This is a guest post by Sarah Worsham, CEO & Web Strategist at Sazbean Consulting and blogging at Sazbean.com.  Sarah is passionate about helping companies reach their business goals by using the web effectively.  Sarah provides guidance through Internet Marketing, Strategy & Business consulting.

A lot of companies get caught up in how much they’re selling or how great a deal it is and they forget one vital thing.  Customers buy your products or services because of the benefits they provide for them.  Benefits equal the value of your product or service.  If customers don’t see value (benefits) in your products or services, they won’t buy from  you. (For reasons of simplicity, products will be interchangeable with services from this point on.  If you’re a service company, your service is your product.)

Customers will have their own ideas about what benefits they can get from your products, but it is also up to you to provide that information – up front and clearly.  Instead of talking about the features of a product, talk about what benefits a customer will get from using a product.  While listing features may be important for some types of customers (very technical or detail-oriented), many just won’t care, or worse, will be confused.

For example, the bottle of Diet Pepsi on the desk in front of me.  Why do I drink it?  A few reasons – I’m thirsty.  I want a bit of caffeine.  I like the taste.  Those are the benefits that bottle of Diet Pepsi is providing to me.  Do I care about it’s features? Calories, Total Fat, Sodium, Protein, Color, etc. Maybe.  In this case, I did want something with 0 calories, but that wasn’t my primary reason for getting something to drink, it was just part of the decision process.

Here’s the secret.  The benefits you provide to your customers (and how well you provide them) are also what distinguish you from your competitors. All your marketing efforts should be geared towards talking about benefits. Customers are very selfish – all they care about is what’s in it for them, so make it clear.

Now you have to deliver the benefits (and value) you promised.  But that’s a topic for another post….

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Only @ InSights. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.