Emotional benefits? Business clients? If that combination sounds strange to you, keep reading.
If you’re nodding your head, on the other hand, you probably already know about using emotional benefits as a way of persuading potential customers they need you.
This idea has become pretty well-accepted in consumer product marketing circles (which doesn’t mean it’s always applied well of course!). But when it comes to business to business (B2B) marketing, there’s still an assumption out there that the only relevant benefit of any product or service is the “bottom line” or return on investment.
That’s a mistake. A big one. When you’re talking to a business, you’re talking to a person within that business. And business people are just as emotion-driven as anyone else.
Yes, business people need to justify their expenses. But the key word there is “justify”. By all means, follow through with some convincing-sounding numbers. Flatter business customers into thinking their buying decision is 100% rational. But start by appealing to their emotions, because emotion is what actually drives their behaviour.
To get you started, here are some emotional benefits you might think about offering potential customers if you’re in a B2B industry:
- Be less busy.
- Stop spending time on routine tasks.
- Spend more time doing what you like.
- Spend less time doing what you hate.
- Make your workplace fun.
- Make your workplace healthy.
- Make your workplace relaxing.
- Make your workplace green.
- Look more professional.
- Look less boring.
- Look bigger than you are.
- Find out what your customers think about you.
- Understand what drives your customers.
- Help your customers understand what drives you.
- Make your customers love you.
- Make your customers want to spend more time with you.
- Make your customers want to tell their friends about you.
- Get wonderful staff.
- Keep the wonderful staff you’ve got.
- Cope with change.
- Cope with stasis.
- Learn to recognise opportunity.
- Don’t be left behind.
- Beat the recession.
- Get talked about.
- Get talked about in better terms.
- Impress strangers.
- Learn stuff you don’t know about your staff.
- Learn stuff you don’t know about yourself.
- Help people learn about the great things you’ve done.
- Persuade people to forgive your mistakes.
- Get on better with other departments/branches.
- Look like a hero in front of your boss/board/shareholders.
- Convince your boss/board/shareholders you’ve earnt your salary (or your bonus!).
- Get a promotion.
- Be more powerful
- Become the boss.
- Help your community.
- Make history.
- Change the world.
What do you think? Which ones have I missed?
(I know a popular one is “Work on your business, not in your business”, but I kind of hate that one. Remind me to talk about why some time.)
Photo: Diabolic Preacher
Nice list Angus. Might Delicious this. Very handy when writing copy! Thanks.
Posted by Glenn Murray on March 20th, 2009.
Very handy idea swipe file you’ve created here! One for the Bookmarks.
I wanted to remind readers about the importance of specificity in selling a benefit in case they think the above items should just be injected straight into a page of copy without further detail.
i.e. To drive home the benefit in purchasing a product or service you have to provide very specific images, feelings, and even tastes, smells and sounds. For example, “get a promotion” might be expounded on to read “Walk into your boss’s office tomorrow. Walk out making 15% more than you do today.”
I know this list was intended as more of an idea generator than to provide literal copywriting examples, but wanted to throw this into the conversation.
Oh, and people are pretty emotional about money too, so “Make more money” definitely needs to be on that list! Of course, I’d be more specific than that in my actual copy …)
Very useful post!
Cheers.
Posted by Karri Flatla on March 20th, 2009.
@Glenn: Glad you found it useful!
@Karri: Welcome, and thanks for the excellent comment. You’re quite right, I don’t mean for people to use these verbatim! And I love your elaboration of the promotion example.
You’re also absolutely right that making money can be an emotional benefit as well as a “bottom line” benefit. I want to get away from the default assumption that it’s the primary driver of every business decision, but yes, it should definitely be on the list!
Posted by Angus Gordon on March 20th, 2009.
Great list to keep on hand for idea generation. Thanks.
Posted by dana strong on March 22nd, 2009.
Thanks for sharing some tips and advice Angus. This will be a big help for those people who are involved in any business.. You really have a great job here and I agree to them, its very handy..
Posted by buy mailing lists on January 15th, 2010.