Why do you market your product or service? To sell more of it, right?
Of course, but what happens when the goal of your marketing is your success? The language you use often points to your success. You have the best product, with the most features. You have the best company with the most integrity. You have won all these awards, and worked with all these fantastic brands.
So what’s the problem?
If you are the best, don’t your customers want to know that? The answer is yes, but there is a huge caveat.
Your customers don’t actually want to know if you are the best. They want to know if using your product or service will make them the best.
Ouch!
How do you do that?
The best way to market your product is to talk about your customer’s success. To do so, you need to make a subtle shift and re-prioritization in your marketing content. Your success is secondary AND necessary to the customer’s success.
Here are two practical ways to assess and correct your marketing today.
1. You vs. we
The best way to find out whose success you are focusing on is to look at the pronouns you use. As business owners and marketers, we tend to talk about ourselves a lot. We use words like we, I, us, our way too much, and we do it at the expense of one of the most powerful words we have, you.
Dale Carnegie said, “A person’s name is to that person, the sweetest, most important sound in any language.”
Assessment: Go to your website home page. Now, count the number of times you use the word we (or I, us, our, etc.). Next, count the number of times you use the word you. As a general rule of thumb, you should have at least as many you statements as you have we statements, and hopefully, even more.
How to fix it: If you found that you have used too many “we” statements, it has probably cost you some valuable business. But don’t worry, there is a quick fix you can use to get started in the right direction.
In each of those instances where you talked about yourself, consider how you can say the same thing from the customer success angle.
Example 1
- Before: We will have your finished product to you in 24 hours.
- After: You will receive your finished product in 24 hours.
Example 2
- Before: Our mission is to make our city beautiful.
- After: Make your city beautiful.
Example 3
- Before: We were ranked the best marketing platform in 2019!
- After: Connect to your customers in a whole new way with the world’s #1 marketing platform.
2. Don’t sell the drill bit, sell the hole
Here’s the second way to reveal whose success you’re selling. Are you talking about the features of your product and services, or are you talking about the benefits and feelings they will have when using it?
You may have heard this analogy before, but it’s worth repeating. Why would someone go to the store and buy a drill bit? They don’t take it home, mount it up on the wall and invite their friends over to look at it. They don’t hold it in their hands and savor its metallic goodness.
No, they take it home, and they drill a hole so that they can hang a picture, build a birdhouse, or install a new faucet on their sink.
The best brands know this, and they market to what their users can do with their product (benefits) and how their users will feel afterward more than what features their product has.
Assessment: Pull up your website again and count the number of times you talk about the features of your company and your product/service. Then count the number of times you talk about what your company/product/service allows your customer to do AND to feel.
How to fix it: If you found that you have used too many “feature” statements, again, it has probably cost you some valuable business. But don’t worry, there is a quick fix you can use to clean things up right away.
For each feature reference, take the next step for your customers and show them why that feature matters to them. Here are a few examples:
Example 1
- Before: The titanium carbide tip drills through any material.
- After: The titanium carbide tip drills through any material, so you can show any project on your “honey-do” list who’s the boss!
Example 2
- Before: Our top-of-the-line, colocated, RAID 6 storage array creates multiple levels of redundancy.
- After: Our data protection system is so reliable you’ll never have to worry about your family photos again.
Example 3
- Before: We have the most fashion-forward suits and blazers.
- After: Caution: these blazers will make your bros jealous!
Wrapping it up
The best way to sell your product or service is to sell your customer’s success. Take a few moments today to assess your website homepage and add a comment with your we vs. you count, and your feature/benefit count.
Here’s to your customers’ success and the success that will surely follow for you.
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