Marketing Focus: Audience Pain Points vs. Skill Development?

George Kao argues that marketing courses around specific tools or platforms outsells messaging focused on pain points. After 15 years selling services, he found that "get more clients" underperforms compared to teaching how to use a particular tool. He recommends testing both approaches to see what your audience actually wants.
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So on this topic of do we focus on our marketing on pain points and solving our audience's problems, or do we focus on our modality and skill development for the audience? Like they, they're interested in developing certain skills, therefore learning a particular modality. The tip traditional mainstream marketing says, no, no, no, of course you focus on pain points. Are you, are you kidding? Of course you focus on their pain points, 'cause that's what they're thinking about. That's what keeps them up at night. That's what they pay money for. Okay, well, if you do focus on pain points in your marketing and it works, of course you should try it and see if it does. At the same time, you should, not at the same time, at another time, later in the month, you should try a modality-focused marketing approach and see if it works too, a skill development. Marketing approach. Um, Fee said something here in the chat, like, yes, for some people their pain point is that they want to have more skills. And I've noticed that true for my audience, you know, whenever— 15 years of, of selling, uh, my, my type of service, I've noticed that strangely whenever I sell a, a pain point problem type of, of course, like get more clients, right? Or you don't have enough clients, get more clients. That's the pain point, the problem to solve. Or do better copywriting. You're, you know, that you need to make your website better and, and take this class to solve that pain point of making your website writing better or something. Those are always my worst selling classes. And you know what my best selling classes are? When I sell a damn, well, I was gonna say when I sell a damn modality, but it's more like when I sell a damn tool, how to use a tool, people like love it. So whenever I sell a class on using a particular social media tool or a particular business tool or marketing tool or whatever, people love it. And so I've noticed that that's my audience. And I think everybody has to experiment with these different approaches to, to find out what their audience is. And of course the audience can evolve over time too. So the experimentations should at least occasionally be done. And, and so yeah, I, and the other thing is, yeah, so, so you might think about that for yourself. Are you doing pain problem-focused, pain points slash problem-focused approach for your marketing, or are you doing modality-focused approach, or are you doing tool-focused approach? Now, modality and tool could be the same thing, uh, perhaps skill development approach. Have you tried both of those, all of those? If not, why not? Because you won't know what's work— what's working, gonna work with your audience unless you try it. And I have had to try all these different approaches to see, cuz I, based on what the, you know, I general idea of marketing out there, I thought the pain point approach would be the winner. Not in my experience for my audience. So anyway, I hope you'll experiment and try Try it with, try it with these different approaches and comment below if you have tried and what have you observed.










