When you sit down to write a piece of copy, doesn’t it feel strange to talk about “pain points”?

Do you feel like you’re being negative or manipulative?

If you’re not familiar with pain points, this is a term that marketers use to refer to the frustrations that your target client is facing that your business’ products and services are supposed to relieve.

Most of the time when you hear about “pain points”, it feels seriously gross. Like dark magic.

Yuck, right?

If you feel totally turned off by the idea of leveraging your target clients’ pain to use against them, that probably means that you have a soul. Congrats!

The thought of manipulating my audience certainly sounds disgusting to me, so you may be surprised to hear me say that you absolutely DO need to talk about pain points in your copy… but it’s not what you think.

“Pain points” or as I like to call them, “the cloud”, are an essential part of sales and it’s not a manipulation technique. Honestly, you’ll have a hard time selling anything without addressing “pain points”.

Here’s how to address the pain without the ick:

 

#1 Listen. When they talk to you about their current situation, what language are they using? What’s frustrating them? What words do they use to describe what things are like right now?

Cultivating your listening skills isn’t just a good human skill, it’ll help you grow your business, too. (That’s not a coincidence).

Most entrepreneurs spend way too much time talking about themselves, their products, and services. If you can step outside of that ego-driven desire and let your audience talk, you’ll gain endless golden nuggets that will help you not only sell your offers, but come up with ideas for new ones as well!

#2 Empathize. When someone lands on your website, they need to be convinced that you understand their current situation.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to get “negative” or dramatic. You just need to show the person that you understand their exact situation as it stands right now (that’s easy if you follow step one: LISTEN). It’s not manipulative; It’s human.

#3 Use their language. If you’ve been through the Rainbow of Sales training, this is what you know as the “cloud”. (If you haven’t, you can get the Rainbow of Sales training for free here).

The whole point here is that you are showing your audience that you understand them. You’ve listened to them. Again, it’s not about “manipulating”. It’s the truth! (Case in point: This is EXACTLY what I do to create and sell products like The Sales Page Kit).

#4 Complete the Rainbow.

 

Again, if you’ve taken my free training, The Rainbow of Sales, you know that talking about the “pain points” is only 1/3 of the equation. Once you’ve addressed this absolutely necessary piece of the formula, you’ll need to balance it out by showing your audience that you also understand what they desire, and that you’ve created a solution to help them get there.