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Michelle PW : Four creative ways to add power to your marketing
Four creative ways to add power to your marketingBy Michele Pariza Wacek There's a hard truth about marketing: People don't care about businesses (and that includes your business). What they care about is how your business's products or services can solve THEIR problems, meet THEIR needs and make THEIR lives easier. In other words, you need to explain the benefits of your product or service, not the features. So what do I mean by features and benefits. Features are the attributes about your product or service. (For instance, the features of my business are I provide copywriting and marketing services.) Benefits are what the customer will receive from your products or services. (For instance, the benefits of my business are my customers will sell more of their products or services when they hire me.) That's the secret behind effective marketing — explaining benefits rather than features. But if you want to go beyond effective to amazing, then you need to add a spark. You need to get creative. One characteristic of creative people is their ability to look at the same thing everyone else is looking at and see something different. How can you learn to do that? Try these mind-twisting exercises. Creative Marketing Exercises1. Sit down with a sheet of paper. Write down the name of a product or service. 2. Write down a list of all the features of the product or service. 3. Now change all those features to benefits. Still not sure how to write benefits? Start with this sentence construction "You will receive BENEFIT because of this FEATURE." Like so:
Or ask the question why is this feature important? Why would somebody want this feature? 4. Now push the envelope. Here are four ways to do this:
Here's an example of how this works: Let's say my company produces a product that saves customers time. I'm reversing the benefit, so the customer doesn't want to save time. Why wouldn't the customer want to save time? Well, maybe if he had more time on his hands he would have to work on those home-improvement projects he's been putting off because he's so busy. Or now he feels like he can't justify hiring someone to do those home-improvement projects because he's not so busy anymore. Or now he's run out of excuses and has to spend a week with his in-laws. By questioning, challenging and reversing, you start to look at benefits in a whole different way. You may come up with a killer ad campaign, realize you've overlooked a segment of your target market, or uncover new benefits for your old product. You may even discover a new product or improvements to your existing product that would make it a huge seller. • Copyright 2003 Michele Pariza Wacek. All rights reserved. [an error occurred while processing this directive]Updated 1/6/14 |