In marketing, as in sales, a popular approach is to focus on problems and solutions. Your audience has a problem, and your service/good/business is the solution. Nothing illustrates this better, perhaps, than the popular sales strategy often and aptly called “solution selling.” 

The main idea in solution selling is to emphasize the WHY instead of the WHAT. Why do I need this product/service? Why is this the solution to my problem? Instead of: What is this product/service? 

It is an effective strategy…when you have a clear answer to the WHY.

Knowing what differentiates your solution from all the others — what makes your offer truly the answer to WHY and getting that messaging down — involves inviting in a few more questions.

Using Questions To Refine Your Messaging

In academic writing, one of the goals when making an argument is to address the “so what/who cares” of it all. But this approach can apply to marketing too; to help build and connect your WHY. When developing your marketing case, dig into questions that fall into these categories. 

Who cares?

• What segment of your audience does this most apply to?
• What does your audience want to know? 
• What do they need? 
• What problem are they trying to address? 
• What barriers might they have? 
• What is keeping them from taking action? 
• What will motivate them to move forward?

So what?

• How will they know “it worked” once they buy in?
• How will they benefit?
• Why should they care about your product/service/cause?
• How does this tie into their larger goals/life/etc?
• How do they sign up/learn more/take the next step?

Building Content Around Questions 

Next, address questions explicitly. This can literally mean incorporating questions into your marketing. When you include a question in your content and then provide the answer, you can draw your audience in and peek their interest. Here’s a few ways you might use questions in your content:

1. Website content: Organizing content in Q&A or FAQ format creates an easily digestible user experience, not to mention it’s also optimal for SEO. 
2. Digital ads: Questions can stick out to readers when they’re scrolling. To help break through the noise, use a question as your headline in your digital ads. Then, use the ad description and CTA to tease the answer.
3. Email: Like ad headlines, email subject lines are great places to pose questions.
4. Social media: To build engagement on social media, you can use features like polls to ask your audience questions. Not only does it invite your consumers in, it also provides an opportunity for a little informal market research.  
5. Video content: Lastly, don’t forget that Youtube and TikTok are being used like search engines. By creating content that poses and answers a question in a video, you’ll drive more traffic to your channel and engage more people with your business.