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The Editor's Desk - From Beneath the Clutter
Feature Article - Get Fit Without Spending a Fortune
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Guest Article - Engage Your Customer – Write About Benefits
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I'm going on vacation as of Monday, but don't worry; I'll have your issue of this newsletter ready for you nonetheless. I'm going up to Oregon to visit family, which should be a really fun trip... aside from keeping a 2 year old busy on a 1000+ mile drive. We're planning lots of stops, of course, just to make sure it's not too hard on anyone.
This is a fun time of year for me. It's my birthday on Saturday, and my anniversary is the following Wednesday. My poor husband has to do so much shopping at this time of year.
Don't forget, you can contribute your articles or tips anytime for consideration. Just use the contact form.
When money is tight, a gym membership is out of the question. So how do you keep fit without all the fancy equipment?
It really isn’t that hard. Easiest of all is to simply get out and walk! Take some time at least every other morning or afternoon and take the whole family for a walk. If your children are small, put them in a stroller or pull them in a wagon, so you can walk for more than five minutes at a time. You could also do family bicycle rides or go skating together.
A pedometer doesn’t cost much and can be used to motivate you to walk more. Find out how much you walk each day, then set a goal at least 25% higher. Keep increasing your goal as it becomes easier to do a given amount of walking.
Too hot or cold to go outside for exercise? Dance! Turn on the radio to your favorite station and dance along. If you’re shy about this one, you can just close the blinds and do it when the kids are napping and no one else is home, but odds are small children will love to join in. You could also dance to the commercials or shows on TV if you prefer.
Cleaning the house is another great form of exercise. Do some of those details you don’t do often, or skip the dishwasher and do all the dishes by hand.
You can use just about anything around the house for weights. Exercise your arm muscles while holding cans of food.
Start a garden each spring. Not only does the food taste better than anything you can buy at the grocery store, it’s great exercise to take care of it. Keep up with the weeding, watering and harvesting, and you’ll have not only gotten some good exercise, but you’ll have some great food to cook.
Don’t forget the basics, such as sit-ups, which don’t require any special equipment. Crunches, stretches, pushups and leg lifting exercises are also easily done at home.
Working out at home has some advantages too. You never have to worry about finding a parking space, waiting for a shower or finding someone to take care of the kids for you. It’s a great way to get your kids interested in exercise too. If you can find exercise you enjoy, it will be easy to encourage your kids to join you.
Stephanie Foster is the owner of Home with the Kids, a resource that knows that there's more to staying home with your family than just business. From money saving tips to parenting and marriage tips, to work at home jobs and businesses, you can get information and support here. You can visit the site at http://www.homewiththekids.com.
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Think quick. In 10 seconds, can you list the 5 key benefits you offer your customers?
I bet you said “Yes”. But are you sure you listed benefits? If you’ll bear with me for another 10 seconds, I’d like to test out a theory on you.
Recap your answers – maybe even write them down. Now list the 5 main things your business does. In other words, what are your 5 core services? What are the 5 core features of your product?
If your first list looks anything like your second, chances are you’re mistaking features for benefits. As a result, it’s likely that your marketing materials aren’t engaging your customer. Customers don’t want to know what you can do. They want to know what you can do FOR THEM.
Don’t talk features – talk benefits.
Don’t be alarmed. You’re not alone. Most business owners and marketing managers are so close to their product or service that they have a lot of trouble distinguishing benefits from the features of their offering. Ask a web host “what are the benefits of your service?”, and you’ll likely hear something along the lines of, “we offer load-balanced server clusters.” But that’s not a benefit… that’s what they do. The benefit is superior uptime and performance.
In fact, so many people think features instead of benefits that it can work in your favour – to dramatic effect. If you can accurately identify your benefits, and convey those benefits to your market, you’ll be light-years ahead of most of your competition. You’ll be converting leads into sales while they’re still bogged down trying to promote features.
