Benefits Always Beat Bullets
People don’t particularly care about buying a coat, they want to stay warm and feel protected during the harsh winter months. In the same vein, umbrellas have more value when it’s raining because people want to stay dry.
“Well-defined benefits provide a concise, articulate and persuasive brand story.”
Selling benefits in the context of your brand messaging is all about understanding your customers point-of-view and relating your value to their situation. While easy to define, a list of bulleted features will not resonate with your audience. Spending the time to consider why your service offering is important to your customer will yield handsome dividends in the future by transforming your brand messaging. Well-defined benefits provide a concise, articulate and persuasive brand story.
Three keys to value-oriented marketing:
- Invest in learning. In order to get to know your customer, you need to gather appropriate data. Investing in programs and campaigns that capture actionable information from your current client base can be an invaluable tool for steering outbound new business development. It is important to get to know the challenges customers face and how you can adapt your product or service offering to be more responsive to their needs.
- Change your perspective. Always consider your most critical customer’s point-of-view. Challenging your marketing message with a childlike persistence of “Why?” will only improve the end product. Also, don’t assume that your customer speaks the same way that you do. Many times marketers and marketing departments, especially ones in technically vertical sectors, develop their own sort of internal shorthand when referring to products, services and scenarios. A dialect of convenience may speed internal communications while leaving your customers wonder “What exactly does that mean?”
- Focus on results. What’s in it for me? Many benefits are trapped within features and attributes waiting to be freed by a critical thinking marketer. Asking ‘what is the end result?’ can help clarify the benefits and elevate the marketing message. Take an iPod for instance -is its storage measured in gigabytes, or thousands of songs, or perhaps in the happiness of having access to music wherever you go, whenever you want?
