If you’ve been marketing your business for any length of time, you may have heard marketers advise you to sell benefits, not the features of your services. Here’s a quick definition of each:
What Are Features?
Features are the characteristics or attributes that physically describe your service. These might include things like:
- you provide weekly Q&A coaching calls
- your products are available for instant download
- you offer several payment options such as cash, check, or credit card
- you offer a 90-day money back guarantee
- you provide a 24-hour tech support hotline
What Are Benefits?
Benefits emphasize the magnitude of the problem and how your solution makes your prospect’s life easier. They answer the question “so what?” Benefits can be classified into three types:
- Economic: Economic benefits stress cost savings or emphasize value.
- Psychological or Emotional: Psychological benefits stress security, reliability, expertise, friendliness or other feelings or beliefs associated with your service.
- Functional: Functional benefits stress what you promise to do such as help single women buy their first home at an affordable price.
How To Transform Features Into Benefits
In the previous examples, the benefits from your customer’s perspective are:
- Weekly Q&A calls: If I don’t understand something, I have a place to ask questions without feeling dumb for not understanding the materials or wondering how they apply in my situation.
- Downloadable products: I have access to the product now, even if it is 3:02 a.m. and my presentation on the topic is due in 5 hours.
- Payment options: I can pay online by credit card so I don’t have to worry about having cash on hand when the pizza delivery guy comes.
- Money back guarantee: Even if I don’t like the product or it doesn’t fit my needs, I have 90 days to ask for a refund.
- 24-hour tech support: It is 9 p.m. and my computer just crashed. I don’t know why and am incredibly frustrated, but at least I have friendly people to call who always pick up the phone immediately and have been able to solve any problem I’ve had in under 15 minutes so I can get back to work.
People buy benefits, not features, so don’t assume just because you tell people all the things you’ll do for them, they’ll understand why that’s useful and beneficial to them. Spend some time thinking about how your features enhance your prospects’ lives. Then stress the results in your marketing materials.
This 40+ page guide will teach you, step by step, how to create a marketing plan to attract new clients over the next 30 days.
