Customers Want to See the Benefits Not the Features

Whether you are selling a diet pill, an LCD TV or an eBook, listing the features of the product will not help with your sales. Your customers don’t want to hear about the features, they want to hear about the benefits. So, tell them exactly “what’s in it for them”.

When planning an online marketing campaign, many marketers still forget about the importance of benefits over features. As a marketer, your job is to sell the benefits of the product on both your ad copy and sales copy.

This is easier to be said than done. Here’s a 3 step recipe to fully understand and implement the important marketing technique; Selling Benefits over Features.

Marketing Benefits vs Features – 3 Step Plan

Understand Your Customer Demographics

You have to start with learning more about your customer. Start with gathering the basic demographic data. Quantcast would be a good start point. Try to learn as much as you can about your customers such as age group, household income, sex, newspapers they read, TV Shows they watch, etc.

When you have enough demographic data about your potential customers, you have to gather psychographic data such as behavioral style, fears they have, passions, value system, primary hot button, etc.

Gathering psychographic data about your customers is more difficult than gathering demographic data. You have to really understand how your customers think and act. This is the exact place you will use your skills, and experience as a marketer.

Think Like Your Customer

You have to look at your product and marketing plan from your customer’s point of view. You cannot be emotional and not see the potential cons of your products. This is where surveys, and workshops with a small group of potential customers would help tremendously.

The key is to put yourself in your potential customer’s shoes, and ask yourself; “Why would I consider buying this product?”

Market the Potential Results

Customers want to hear about the benefits, this is true. But what are the benefits lead to?

Results.

To be able to create right on target marketing messages, you have to take the results approach. You need to tell your prospective customers the exact results they will get from your product.

When shaping your marketing campaign, focus on “features vs results” mindset instead of “features vs benefits”.

Whether you market pain or pleasure, your customer wants to know what the results of your product will be.

Don’t confuse your customers with detailed features, instead let them know the results straight.