Creating content about customer problems

There’s a lot of content out there about general problems. If you go high enough, every company’s problems can be categorized as cash flow issues, personnel, innovation and sales closures. Writing, in general, doesn’t help to attract customers.

Develop content about the specific problems that customers face. Here’s an example from a product discussion. For confidentiality reasons, the name of the motorbike company cannot be disclosed, but here is the problem they faced.

They had been making the same product for decades – and the brand was doing reasonably well. One problem they had not been able to solve was the slow leak of oil from one of the seals. In a few months after buying the bike, all customers would find an oily patch in the place where they parked the bike overnight.

Several solutions were suggested, and vendors examined the problem apart from the company’s own R&D, but the solutions didn’t work long-term. Sooner or later, the material either heated up or developed leaks.

Expect Scepticism

When this company came up with a solution, it offered it to the motorcycle company. But there was immediate resistance. The problem had been around for so long that no one believed it could be solved. They went ahead and told the company to install it in an entire batch and then track progress.

The confidence worked. It took a few months before they got past all the initial tests, another few months before it was tried out in the assembly line, and then a few months to track how it was performing in the market. They had to track this batch separately from the rest to see if the seals were performing as promised. Finally, about a year later, they realised that the problem had been solved for good.

The company making the seals now has a monopoly on the supply. They had to get specific and demonstrate that the product worked, then have the patience to wait for validation from the company’s own tests. But it’s going to be hard for the competition to dislodge them from this product category.

Now, imagine the company writing about reliability instead of the actual problem. Reliability is a general problem. The leaking oil problem was specific. And that’s what other manufacturers would like to know about.

The deeper, the better

Create content about 1% of the problems your customers face. The ones who have the problem will get back to you because they need the problem solved. Don’t write about problems 90% of the market knows about. That already has the competition and the companies you target already have options.

But companies prefer to keep quiet about some of these advances believing they have an edge over their competitors because of this. In today’s world, it’s far from the case. The obscure problems are what customers are looking to solve. And they’re the ones who will be drawn to the content.

HubSpot Content Hub helps you build a storehouse of content in 1% instalments. And over time, that could lead to building or gaining market share steadily year on year. These days, the harder problem is to get noticed. That’s where being specific helps. The deeper you go, the more you explore the market not available to the rest.

Having a Content Management System (CMS) to track customer interest is exactly how HubSpot functions. Your customers can be shown other examples each time they visit. And each visit, when they can dive deeper, helps to build site as well as product authority.

The 1% entry point

It’s how you get attention and build authority. Don’t list general product benefits alone. That can be handled by the general product brochures or leaflets if you simply want to be clubbed with the competition. If you’d like to stand out, speak about the problems you know customers experience but are limited to face-to-face conversations.

Solve for customers. It seems obvious, but most of the time, when companies are in sales mode, they only look to fit their product into the problem. That does not work. Put together the leaflets of all the companies in a category, and the surprise is that they all seem to say the same thing in different ways.

Speak to and listen to the R&D people from customer companies. Look at what they are working on. That’s a great starting point for your own product line expansion. When you speak about a 1% problem, you may attract a smaller audience—but one that is invested and attentive, which makes a big difference.

Generating content is one of the best long-term investments you can make. HubSpot CMS is made for leveraging that content and spreading it across social channels. It may take a while longer, but unique, authoritative content can be a goldmine that customers will tap into. When you strike a chord with content, it resonates and clears the ground for conversions.

Be specific. Create for narrow interests. Don’t worry about getting returns right away. That’s what makes the magic happen.

Speak to our consultants about any aspect of tech enablement for HubSpot. No matter how small it seems, we like being specific.