Showing Benefits Instead of Features

Some of the mistakes that entrepreneurs make in their marketing materials are showing only the features of their products and services and features of their business. However, potential customers don’t want to know the features they want to know about benefits that they will receive from your business.

In reality, people don’t really care what you or your business did. The only thing that they care is what you can do for them. Benefits are simply answering of the question: What’s In It For Me?

Here is a list of some basic steps that must  be accomplished in simply abstracting the benefits from the list of features that you already have.

1. Know Your Customers

Knowledge about something that is in our primary focus as entrepreneurs is most important for business success. Research your current and potential customers. Find as much as more information about their habits, desire and problems. Talk with them about what they want, and what they desire. Possibilities of surveys in this knowledge are great and must be used on the regular basis.

2. Be Your Potential Customers for One Moment

When you know your current and potential customers you can take their position and point of view, and you can ask yourself these questions:

• What is something that I really want?
• For what I am starving?
• What are my problems?
• How can I solve that problems with my products and services?
• What’s in it for me?

2. Extract All Benefits from Features

Each feature has some type of benefits for potential customers. The main difference between feature and benefits is the way of expression the things. One feature can have more benefits for one or more customers. Sometimes one feature can have benefits for some people and on other hands do not have benefits for another. Because of that it is important to know what feature for what people give a benefit and to include these findings to improve our marketing campaign. Here is some help about extracting benefits from feature.

• Make a list of all features that have your products, services and your business.
• Make a table with three columns. In the first column will be placed features, in second columns will be placed benefits and in third column will be placed associated people with that benefits.
• Brainstorm all benefits for each feature and place the people associated with that benefits.

The business is more about them, not about you. Too many marketing campaigns start with:

• Our Business will…
• We will …
• Our products…
• We Offer …

Think about this instead of previous:

• You will …

3. Ranging Benefits According to Importance to Potential Customers

Our business, our products and our services have dozens of features and benefits. But, some benefits are more important than another. Some benefits are important for some type of customers and unimportant for another. Because of that you must make ranging of the benefits based on their importance for different type of customers or different market segment. In this way, you have prepared a list of the most important benefits that will be expressed in different marketing campaigns for different market segments that were targeted from your business.

4. Narrative Explanation of the Most Important Benefits

One thing in this process that is often forgotten is the way of communicating a benefit with the potential customers. Because of that my recommendation is to make several narrative explanations for the most important benefits from previous step. Some of this explanation will work well some will not give the results. The task of entrepreneurs is to measure and change the look and feel of this narrative explanation that will be included in the marketing campaign.

5. Use the Benefits Instead of Features with an Eye on Results

This is the last step in this process. Now you already have developed all most important benefits with several variations for communicating, and you can start using them in all marketing campaigns in the future. However, this is never-ending step because you must keep an eye on results and make adjustments in some of the previous steps.

Photo by Axel Bührmann