Benefit

Your business benefits are the key drivers behind all your marketing – or they should be!

If you don’t know what the benefits are for your customers when working with your business, buying your product or using your service, how can you answer that most important client question: What’s in it for them?

That’s the question that all prospective clients will ask when considering your business – “What’s in it for me?” And it’s your benefits that will answer them.

If you know your benefits, and quote them in your marketing material and creative copy, then your prospective clients will have that question answered straight away and will be able to make a clear and informed judgement about becoming an actual client.

So what is a benefit, in marketing terms?
Well, it’s not a feature. Many people get features and benefits confused.

A benefit of your business is something that improves the life, business, money, experience, wellbeing etc, of your clients. That is, if that person works with your business, buys your product or uses your service then their life will be improved in some measurable or noticeable way.

Here is an example of a benefit: By shopping at a 24/7 store, customers benefit by being able to shop at any time most convenient to them.

The correlating feature to the above benefit is: Open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Most people quote their features in their marketing copy and this is where they go wrong. Prospective clients don’t want to know what you do (in any great detail at least) or even how you do it – they just want to know: What’s in it for them?!

So don’t quote your features, use your benefits. If you are struggling to distinguish your features from your benefits, then here is a little trick you can use:

When thinking about the aspects of your business that prospective clients might want to know about your business, you might come up with a statement that looks like this:

“With my business, any work you send me will be turned around within 48 hours – guaranteed.”

This is a feature. (It might sound like a benefit to you – it isn’t.)

To make it into a benefit, repeat the above sentence and add these words: “Which means that…”

The next thing you think of or say will probably be your benefit statement. So…

“With my business, any work you send me will be turned around within 48 hours – guaranteed, which means that, as my customer you will have peace of mind that all work will come back to you promptly and within a guaranteed time frame.”

THAT’S a benefit!

You try….