So if you’ve ever sat down to write a sales letter and wondered how you’re going to grab your reader’s attention, or you’ve ever gone ‘round in circles writing draft after draft of web copy without ever hitting the mark, now you know where you were going wrong.
The only question remaining is, how do you do it right? Advertising copywriters and website copywriters do it all the time – and most of the time, they do it with benefits. Benefits are the copywriter’s holy grail. But if you’re not a seasoned copywriter, how do you identify the benefits you offer your customers?
There are any number of ways to identify the benefits you offer. This article discusses just three:
1) Customer Research
2) Speak to Your Sales Team
3) Make it Easy for Your Customer to Get Buy-In
The method you choose depends on your time constraints, budget, and level of customer interaction.
1) Customer Research
The most obvious way to identify benefits is to ask your existing customers. They’re spending a lot of money on your offering, so you can be sure they know what benefit they’re getting from it. (In many cases, it can be handy to ask them what benefits they’d like to be getting from you too!) Unfortunately, like everyone else, your customers are busy people. In most cases, you won’t get useful feedback by simply sending an email enquiry. You have to make it easy for them to respond, and you have to make it worth their while. Think about questionnaires and surveys for quantitative data, and interviews and focus groups for qualitative data. These are the simplest techniques, but you still have to make sure you interpret the results appropriately. And always remember that they’re self-report methods. People will sometimes tell you what they think you want to hear. (That’s also why you have to word your questions very carefully – try not to ask leading questions.) Of course, there are plenty of other research techniques around. Do a bit of homework and find the methods which best suit your business requirements. But don’t get carried away by the possibilities. All the research data in the world is pointless if you’re not talking the language of your customer.
2) Speak to Your Sales Team
Sadly, not every business can afford to invest in market research. If your budget doesn’t stretch far enough, try talking to your sales people. They’re out in the field every day, talking to customers. And because their livelihood depends on their success in engaging customers, chances are they’ll be able to tell you what your customers want to know. (A word of warning, though… Be careful not to make lofty promises. Unlike your sales team, written collateral doesn’t generate a rapport with your customers. Customers won’t make as many allowances, so you can only stretch the truth so far in writing before your credibility suffers. What’s more, if you do push the boundaries, you’re more likely to be held to your word!)
3) Make it Easy for Your Customer to Get Buy-In
If you don’t have the budget for in-depth customer research, and you don’t have a sales team, a good tip is to imagine how your customer gets buy-in from their boss. Quite often, the decision maker is someone higher up the food chain than your direct audience. Your audience will probably be the key stakeholder – they’ll be the user of your product, or the recipient of your service. But when they find an offering they like, there’s a good chance they’ll have to sell it to someone further up the line. If you can make this sale easier, you’ll have a foot in the door. Don’t just appeal to the sensibilities of the direct audience. You also need to ask yourself what they need to know to convince the decision maker. If the decision maker is a CFO, think Return on Investment (ROI) and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). If the decision maker is a CIO or MIS, think performance, technological sustainability, availability, manageability, and ease of integration. If the decision maker is a CEO, think liability, risk management, and ROI. And only use jargon to prove you know your stuff. Remember… jargon will probably have the ultimate decision maker scratching their head, not reaching for their cheque book.
There are many many more ways to identify benefits. This is just a very superficial snapshot of some techniques you might like to try. At the very least they’ll get you thinking benefits.
In the end, the message is simple. Forget all the fancy talk about complicated revolutionary marketing principles. Forget new-age hard-sell advertising quick-fixes. Forget looking to so-called “experts” for solutions. Just think benefits. And if you can accurately do that, the rest is just mechanics. Once you know what you want to write about, you just need to put pen to paper. And that’s a whole ‘nother story!
Happy writing!
* Glenn Murray heads advertising copywriting studio Divine Write. He can be contacted on Sydney +612 4334 6222 or at mailto:glenn@divinewrite.com. Visit http://www.divinewrite.com for further details or more FREE articles.
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