including marketing, sales and customer relations. All three of them will provide valuable feedback as long as it is interpreted appropriately.

Fostering a culture of constant development, discovery and improvement will empower teams to provide you with valuable constructive feedback of potential pain points that might have been missed, and this collective approach will ensure that you can focus on creating the best products for your customers.