Is Marketing & Selling To Pain Points Manipulative & Unethical?

There’s a common worry that marketing and selling based on pain points might be viewed as manipulative, shady, or even resorting to cheap tactics.

…and it can be scary too! Engaging directly with your audience’s pain points can feel intimidating - like walking a tightrope of opinions.

I know this is a super common worry because it came up in the chat of my group program ~ Freedom Friendly Marketing, when we were talking about selling to pain points in their sales funnel emails.

So, let's address the elephant in the room: Is it ethical to market and sell by tapping into our audience's pain points? 🤔 Well, here’s my take.

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What even are 'PAIN POINTS'!?

Pain points are your audience’s worries, frustrations, bugbears, challenges.

Pain points are the things your audience want to overcome.

Marketing and selling to pain points means addressing those pain points in your marketing messaging. For example, that might look like…

Right now you NEVER have any time for your creative writing. You love the idea of dreamy days spent writing from your writer’s nook or from a gorgeous Airbnb on a writer’s retreat, but your todo list always adds up. People need you, your calendar get’s packed out and there’s never any time left for your writing.

Inside [your offer] I help you carve out an hour a day for your writing - no matter how crazy busy you are.

Here the pain point is ‘never having enough time’ and you’re speaking to it directly in your marketing copy, and explaining that you help people overcome their pain point.

Here’s why you worry about marketing & selling to pain points

You’ve been conditioned (especially if you’ve been raised as a woman) to be nice, be quiet, don’t rock the boat, don’t display anger or frustration, play small, give others the spot light… 

And so when you start speaking to your audience’s pain points in your marketing it can feel like you’re being manipulative, taking advantage, or even being being opinionated, angry or loud. 

But, what if we rephrase pain points to -> frustrations, bugbears, things your audience are really fed up with.

Do you think they might want to hear from you about how they can overcome those?

I damn well want people to market & sell to my pain points!

• If I’m feeling like the odd one out and struggling to find my people I wanna know where I can join a community of my kinda people
  
  
• If I feel like my head is so noisy that it makes me anxious and gives me insomnia, I damn well want to know how I can fix that.
  
  
• If, whatever I do don’t seem to be able to save money, and haven’t been on holiday for 3 years, I defo well wanna know how I can change that.
  
  
• If I’m trying to create a beautiful home but I’m always getting stuck at the paint colour picking stage, and the overthinking stops me from ever getting the damn thing painted, I sure wanna know how to pick colours to suit my home in 30-minutes.
  
  

Here’s what you need to understand about marketing psychology… We’re more motivated to move AWAY from pain points, than we are towards our goals. 

You may have noticed that your clients often come to you when they’re at their wits end.

They’ve tried to fix the problem themselves, they’ve been stuck for a while, things have been getting worse and worse and finally ~ they’re had enough.

Sound familiar?

And this happens even if your client is working towards a ‘non essential goal’.

For example, they want to learn how to take beautiful photographs.

They’re frustrated with the results they’re getting, they don’t seem to be able to improve. They’re stuck.

Sure, they want to create beautiful photos and that’s some of the motivation for buying from you.

But the chances are, they’re more motivated by the fact they’re frustrated with the results of their photography, and are sick of comparing themselves to the amazing photography they’re seeing on Instagram every day, they want to get to that level ~ FAST!

Here’s why you NEED to speak to your audience's pain points

Speaking to your audience’s pain points, and giving them a solution to their frustrations and worries (ie your paid offer) IS SERVING.

You’re helping your people overcome their frustrations, gripes, and the things they’re fed up of. And they want to know how you can help them overcome their pain points asap!

Speaking to your audience’s pain points can feel scary

Another common worry about marketing and selling to pain points is, if we get honest about the things that are angering or frustrating us and our audience - we’ll come across as ‘angry’, ungrateful or ‘dramatic’.

Perhaps to get opinionated about something you’d like to change in your industry for example might feel like it could attract backlash, or you could get cancelled.

Again, this comes back to our conditioning around needing to feel safe - ie not rocking the boat and causing a backlash, and the need to be quiet and calm. 

But there are things you & your audience are really frustrated about!

For example…

• Maybe your audience is pissed off that your niche seems to be able to charge less than any other niche.
  
  
• Maybe your audience is frustrated that their access to their local outdoor space keeps getting closed off by large corporates to run events.
  
  
• Maybe your audience is annoyed that our outdated 9-5 corporate system and pressure to be the perfect parent, sibling, friend means they find it hard to make time for themselves

Write about it, talk about it! I guarantee you it’ll be your most engaged content.

I’ve spoken before about my and my audience's frustrations around marketing on social media. Writing about this in my recent launch emails is what got the most traction. Because my audience are angry about this too.

And lemmie tell ya, it’s the opinionated, slightly unusual viewpoints that really connect with your audience - every~single~time!

Marketing and selling to your audience's pain points is SERVING!

Do you think your audience want to feel less angry and frustrated? Do you think your audience want to know how YOU can help them overcome their bugbears, worries and challenges? They sure do! 

I hope this has helped you reframe how you feel about selling to people’s pain points and given you a kick up the bum to get out there and talk about the ideal audience’s frustrations and worries - I can’t wait for you to unlock some serious traction with this! 

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