ARTICLE
Is Your Website Fueled By Your Audience’s Pain (points)? It Should Be.
By JB Clark
February 1, 2024
Is your web design centered around your customers’ pain points?
Or is your web copy more like a game of Where’s Waldo, where your customers are trying to connect with you, but you’re hiding behind three menus?
Your homepage is your first impression. Don’t make your potential customers play Where’s Waldo to figure out what you do, how you do it, and most importantly, how you can solve their pain points.
If you’re anything like me, you wish some of the websites you use would put a little red and white hat on the features you can never find.
The vast majority of online interactions begin with a search because most people use the internet to answer questions.
- “Where to eat lunch near me?”
- “What are the best midsize cloud security providers?”
- “Small business tax compliance help”
- “Why does my shoulder feel weird?”
- “What is everyone talking about the Roman empire?”
If you can answer the right questions, you can convert customers. Now, you just need to figure out the right questions to ask of your web copy.
Write web copy with the right audience in mind.
If your company has created marketing personas, you should understand your audience’s pain points.
If your organization doesn’t have personas, check out our primer on using marketing personas.
Marketing Personas
Personas go beyond demographics and psychographics to the heart of your ideal customers and audience members. By creating characters based on your best or most aspirational customers, you can craft messages to humans instead of faceless groups. By putting yourself in the shoes of your personas, you can better understand their pain points and motivations, which allow you to better understand them from both a marketing and a business development standpoint.
Pain points give you the power to humanize.
Imagine the protagonist of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was a STIHL Farm Boss MS 50CC gas chainsaw. That’s no good.
At Content Workshop, we always say, “Humanize, don’t productize.”
A story that centers on a product is a terrible story. But a story that makes your audience into the hero is a story that sells.
So, is your web copy telling the story of a bashful young farmhand who faced his fears to lead an underdog group of rebels to victory over the evil empire—all because he had confidence knowing the force, his wit, and his trusty lightsaber could get him out of any trouble?
Or is your web copy just telling the story of a blue lightsaber?
How do you make your audience the hero? Tell them the story about who they will be once they solve their most significant pain point, all while using your product.
If you don’t have a solid idea of your audience’s pain points, your website is likely product-centered instead of customer-centered.
Find out what causes your audience pain.
Sure, you’re not Tylenol or Advil, but you can still do something about pain points. Most people interact with brands because those products or services fix a particular problem.
You are uncovering their pain points by identifying the reasons your ideal customers use your product or service. Don’t make assumptions here. Survey the customers you find most straightforward, most profitable, or best to work with. Ask them what problems your product or service solves and why they choose you over the competition.
Do they like your makeup because it’s easier to put on in the car at a red light? Your audience’s pain point is being busy and stressed.
When you address those pain points, you have an opportunity to empathize with your audience, enhancing the effectiveness of your messaging.
Focus on who your audience could be, not what your product is.
One of the easiest ways to know if you’re centering products or people is with the feature/benefit test.
Do you list product features on your home, products, and services pages, or do you talk about the benefits users receive?
| Feature | Benefit |
| 5% Interest Rate | Earn Money Automatically |
| Multi-factor authentication | Know your money is safe |
| Same-day transfers | Confidence you have your money when you need it. |
Instead of focusing on what the product is or does, focus on the problem it solves for your customer. You can even take this exercise further and focus on how your customer will feel after solving the problem.
To drive the image home, you can describe practical, real-world applications of your products and services and connect customer testimonials with your target audience’s pain points.
Here’s Waldo! Tips for clean web copy
- No jargon
- Be concise
- Use visual hierarchy
1. No Jargon
Rule one: stay away from industry jargon. When people search for solutions to their problems, they often don’t know which industry specialists to seek, much less what industry terms to plug into the search engine.
If your web copy is riddled with indecipherable jargon, your prospective customers will have to search for the benefit themselves.
2. Be Concise
I understand if this tip seems hypocritical as it arrives more than 800 words into this blog post. But you can be concise, even in longform writing.
The nature of web design allows for a near-infinite amount of web copy, and that’s good. But you must be sure to write in a way that delivers the most essential information to your visitors as quickly as possible. Then, leave the rest for them to explore through your user flow.
Use visual hierarchy
Make sure your written copy and visual design go hand in hand. Does the design help visitors find the information they’re seeking? Is the copy laid out for ease of access?
Write easy-to-scan content using headings and subheadings. Use bullet points to help your website visitors quickly find the information they’re looking for.
Visitors don’t mind long copy, but they don’t always have time to read an entire article. Bullet points make quick facts easier to find.
- The eye naturally scans a page in a Z shape.
- Most visitors will read the text in order of placement along that Z path and according to size.
- Images will pull the eye in any direction the image subjects appear to be facing or moving.
- If bullet points contain information visitors seek, they’re more likely to read the surrounding text.
- Interesting design elements that break up web copy, like pull quotes, shapes, and bullet points, keep the reader’s interest in long blocks of web copy.
Leave the searching for Where’s Waldo.
The web copy on your homepage is your first (and sometimes best) opportunity to start your customers on a predetermined journey that ends in a sale. But it can also be a jumbled mess, leaving prospects searching for a little red-and-white-striped hat.
When it’s time to rethink your website, start with the story you want to tell and the problems you want to solve, then bring in your product features and details once there is more interest.
Centering your personas and their pain points in your web copy is a central tenet of story-first web design.
The idea of story–first web design boils down to this: Your website will tell a story whether you’re the one who writes it or not.
Your website can tell a story about a company that sells stuff. Or, your web copy can tell a story your audience relates to, a story about their everyday frustrations and pain points.
Content Workshop helps brands like yours tell their stories every day. We work with organizations to craft compelling content marketing strategies and build story-first websites.
