We’re in the business of solving problems. How do we know what they are?

If you want to build something that earns attention, you have to understand what your audience is struggling with. It’s the surest path to marketing success: Find a pain point, and solve it.

Here’s how to find those pain points:

1. Talk to people.

This is a surprisingly rare tactic in a world driven by digital metrics. But it will be the most illuminating part of your research, getting a human reaction, in words humans actually use.

Start with at least 10 in-depth, 1-hour interviews with your actual audience – the hour is important. In our experience, it takes 20-30 minutes for someone to be comfortable enough to be vulnerable, which is critical if they’re going to share their struggles with a stranger.

Here’s what we try to figure out in these calls:

• What’s really impeding their process. Sometimes it’s culture or people, a less easy solve.
• What would make their life easier, or what their ideal scenario would be.
• What they’ve already tried that didn’t work.

2. Mine your sales team for objections.

Your sales team is a goldmine of raw insight, because they’re on the front line of every “no.” Here’s what to ask them:

• Why do we lose deals?
• What’s the moment someone gets cold feet?
• What do prospects misunderstand about what we offer?

Every sales objection is a problem waiting to be solved.

3. Lurk where they live online.

Quietly sit in LinkedIn comments. Scroll Reddit threads. Watch what questions people ask on Slack or Discord. You’ll see real problems bubble up, and others trying to help solve those problems. Especially pay attention to how people talk about their problems so you can mirror that language later. As your program matures, you’ll want to build a system to regularly ingest, process and respond to new problems.

4. Go down a rabbit hole on Google.

Long tail search is one of the best places to try to find your audience’s problems. If you have access to a tool like SEMRush, use it to find out you audience’s problems, both trending and constant. If you don’t, autocomplete and Google Trends can help.

5. Interrogate your own data.

There are three good places to look:

• Best performing content: What pages are converting at the highest rates?
• Internal search data: What are people using your website to search for?
• Call center data: If you have a call center, try to get reports or transcripts to mine for intel.

The best marketers make audience insight part of their operating system. Once you can understand and solve your customers’ problems, the more indispensable your content becomes. We’ve been doing this type of deep audience research for almost 10 years, and we've seen time and again how effective it can be at getting better results. If you’d like to talk more about our process, reach out to me by replying to this email.

KRYSTLE KOPACZ CEO, Revmade krystle@revmade.com

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P.S.: This is part 2 in a 3-part series that unlocks a simple content value framework. In 2 weeks: How to solve your audience’s problems.