Copy And

4. The Problem With Pain Point Marketing in Your Copy (and How to Fix It)

• Sam Burmeister | Conversion Copywriter @ Nomad Copy • Episode 4

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Pain-point-heavy copy has been the default in online marketing for years, but it can leave your audience feeling stuck instead of inspired. Your people want to hear about their potential, not their pain. In this episode, I talk through why leading with pain falls flat, how sales psychology supports writing for potential, and how to shift your copy toward transformation without losing clarity or conversions. 

Key points covered in this episode:

  • Why pain point marketing can backfire in your copy
  • What your audience actually needs to hear to feel confident buying
  • How to write transformation-focused copy that still converts

Resources Mentioned:

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Hello and welcome back to Copy and the marketing podcast where online service providers learn how to write copy that sounds like them, but converts better. You already know me. I'm Sam Burmeister. I'm your guide on this copy adventure. And as a conversion copywriter and sales psychology expert, I learned the right way to sell in my decade long sales career. After spending the last six months writing copy for hundreds of super successful launches and helping dozens of entrepreneurs write better copy every week inside of Copy on Demand. I know what sells and what's working in copy and online marketing right now. And what's working is copy and it's copy and messaging, copy and design copy and strategy copy and AI and more. So today the piece of the puzzle that we are putting together is defining your ideal client and writing for them. Just about everybody and on the online business world has gone through some version of the ICA or ideal client avatar project for their own business. Sometimes we even name that person. We say Amanda's between 35 and 45, she makes six figures. She's married, she's a busy lady. It doesn't work. It doesn't work like that. So what we're gonna dive into today is how we can get really specific. In your copy without alienating anyone, without being exclusive, but really being specific to the people who are going to be the best clients you've ever stinkin had. We are not doing the ICA exercise, but I am going to walk you through one of my favorite ways to identify and speak to, specifically speaking to whether it be in the written word or with your mouth, um, to your ideal client. So let's go ahead and dig in. We've all been through the pain point marketing exercise, right, where we define an ideal client avatar and we say, this is their psychographics, this is their demographics. And then we say, now what we need to do, this is the second level of it is we need to understand their problems, and then we write down a whole list of their problems. And our coach asks us about them when we write even more problems, and then our coach says, great. Now that you know their problems, you can speak to their problems, and your ideal client is going to feel so heard that they're going to buy from you. And then you go and you write a website or a sales page and you nail their problems. You absolutely speak to their problems. And then crickets. Nobody buys why? That is because you are speaking to a fake person and you are not lighting up the parts of their brain that make them want to buy from you. If you're curious about the parts of their brain that make the want to buy from you. Go back to the last episode about sales psychology, where we dig into the carrot and the stick and what makes the big difference here, but. What your people want is not for you to repeat their problems to them. They want to know what are the solutions? How do I get them, and is that going to work for me? Is that going to solve my bigger problems? Again, going back to episode three in sales psychology, is this going to bring me happiness, joy, make me hotter, cooler, more fun to hang out with, better at business? What solution is it going to bring them? So we're often asked, so who do you serve? And it's this awkward, like, well, I do serve mostly X who fall into Y income bracket, et cetera. And it usually sparks some sort of response, like women entrepreneurs making a certain amount, who has a family and wants to make more money. So we start to edge on their desires by saying they want to make more money. And this is not bad. It is good to know who your person is and what they want, right? If you're selling. It's a starting point. It's a really good starting point to which you must be then thinking. Yes. So if my ideal client is, we're gonna use this example over and over in this episode, we're gonna say a woman between 35 and 45. She's been fortunate to be a stay-at-home mom while her kids get up to kindergarten level, and she doesn't really wanna go back to a traditional office. Her spouse has been able to support them and then some as they go on vacations and continue to have kids, and they may have even gone through IVF and my job now as a service provider who wants to teach this parent how to do something. Let's say she wants to create an online income so that she can continue to stay home, but contribute more financially to the household that we need to know her pain points. You're not wrong. Like I said, it's a good starting point, but then we dig into the pain points, and it might be feelings, it might be facts, but too many pain points on your sales page is going to take people on a negative journey. And your job as a salesperson inside of your own business, inside of your own company, is to lead people to a high that they want to purchase from. We spoke in our sales psychology episode about how people buy the carrot. They buy the potential that's in front of them. So when we have a list of things that our ICA, our sweet, rich, suburban mother. And all of her pain points and how she just feels like she did have this successful career and she feels vulnerable trying something new, and everything she's done so far doesn't stick or it seems like there's really no money in doing online work, and we name all of these problems. She's then going to associate you with someone just like her, somebody who has problems, somebody who does not make a lot of money online, somebody who cannot guide her to the solution that she's looking for. So today what we're going to do for the next five, 10 minutes is if you are able to pull out a piece of paper and fold it into thirds, I strongly encourage you to, if you can't think along with me, as we take your ideal client, we're going to find out, yes, what their problems are, but then we're going to find out how to speak to them on your sales page so that they actually want to give you money to solve their problems a solution to their problems is your job. And then once you know that transformation, what do we do with it? Where does it go? So we've got three columns, or you may have folded a piece of paper into thirds. On the far left column, I want you to write for me, what are these people's problems? Tell me that she feels vulnerable asking for help. Tell me that your person feels like they're out of touch and hasn't used computers in a long time. Tell me all the problems that you can think of. And if you're listening along live, you can always hit pause or you can continue to listen to me as I go through the exercise. So that's column one is all of their problems. And column two, I want you to write all of their ideal