Smart marketers have long known about the power of benefits over features.
In simple terms, features are aspects of your product or service that can be used to describe it. Benefits are how those features positively affect the customer.
Your new turbo setting on the latest version of your widget is a feature.
The fact that the turbo setting saves customers time is a benefit.
What’s really in it for me?
Features are about you. Benefits are about the customer. With customers being naturally self-interested it makes sense to talk more about benefits than features.
However, sometimes we don’t go far enough. In fact, saying that your new turbo setting saves time (or saves money, or cleans better or whatever) has become so common place as to be irrelevant.
Everyone says they’ll save you money. Everyone says they’ll save you time. Everyone says they’ll help you attract more customers.
Benefits have become platitudes.
The benefits of the benefits
So, we need to go a step further. We need to talk about the benefits of the benefits. In doing so we can start to paint a picture for our potential customers that is much more compelling.
Case in point. In his excellent Content Marketing Today blog, Newt Barrett discusses what small business marketers can learn from retail giant Walmart.
One of the points he raises is as follows:
“Be crystal clear in describing your mission so that it informs all that your company does to serve its customers. As they put it on their corporate website: “In everything we do, we are driven by a common mission: Saving people money so they can live better.”
If we take Walmart’s mission statement (and current tagline) as an example, the benefit is ’saving people money’. The benefit of the benefit is ’so they can live better’.
Telling people that you’ll save them money is nice. The things that they can do with that money are even nicer. Saving me time with your turbo setting is fine. Spending that time with my family or practicing my golf swing is a picture of the future I can get excited about.
Share your thoughts: What are the benefits of your benefits? How can you use these as content to paint a picture of your customers’ futures?
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Well said, Mark! It’s time for us to go beyond surface platitudes and get to the meaning for our customers – from their perspective.
Ardath
Thanks Ardath.
I think customer perspective is the one thing missing from a lot of marketing comms. The reason is in line with some of what you discuss on your excellent blog – laziness.
http://tinyurl.com/ardath
It’s always much easier to talk about yourself and what you can do – you already know the topic well.
It’s much more difficult to market from the customer’s perspective – it takes a willingness to let go of the instinctive desire to self-promote.
BTW Congrats on the Junta42 list
Thanks, Mark! The Junta42 list is fun. I’m just happy to keep my place every time they do an update!
As to your comment about “letting go of the instinctive desire to self-promote,” I’d add that they also have to invest the energy and resources to learn what the heck their customers’ perspective is. And then keep up with how it’s evolving over time.
Happy Turkey Week!
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