Something I see many companies struggle with, and I tend to fall into quite a bit too, is trying to promote features as benefits. While features of a product should lead to benefits for the customer, they shouldn’t be positioned as such.

Custom Post Types

For example, a feature that we include on many websites are custom post types. They’re a feature that creates a new type of “post” on a website, and they can be great! Here is how I described them back in 2015.

However, most clients don’t (and shouldn’t) care about them. They don’t care what they’re called, and they don’t care how we make them. However, when we position them as “an area on the back end of your website to very easily add new staff members to the site, and to be assured that every page will be formatted 100% correctly every time“, it becomes a great benefit.

The first iPod

Apple has been a master at this for years, and a perfect example was the first iPod that came out in 2001. It had some amazing technology inside of it, and an impressive amount of storage, but Apple didn’t tout those as features. After all, most of their consumer base wouldn’t really be able to understand what they could do with 5GB of storage. What did Apple do instead?

Simply saying “1,000 Songs in your pocket” is easy to understand, but it also led users to understand other benefits for themselves, such as no need to carry around multiple devices to have all of their music with them.

Listing features is easy. Listing solid benefits takes more work, but is always worth the effort.

I hope not.

That’s not to say that buying advertising is a bad thing, as it can certainly help your product be seen by more potential customers, but if advertising is your only hope then you’re likely in big trouble.

Albert Lasker put it this way:

“The product that will not sell without advertising will not sell profitably with advertising.”

If you can’t move your product at all, advertising won’t help. Of course, if you’re able to sell some of it profitably, then ads could indeed be a good solution to increasing your volume.

Robert Stephens, the founder of Geek Squad, offered a similar thought when he said:

“Advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable.”

That one is a little trickier, as there are plenty of very remarkable products (the iPhone being a prime example) that are undeniably remarkable on their own, but they still choose to advertise to help reach a broader audience.

The difference is whether you are using advertising to reach more people, or if you require advertising to make things work at all. In the case of our clients, we have some of each. Some of our clients focus on basic marketing tactics (solid websites, active social media presence, engaging email pieces, etc) and that’s all they need. For others, those pieces help get the ball rolling and then some digital ads are able to take them to the next level.

You shouldn’t feel like you need to buy ads in order for your business work, but using them to expand your reach is always something worth considering.

When you have a product or service for sale, your main goal is generally for people to exchange money to acquire what you’re offering. They key to remember is that your product needs to literally be the best use of their money in that time.

Whether you’re selling a $2 soda or an $80,000 car, in either case that customer needs to feel that giving you that money is the best thing they can do with it.

I’ve shared before that once I bought a 20oz bottle of Coke for $5, and I considered it to be an amazing deal! At that moment in time, there was nothing else that I would have rather done with that $5 in my pocket. Particularly at lower price points, instant gratification will seal the deal.

In other cases, though, people need to believe that your solution is in their best interest in the long run. If someone spends $20,000 on a website, they’re not expecting huge results tomorrow but they’re confident that investing $20,000 on a new site is a better use of that money than anything else that $20,000 could do.

Josh Kaufman summarized this whole concept by simply saying:

Every time your customers purchase from you, they’re deciding that they value what you have to offer more than they value anything else their money could buy at that moment.

As a consumer, that really makes me pause and think. The next time I buy something, I’ll wonder if it’s really the absolutely best use of that money at the time.

As a business owner, though, it makes me remember that we always need to be showing a higher perceived value than what the monetary cost is, and then back it up with actual value down the road.