Effective Product Marketing Rule #10

This is the tenth in a series of posts on Pragmatic Marketing’s Effective Product Marketing Rules.

Effective Product Marketing Rule #10: Benefits express answers to your buyer’s problems.

And, let’s face it, if you’re doing B2B technology marketing those benefits at one level boil down to a precious few:

• The way you’re doing it now costs too much: we’ll save you money
• The way you’re doing it now takes too much time: we’ll save you time
• You need to do it,but there’s no way you can do it without this product
• If you use our "this", you’ll be able to find more customers
• If you use our "this," you’ll be able to make those customers happier

If there’s another B2B technology benefit out there that doesn’t fall into one of these categories, I’m all ears.

So the key to using benefits in your messaging is to directly and closely tie what your product does to the benefit.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who sees at benefits-in-a-vacuum and doesn’t even give them a second glance. These are the bulletized lists you see everywhere, the ones that read:

• Save time with widge-o
• Save money with widge-o
• World peace with widge-o

That give you the benefits, alright - hey, who doesn’t want to save time, save money, and bring about world peace?

But just putting those benefits out there will leave your prospects cold if you don’t back them up with something real.

What’s real?

How about:

• You can save time and money with widge-o, because it eliminates 8 of the 16 step process you’re now following to make your product
• You’ll make your customers happier if you use widge-o, because each time your customers use a widge-o infused product, a patented bliss-inducing (yet harmless) scent is given off that immediately calms their nerves and makes them think pleasant thoughts about your brand.
• Widge-o helps bring about world peace through its "instant realization" technology, which causes every person that comes in touch with it to look in the mirror and say, ‘There’s got to be a better way than killing someone because they’re different from us (or because we just want what they have)."

Those plain vanilla benefit statements? Meaningless without backup.

So, as a rule of thumb when constructing benefits statements, make sure that you can honestly make a connection between the benefit and your product. The connection may be something about the technology.Or about how you use the technology. Or it may be evidence you have from your customers attesting to it.

There may be times when you may truly need to abbreviate your benefits statements, down to the minimalist shorthand of save time-save money-bring about peace. But hovering around those benefits statements you better have something more to say, or someone is going to scoot right by those benefits, eyes glazed over and not even bothering to stifle their big, old yawn.

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