Marketers
often make the mistake of speaking in the language of features, not realizing that their prospects hear
the language of benefits. This is akin to walking
into a meeting and speaking Italian to a room full of Spaniards. It kind of sounds familiar, but the
prospects must strain to understand.
Marketers
need to get out of the mindset of selling themselves, and start understanding
what their prospects need and deliver messages that show how they can help
them. In other words, sell the
benefits not the features of their products.
Messaging
can help tremendously; just ask our client The Schneider Corporation. They are in a commodity
business and struggled to differentiate themselves. The best way to do this, we told them, was to stop selling
their features (a commodity) and start selling benefits (what makes them
different and what matters to their customers).
This is
how their elevator message turned out:
The
Schneider Corporation provides creative solutions for land, infrastructure and
facilities projects that help increase revenue, lower costs and mitigate risk.
It’s
pretty clear how their customers benefit.
Compare
that to the elevator message of a competitor:
Transforming
ideas into reality for over 50 years, Competitor Company is a 700-person,
employee-owned, multi-disciplined, engineering and environmental consulting
firm serving our clients worldwide in the energy, transportation, real estate,
water, municipal, government, and industrial markets from offices throughout
the Northeast, Midwest and Southeastern United States.
The
difference is pretty clear.
Language makes all the difference.
–Mara Conklin