Connecting with customers

An important element to marketing that too many entrepreneurs tend to overlook is finding your emotional benefit.

We tend to focus our energies on our business features — from pricing to product claims to timetables. But it’s not the facts that set you apart. The rational elements of your business do little to differentiate you from your competition. They also don’t help you form a relationship with your customers. It’s the emotional benefits you offer that make your company special, turning your business into a brand.

Think for a minute about how you choose products. I’m sure you are picking out features, but it’s really the brands you are choosing. You choose one brand over another because you trust it, you’re familiar with it, you’ve relied on it for years or it’s been highly recommended by someone you trust. These are all emotional benefits. It’s the emotional benefits that have turned those products into brands. You have relationships with brands, not with products.

As an entrepreneur, you can do the same with your business. While you’ll certainly need to sort through your product features and benefits, if you want to create a brand people trust and recommend, you’ll need to offer an emotional benefit.

Every business has to get at customers’ emotions differently, in whatever way best suites them. If you are a business consultant, you may think all you offer are functional benefits like reports and analysis. While your clients may need these things day-to-day, there’s an underlying emotional benefit that you can offer them as well: building their reputation among their colleagues, helping get them promoted or allowing them to balance their work and family pressures. You also offer them trust and reliability — factors that create an emotional appeal.

The emotional benefit for your brand may not be intuitively obvious to you. Talking with loyal customers is a good place to start searching for that emotional appeal. Also take a look at what your competition is saying to their customers. This may give you ideas about how to create your own messaging. Simply thinking about why your customers need to come back to you time and time again could be enough to reveal the answer.

Customers don’t necessarily remember what you do for them as much as they remember how you made them feel. There’s where you can uncover your emotional benefit.

Extract taken from the ‘Entepreneur’

Can you share an example of having successfully addressed emotional benefits?