Effective brand marketing is more than just features and benefits
Contents
- The Marketing Tactic You Can't Ignore in Tourism
- The Science of Storytelling: Why does it work?
- What is it and why do you need to know?
- Why you need to find your ‘why’
- What is the tone of voice for your brand
- Using storytelling to connect with your customers
- Effective brand marketing is more than just features and benefits
- Emotional marketing: why it’s important when using storytelling to sell your brand
- Storytelling across all your marketing platforms and mediums
- Digital Storytelling: Why Is It Important for Your Brand
Contents
- The Marketing Tactic You Can't Ignore in Tourism
- The Science of Storytelling: Why does it work?
- What is it and why do you need to know?
- Why you need to find your ‘why’
- What is the tone of voice for your brand
- Using storytelling to connect with your customers
- Effective brand marketing is more than just features and benefits
- Emotional marketing: why it’s important when using storytelling to sell your brand
- Storytelling across all your marketing platforms and mediums
- Digital Storytelling: Why Is It Important for Your Brand
Effective brand marketing is more than just features and benefits
If you want to sell a product or service or for people to buy into your brand, it’s crucial to know the difference between features and benefits.
The features are things that a product or service has, does or is. For example a hotel may tell you they have a concierge service, free wifi, Netflix in every room, wake up service, laundry service and more.
The benefits, however, are the results that the customer will experience – if all goes to plan — if they use your product or service.
A great way to develop your benefits is to list out your features in one column and then attempt to find a benefit to suit each feature.
Let’s take our hotel example:
Your customer wants to know what your product or the service will do for them. They’ve come to you because they have a need and they think your product or service could fill that need. The benefits are the things that will convince them to buy from you, which is why it’s so important to identify them.
Identifying your brand’s features
When it comes to working out your brand’s features, you’ve got to work out what consumers want and then decide what your brand does. Think about the strengths of your brand. What makes your brand different from the rest? What claims do you make about your brand — or can you make?
Take a good look at your product or service and concentrate on its strengths. Is there anything in particular you can highlight?
Identifying your brand’s benefits
Identifying your brand’s benefits is a bit more tricky. There are different types of benefits, which is a nice problem to have, actually, because it means you can appeal to your customer in different ways (and give yourself more chances of making a sale).
The three main types of benefits are:
- Functional
- Economic
- Emotional
The functional benefits refer to what your product or service will do for your customers. It’s important for customers to know what’s in it for them. Unfortunately, functional benefits are the easiest to compete on and many other businesses like yours will offer the same ones, so you may wish to dig deeper to find something that really captures their business.
That digging deeper could lead you to the economic benefits which, as you might expect, refer to what your product or service might do for them in terms of time or money. Does it save them time? Does it save them money? Economic benefits appeal to the rational part of the customer. The more value you can give them for their money (without damaging your own interests), the better.
The emotional benefits are the most powerful type of benefit. They’re all about how the product or service will make the customer feel. If you’re offering can appeal to their heart, you’re really onto something.
This is where your storytelling can be very powerful. If you can give your customers something more than just the features and benefits you will already be ahead of the competition. Think about what your story can add. Maybe it’s the magic and mystery of your attraction or the interesting and unique characters involved in your business.
Take our hotel example. Maybe the concierge is somewhat of a local celebrity, maybe tourists love getting their picture taken with the concierge and hearing the wonderful tales and stories they have to offer.
Is there something special about your chef? Maybe they have a signature dish or specialise in a particular style of cooking - why?
Think about what you can add to each feature and benefit that will add to the picture your customer is painting in their mind before they book with you.