You’re welcome to publish this article free of charge provided: - you include
byline - byline includes a functioning link to http://www.divinewrite.com - you don’t change article in any way - you provide a courtesy copy once publishedEngage Your Customer – Write About Benefits By Glenn Murray *
Think quick. In 10 seconds, can you list 5 key benefits you offer your customers?
I bet you said “Yes”. But are you sure you listed benefits? If you’ll bear with me for another 10 seconds, I’d like to test out a theory on you.
Recap your answers – maybe even write them down. Now list 5 main things your business does. In other words, what are your 5 core services? What are 5 core features of your product?
If your first list looks anything like your second, chances are you’re mistaking features for benefits. As a result, it’s likely that your marketing materials aren’t engaging your customer. Customers don’t want to know what you can do. They want to know what you can do FOR THEM.
Don’t talk features – talk benefits.
Don’t be alarmed. You’re not alone. Most business owners and marketing managers are so close to their product or service that they have a lot of trouble distinguishing benefits from features of their offering. Ask a web host “what are benefits of your service?”, and you’ll likely hear something along lines of, “we offer load-balanced server clusters.” But that’s not a benefit… that’s what they do. The benefit is superior uptime and performance.
In fact, so many people think features instead of benefits that it can work in your favour – to dramatic effect. If you can accurately identify your benefits, and convey those benefits to your market, you’ll be light-years ahead of most of your competition. You’ll be converting leads into sales while they’re still bogged down trying to promote features.
So if you’ve ever sat down to write a sales letter and wondered how you’re going to grab your reader’s attention, or you’ve ever gone ‘round in circles writing draft after draft of web copy without ever hitting mark, now you know where you were going wrong.
The only question remaining is, how do you do it right? Advertising copywriters and website copywriters do it all time – and most of time, they do it with benefits. Benefits are copywriter’s holy grail. But if you’re not a seasoned copywriter, how do you identify benefits you offer your customers?
There are any number of ways to identify benefits you offer. This article discusses just three: 1) Customer Research 2) Speak to Your Sales Team 3) Make it Easy for Your Customer to Get Buy-In
The method you choose depends on your time constraints, budget, and level of customer interaction.
1) Customer Research The most obvious way to identify benefits is to ask your existing customers. They’re spending a lot of money on your offering, so you can be sure they know what benefit they’re getting from it. (In many cases, it can be handy to ask them what benefits they’d like to be getting from you too!) Unfortunately, like everyone else, your customers are busy people. In most cases, you won’t get useful feedback by simply sending an email enquiry. You have to make it easy for them to respond, and you have to make it worth their while. Think about questionnaires and surveys for quantitative data, and interviews and focus groups for qualitative data. These are simplest techniques, but you still have to make sure you interpret results appropriately. And always remember that they’re self-report methods. People will sometimes tell you what they think you want to hear. (That’s also why you have to word your questions very carefully – try not to ask leading questions.) Of course, there are plenty of other research techniques around. Do a bit of homework and find methods which best suit your business requirements. But don’t get carried away by possibilities. All research data in world is pointless if you’re not talking language of your customer.
