How can you leverage benefit-led marketing messaging to achieve business growth? And is it worth it?
Back in 2001, when Steve Jobs introduced the first iPod to the world, the technology itself wasn't new. MP3 players had been on the market for the longest time, but that didn't stop him – in fact, he knew exactly how to sell it by creating a need. At that time, he didn't pull it out of his pocket and say, "The iPod. A 5G MP3 player!"
Not at all. Instead, he said, "The iPod. 1,000 songs in your pocket." See the difference? He didn't sell the features – he sold the benefits that customers would appreciate, and most importantly, understand! Since then, marketing as we know it has revolutionized, and the dominant goal became to market with clear benefits to customers.
For the longest time, brands have focused on marketing the features of their products and services in their communication. Yet, today, that no longer works. Instead, it's all about "what's in it for me?" Why should they care about your offerings? That's the question that crosses every customer's mind before purchasing a product or acquiring a service, and if you think about it, it makes sense. After all, you need to give your customers a reason to use your products or services because they're going to invest money into it and need to reap some benefit in return, right? But don't features provide the answers to that question? Not exactly. Instead, benefits do. While it's important to highlight both in your marketing communication, benefits need to take the lead.
Sometimes you may take a trip down memory lane and remember how trim you looked when you had your bicycle, and you might feel that it might be part of the solution to shedding off a few pounds now. Imagine one day you decide to act on those feelings and actually go to a cycle store and tell the attendant that you are looking to buy a bicycle to ride around the area on casual evenings when the sun has almost set then he enthusiastically puts you through a lecture of series of options that will be ideal and how he can't immediately pick one because it has cantilever brakes or one that has a drive train, or the blue one with disc brakes or he points to one of the bicycles set on an elevated platform which he thinks might be the best but is quite expensive for casual evenings. At this point, I'm sure you are exhausted, and these are just a few scenarios off the top of my head. These confusing situations happen all the time; they wear you out mentally and discourage you from getting that thing done. You are totally lost amidst all the facts, and you feel incompetent because you understand nothing that is going on. That's why you should never focus only on the features of a product but mainly on its benefits.
There's no denying that features get the lion's share of attention, but benefits take the lead when it comes to incentivizing customers actually to make the purchase. That's because benefits, not features, drive value.
On a daily basis, customers receive an overwhelming number of marketing messages from brands and businesses, but how many of those do they really care about? It depends on the benefits. Because most products have new features, but how many have compelling benefits? Real benefits?
Let me know what do you think?