Usable Words

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:

1. Be less busy.
2. Stop spending time on routine tasks.
3. Spend more time doing what you like.
4. Spend less time doing what you hate.
5. Make your workplace fun.
6. Make your workplace healthy.
7. Make your workplace relaxing.
8. Make your workplace green.
9. Look more professional.
10. Look less boring.
11. Look bigger than you are.
12. Find out what your customers think about you.
13. Understand what drives your customers.
14. Help your customers understand what drives you.
15. Make your customers love you.
16. Make your customers want to spend more time with you.
17. Make your customers want to tell their friends about you.
18. Get wonderful staff.
19. Keep the wonderful staff you’ve got.
20. Cope with change.
21. Cope with stasis.
22. Learn to recognise opportunity.
23. Don’t be left behind.
24. Beat the recession.
25. Get talked about.
26. Get talked about in better terms.
27. Impress strangers.
28. Learn stuff you don’t know about your staff.
29. Learn stuff you don’t know about yourself.
30. Help people learn about the great things you’ve done.
31. Persuade people to forgive your mistakes.
32. Get on better with other departments/branches.
33. Look like a hero in front of your boss/board/shareholders.
34. Convince your boss/board/shareholders you’ve earnt your salary (or your bonus!).
35. Get a promotion.
36. Be more powerful
37. Become the boss.
38. Help your community.
39. Make history.
40. 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

OK, so you’ve managed to attract a bit of traffic to your website, and you’ve been clear enough about what you’re on about so that you’re on the shortlist of your target customers. What next?

Well, what’s next is that they choose you over anyone else on the shortlist. Duh. And there are two basic things you need to do for this to happen:

1. You need to convince them that you understand their problems and you can make them go away. (Even one of their problems would help.)
2. You need to convince them that you can do the above better than anybody else.

In other words, the way to get people to choose you is to make it all about them.

In the next post in this series, I’m going to be talking a bit about point 2, convincing people that you do it better than anybody else. But for now let’s concentrate on point 1, convincing them you can make their problems go away.

What we’re fundamentally talking about here, as many of you will have realised, is selling benefits, not features. In other words, don’t tell people what you do, tell them how you can help them. In the classic formulation, people don’t care about you, they want to know “what’s in it for me”.

I don’t want to reinvent the wheel here. There is a lot of stuff out there about using benefits to sell. I mean, really a lot, and most of it is just some variation on “Tell the prospect what’s in it for them. There, you’re now a copywriting genius. Give me $100.”

So yeah, really important principle no doubt, but do I have anything original to say about it? Maybe one day I will, but in the meantime, let me direct you to two of my favourite posts on the subject, by Sonia Simone at Copyblogger. Sonia suggests you bait the hook with emotional benefits, then reel them in with logical benefits, a formula I’ve found extremely useful.

So go and read Sonia. When you come back, you will be a copywriting genius (and not even $100 poorer), and you’ll be ready for me to tell you how to convince people you’re special. Because you are.

Image: mackz

Here is a handout [PDF link] I used for a presentation at BNI last week. It’s a quick 3-point check for the front page of a business website. Pretty basic stuff, but it’s amazing how many sites fail it.

Image: foundphotoslj