Over the past month, I have been blogging about the basic elements necessary in product messaging. A lot of what I have discussed is pretty cut and dried. In this post, I am going to talk about the technique that separates average product messages from the ones that truly connect with the buyer.
Today we will focus on persuading the buyer why they should care about your product.
In just about every purchase (even business purchases), emotion plays an important role in the final decision. The answer to the question "why should the buyer care" is about creating that emotional connection with the buyer.
To do this, the marketer must understand 3 things:
- Benefits the product offers
- Value the product offers
- Buyer motivations
We always talk about those benefits from the customer's perspective.
Not all benefits are of equal merit. Values assign worth to each benefit.
This is the total buyer context that drives their need and interest in your product.
Now, benefits and value aren't just pulled out of thin air. They are developed using a disciplined approach. In this approach, we seek to understand how the product delivers quantifiable benefit experiences for the buyer. That approach is built into something called the customer value proposition. (If you are new to value propositions or just want a quick refresher, read my new eBook The Customer Value Proposition.)
The third component - buyer motivations - is developed in your buyer persona.
What we want to do in our messaging is to convince the buyer both logically and emotionally that many of their voiced and unvoiced motivations will be addressed by purchasing and using our product. We need to observe, consider, and integrate like great sales reps. Because buyer motivations are so key, let's spend some time exploring what makes a buyer motivation.
Motivations come in a number of forms.
- Needs - something the buyer feels is necessary to improve a situation
- Pains - underlying issue that causes the buyer discomfort
- Challenges - realities that stretch the buyer without causing pain
- Goals - tactical and strategic milestones the buyer wants to achieve
- Ideals - moral, career, personal characteristics buyer wants to attain
Buyers will look for products that satisfy their existing needs and eliminate their current pains. Sales reps often talk about this as "identifying the buyer's pain points". The higher the degree of pain, the more motivated the buyer will be to find a solution to it. It is fairly easy to get a buyer to talk about their needs and their pains.
Challenges, goals, and ideals tend to be unspoken motivations. Take the IT Manager who must decide between an IBM product and a product from a start-up company. The saying goes, "No one was ever fired for choosing IBM." For that new IT manager whose challenge is to impress his boss and whose goal is to become CIO, these motivations will play an important part in the company and product selection. He/she may be willing to take more risk and go with an unproven company with a superior offering.
But for the IT manager who has a family of 4 with a baby on the way, his/her challenges and goals may lean more towards a safer, proven, turn-key solution. He/she can't afford to spend long hours overseeing an incomplete product. A poor product selection could cause him/her to be fired.
You can see the emotional power in each of these different motivations. For this reason, when the marketer crafts the "why care" product messaging, he/she needs to go beyond the easy-to-read surface pains and needs. This isn't just about words, though. The product experience must support these more motivational claims.
In marketing messaging, the most persuasive message is that combination of logical matchmaking and emotional persuasion. Product messages that connect and persuade will carry the buyer much farther along in their buying process with you.
So, take the time to build those buyer personas and develop those value propositions. They provide everything you need to craft the product messaging that convinces the buyer why he/she should care about your product.
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