What Problem Does Your Business Solve?

What is the first question that needs to be answered when creating a marketing plan for your business? I’ve talked a little bit about the “Four P’s” of marketing: place, price, product and promotion. These are all important, but there is something else that needs to be analyzed first.

Let’s go back to the definition of marketing, marketing is the process of identifying a need of a particular group of customers and explaining why your product or service is the best solution for that problem. Examining that definition gives us the very first thing we have to do . . . Define what problems your business solves.

Taking a Tip from “As Seen on TV”

Before the advent of the internet, Youtube, and other social media sites, promotion options for businesses were very different. If you were a local business, your advertising strategy likely consisted of ads in the newspaper and the Yellow pages, some occasional mailers, and maybe if you were a larger business local radio and TV spots. Chain stores relied heavily on mailers, and businesses that produced specialty items would advertise in interest magazines.

But what about those weird products that don’t relate to a specific interest such as fishing or cooking and that wouldn’t attract much attention if they were sitting on a shelf in a store? Many of those products found sales through “As Seen on TV,” an infomercial (what is now known as “news”) service that demonstrated the problem the product solved, otherwise known as the “Unique Selling Proposition.”

One of the most well-known items was “The Clapper” which not only convinced a large swath of Americans that it was simply too much effort to get up and turn off the light, paving the way for Alexa, but it also earned a place in American pop culture with references appearing in movies such as A Night at the Museum and in SNL skits.

The “pain” in these infomercials was often exaggerated, as was the relief at the solutions. Never the less, the ad effectively created the idea that this “problem” was something that could be solved and with just an easy payment of $19.99, life would be a little bit better.

So what is the problem your business solves? If you were creating an “As Seen on TV” ad for your business, what would it look like? What do you want a potential customer to take away from your advertising? What can you do for them?

This is part of our strategy when we work with clients in our “Customer Conversations” program. We identify the hot buttons, or pain points, that potential customers and clients are looking for and design a marketing strategy and content to communicate it.

Being able to articulate the key issues in your industry and how your business effectively solves them is not only important for your general marketing or business plan, it is also critical to understand these points when designing and structuring your business website. Your website should be designed around presenting those solutions. How those solutions should be presented is covered in my upcoming book, 10 Steps to Success with WordPress.