You’re happy about how your Product or Service turned out, but not so happy about the sales?
You’re not sure how to show the value of your products?
You know what your target audience wants but don’t know how to express that you have it?
It’s a common mistake that people talk more about features, but features don’t sell, because nobody wants features, instead the trick is to create those benefits that show the value of a product. And this is what you will learn in this article.
When products and services offer something to the customers that helps them reach a goal or alleviate a pain, that something is known as benefits of the respective products and services.
It is a generally accepted fact that product benefits are more important to customers than product features. So, it is crucial for marketers to understand the benefits of the products or services being offered. Benefits should be highlighted properly in the sales pitch and the marketing materials used to attract customers.
The Golden Circle is a concept developed by Simon Sinek who says, “people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”
To use the Golden Circle for your marketing content just answer three simple questions:
Why – Why are you doing what you are doing? For example, why are you in business, why did you develop your product or service?
How – How will this help your readers? For example, what problems are you solving for your readers, what challenges are you helping them overcome?
What – What are you offering? For example, what is your product or service, what are the features and benefits of it?
Why does the order in which you communicate your marketing message matter? Well it has to do with the parts of the brain that we use to communicate. When you’re talking about what you do, you’re speaking to an analytical part of the brain. But when you talk about the why and how, you’re communicating with feelings and dealing with human behaviour.
You always have to keep in mind the best way to showcase the value of your product or service when constructing a benefit. A benefit consists of features and the goals they help reach or the pain they alleviate. More features can be included in a benefit, and sometimes a combination of pains and goals is used to deliver the value in the marketing message.
To find out more about features check out our article How to Identify, Describe, and Choose Product Features that Attract the Most Customers. For pains and goals check our article on Buyer Personas: How to Create a Buyer Persona that Takes Your Marketing to the Next Level.
To learn how to use the above when constructing your product benefits, stay tuned and just keep reading.
Product features are just facts about the product, made known usually during promotions. But features never attract customers to buy the products. Here product benefits weigh in and give meaning to the features, showing customers something-of-value in return of buying the product.
As with so much of marketing, the main reason why so many businesses confuse features and benefits comes back to intent.
Marketers often spend a great deal of time examining common problems experienced by their target markets. As such, it’s easy for marketers to forget that, to the normal user, the benefits of using their product may not be immediately obvious.
Put another way, just because you know why your product will make your ideal customer’s life better doesn’t mean they do.
Another common misstep marketers make is equating the time and effort that went into developing a new feature with its importance to consumers. As harsh as it may sound, most people don’t care about you, your company, or how many late nights your engineering team pulled to ship a product – all they care about is themselves.
As long as you keep that in mind, you should be able to produce benefits that convince your audience to buy.
Features have their place in your copy too, don’t get me wrong.
They play the supporting role to benefits and are most effectively used to justify and support the claims of your benefits.
By extracting the emotionally relevant, and most compelling benefits of your product or service, you are far more likely to get your prospects to pull out their wallets.
And they’ll be even happier once they actually experience your product or service.
It’s actually incredibly easy to create a benefit if you truly understand your business and what it is you’re selling. More importantly, it’s even easier if you believe in what you’re selling.
Here are five easy steps to help you construct your benefits:
Figure out the pains and the goals of your buyer persona. This can be done by directly asking them, or through buyer persona study. To find out more about this process, check out our article, How to Create a Buyer Persona that Takes Your Marketing to the Next Level.
By this time you should have the pains or the goals you want to work with (or a combination of both). Now, keeping in mind those, select a feature or some features to connect with them later, in terms of what this equation is trying to achieve for your customer.
To build your first benefit you’ll have to pick a feature that stands out, or a collection of features related to each other in one way or another.
By connecting the feature to the right pain or goal you show specifically how you’re going to improve the life of your customer. You need to spend the most time here. It’s very important to connect the right features to the right pains or goals. Which feature solves which pain or helps get the customer closer to a goal.
This might seem obvious, but you need to first explain to your customers what action they’ll have to take in order to see results if any. It can be as easy as uncapping toothpaste or as complex as building an Ikea bookcase, but they still need to know.
The thing that you have to keep in mind is to express in a way that relates to your audience how they will achieve a goal by using a certain feature.
Now, when it’s time to share what exactly is the benefit, focus on the results, focus on how the life will look like after using your product or service, while also not forgetting to show how they will get there.
Paint a picture of their life after their stress is alleviated by your product or service. What does that end result look like to them?
There are a few best practices for writing a great benefit statement. It’s a pretty simple process, but you can always look for ways to optimize your efforts.
📈 Include Statistics.
Customers appreciate measurable benefits like percentages, survey numbers, and statistics that support the value of your product or service. Adding in quantifiable facts validates your business and keeps your benefit claim from feeling too general or vague.
🔮 Be Crystal Clear.
Along the same lines, you’ll want to be as straightforward as possible in your benefit statement. Get to the point and address the customer’s needs before you go into great detail about other features. If they ask for more, that’s when you can dive deeper.
🔥 Share What Makes You Special.
Chances are you have some competition within your market. Another business, or maybe several, are selling the same products or services as you. Mention benefits that are going to set you apart from the others.
⭐️ Don’t Be Hyperbolic.
When talking about the happy ending, make sure you’re not setting unrealistic expectations for the customer. You’ll be setting them up for disappointment if you’re trying to sell your goods for more than they actually are.
Let their true value speak for themselves. If it’s a good product or service, then it’ll do well simply by being high quality.
🏆 Keep It Short and Neat.
If you have to go on for a long while trying to sell the benefits of your business, then you probably don’t fully understand them yourself, which can be unconvincing to the customer. Keep your statement concise and to the point, hitting all of the key benefits of each relevant feature efficiently.
Now that you have your Product Benefits all figured out, the next step is what you can do with them.
Product Benefits are a crucial part of your Marketing. They serve as the convincing part for your strategy, promotional content, and even customer service. They are the ones who will do the selling.
You can use them in your hero section of your website, when describing your products or services, when writing an email, or even a social media post.
To assist you in figuring out the key features of your product, download our Product and Benefits Template here and get closer to your sales goals.
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