As a business owner, do you know and understand what your business features are?
As a business owner, do you understand what the benefits you provide to your clients or customers?
If you don’t, then how can you promote yourself well, confidently and articulately!
As business owners, we need to understand how we are different to other similar or same businesses and be able to shine uniquely.
When asked, can you say in what way your business is unique or different?
Can you explain specifically what your point of difference is?
There are a couple of things that can hinder us from doing these things.
One is confidence in ourselves as a business owner; having self-belief in what we do and who we are, and well as feeling comfortable in our own skin to be proud to say what we do AND that we are good or even great at what we do.
Let’s look at what the differences are between features and benefits:
Features are the characteristics of your services or product, and are likely to be descriptive, visual or technical. They should outline what is remarkable or unique about your product or service. Features are factual statements about your product or service that provide credibility and substance to what you say when promoting your business.
Benefits are solely all about the client or customer, the WIIFM (what’s in it for me), in what way will they be better off after receiving your service or product. The added value that makes a difference in their lives. Benefits are the emotional aspect, the reasons why someone will buy your service or product from you. The WHY is important because we buy with emotion, we want the benefit and the ‘end’ result.
Features to Benefits – the step between the two is the ‘SO WHAT’ aspect. For example, explaining that your business is personalised, creative, positive and empowering may not be sufficient. Whereas explaining that you can be stress-free, have more time, feel and be more in control, have better balance in your work and life, is the reason you want, need and buy the service or product.
Have a go! Try writing down what you see as being the key features of your business and then write down what you see are the benefits, remembering descriptive factual for features and emotional value-added aspects for the benefits, and then use these to promote your business next time you’re presenting or in a meeting with someone or a group.
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