When it comes to marketing, there are two primary ways to describe your offering. One way focuses on what your offering does, known as its features. The other is how it will improve your user or prospect’s life, known as its benefits.
Many nascent business owners spend too much time listing features such as all the bells and whistles when they interact with their potential customers, and not enough time trying to connect the features to the benefits which is the part that the prospect really needs to understand. Left to their own accord, users and prospects often fail to make the proper correlation between the features and the benefits. Good marketers don’t leave benefits to chance and make a concerted effort to make the connections for the potential customer.
Features
Features describe the attributes of a product. For example, Oculus Go is a headset that the user wears. When they describe the high-resolution display, tracking features of the device, or the size of its memory, they are talking about its features.
What I see in a lot of marketing material for Business to Business companies are data and fact sheets that list all the features. That is because many Business to Business companies are sales-led organizations, and as such the marketing material they produce is used primarily as support for a salesperson’s pitch which reveals the benefits.
Benefits
Benefits describe what a user or prospect will gain by using the product or service. While the features describe the “what”, the benefits describe the “why”. By connecting a feature to its benefits, it connects the features to a person’s desires.
In the Oculus example, one of their ads said:
“Oculus enables the sensation of presence and the magic of presence changes everything.”
The “sensation of presence” is more of a feature and the “presence changes everything” connects it to the benefit.
The benefit answers the age-old question “So what?” in the user or prospect’s mind after they see a list of features.
It is always advisable for a business to have a unique value proposition or something that makes them different from the competition.
For example, if you are a dry cleaner you don’t need to describe the benefit for each of your features. However, if your blue ocean feature is that you provide a home pick up and delivery service, you had better make that benefit abundantly clear. You could show how it will save the customer valuable time and aggravation dropping off and picking up their clothes so they can spend that time more productively, such as at their child’s after-school event.
When you have something that makes your business unique, don’t expect the customer to simply look at your features such as your pick up and delivery service, and make the leap to how this will benefit them, you must show them.
Sometimes it is hard to define all of a feature’s benefits.
The problem with defining benefits is that as marketers, you know your product or service inside and out, and you often can’t appreciate the perspective of all potential customers. As a result, you make certain assumptions about your user or pro...