solutions. This is not the solutions that you provide. We're not there yet. These are a one for one problem, two solution. So this person may feel vulnerable asking for help. Maybe their ideal solution in this phase is a therapist. Maybe their ideal solution is, um, couples therapy and asking their spouse for help because it's something that they're not comfortable with. Maybe the solution is that they don't even have to ask for help because their solution is that they use their own funds to get their business off the ground. Okay? So there's a lot of different solutions to each problem, and maybe this means surveying and asking your ideal audience, but ask them or asking people that you like, ask them what their ideal solution to their problem is, which you should be doing on sales and research calls anyway. So now we have two columns, one with the person's problems, the second with people's solutions, their ideal solutions. When we have this list of solutions, go back through it and circle the solutions you can actually provide. I'm gonna use a different example here for a moment. We have all seen energy drink and Red Bull and all sorts of energy based commercials and ads. When we see these, what do we see? We see somebody saying, oh, I wake up so tired in the morning. I wish I had more energy to spend with my family and kids. We might see those same commercials saying something like, I do this to get through the day. There used to be a five hour energy commercial that said, do you ever get that three o'clock feeling? And they named the three o'clock feeling that so many people felt. Some people's ideal solution to not feeling tired is to sleep more. Other people's ideal solution to not feeling tired is an energy drink or coffee or when they're really tired. Maybe this is the part where they get a babysitter and a housekeeper to help them with the things that cause them to feel tired. So that to illustrate, there are a lot of different solutions for the same problem. Red Bull is not offering coffee. They're not offering sleep training. You are uniquely positioned to provide a solution, but not every solution, just like other companies are. So when we go through this column, the second column of solutions, I want you to remember that as you circle the solutions that you are able to provide, then. Only the ones that are circled. We are going to go to our third column. We're gonna draw a direct line over from those circles and we are going to say, this is what happens after these people have the solution. So I'm gonna continue using this energy drink. Uh, example, when people have. Coffee, they feel more energized. They feel like they can actually show up to baseball practice and make it through dinner without taking a nap so that they get more done in the day. These are all things that happen as a result of the coffee or as the energy drink or whatever it is that you and your company are uniquely positioned to provide. So ultimately what I want you to understand is that you are not. Selling coffee. Again, going back to our mom who's trying to earn money from home, you are not simply teaching someone how to make courses. You are teaching someone how to get more disposable income in their family so that they can be the decision maker when they go on vacation because it is their money that they're spending. You are helping them put kids through college and helping them. Prepare more financially for the future. You're helping them feel secure as a professional. You are helping them feel more involved in their family's finances, so you're not just teaching them how to create courses, and your solution that you're providing is not simply how to make more money at home. Your solution that you're providing is something much more actualized for who that person is as an entire human. This is what I refer to this third column is the transformation. So once you have the transformation, what do you do with it? You can do a lot of things. You can put it in your headline. I often see people put their transformation in their above the fold section on their sales pages, and in one of our upcoming episodes at two weeks from now, we're going into detail on how to structure a sales page, including an episode three weeks from now, on the above the fold specifically. So you are going to be very well equipped by having this list of transformations. You're gonna be well equipped to write your sales pages. You can also use the transformation in your calls to action. I saw a client recently who all of her calls to action said, yes, please, and we wanna go from yes, please to. Make money from home. We want these verbs. We want actions. We want outcomes. We want feel good even in the evenings. That's what we're buying. We're not buying Red Bull. We're buying the feeling that you feel after 3:00 PM So those are all calls to action. You could use them in subject lines, in your emails to use the ideal client language of what happens when you work with me. You can use them in the body of your email. I encourage you to go back and listen to episode three about sales psychology. Based on what people say about themselves, you can use this in the body of your email as well to use their language to speak to the transformation. Ultimately, when we define our ideal customer, we are able to write specifically to them. We are able to make them feel so hurt. It's like a little kiss on the forehead for your clients to say, yes, sweetie, you are in the right place. This is what's going to happen when you work with me. So defining your ideal customer is a great place to start. Understanding their problems is level two, but really the level that I want you to be at when you're writing your copy is understanding their transformation because it's not enough to just get them. You need to be able to get them where they need to be. My name is Sam Burmeister. I am a copywriter. I have been writing really great sales copy for the last six years, and I had a sales career before that I can help you not only create your ideal avatar and find their transformation, but create messaging that specifically speaks to these people. I've done it a lot for other clients in the past in which we nail down their audience and their messaging, so how they're speaking to their client so that they sound like their client, so that you can write all of the copy after this from your core messaging. If you're interested in a branding session, I will put my information below and you can always, always reach out to me at Nomad. Do copy on Instagram. I am at Samantha nomad copy agency.com, or you can reach out to me on LinkedIn. My name is Samantha Burmeister. In our next episodes, we are talking about how to know if you are too close to your own messaging. So when we create this messaging right, about their transformation and what they're going to receive. Sometimes it just doesn't click with them. So that's when we're too close to our own messaging. We need to take a step back. We're gonna talk about that and then we're gonna take everything that you've learned about sales pages and. We're gonna take everything that you know about sales psychology and how to know if your messaging is going to hit, and how to speak directly to your ideal clients and the difference between content copy. We're gonna take all of this and we're gonna go through a series on how to write a sales page that converts, and we're gonna have all of this information so that you become a better copywriter in your business. I'll see you in episode five.