Your customer does not care about your USPs
Your customer does not care about your USPs
The Feature-Benefit approach to marketing had its day, it’s time to move on.
Imagine a company has launched a brand-new car. The campaign focuses on an innovation which reduces fuel consumption by 25%, which is a good statistic to have in your armoury.
By taking this approach, and positioning the technological advancement as the narrative, you are focusing on what is important to the company, not the customer.
There might well be some customers who make purchasing decisions based on technical specifications, but the majority will be focused on the value derived, not the features and benefits of the product.
Instead, a more appealing campaign would focus on reducing the monthly bill for running the car. The national conversation is swirling around cost-of-living, therefore you can offer a product which can reduce household spending, you are improving your relevance to that customer.
This approach puts the campaign in the relevant market context (household budgets are squeezed), and on the customer motivation (spend less running the car), to earn credibility, before demonstrating your solution (the benefits) and providing proof (the feature).
You’ve positioned your capability around their motivation not the other way around.
This is what many in the marketing world would accept as best practice, but the sheer volume of content published daily which is leaning on the feature/benefit approach is overwhelming.
USP dumping - pride above best practice
There are three trends to consider here which are independent, but when they collide the outcome is a significant downturn in the quality and success of content marketing strategies.
- Trend One Marketers have less money to operate with. Research from Gartner suggests the average marketing team is operating with a budget of 7.8% of total revenues. This is down 18% from four years ago.
- Trend Two Artificial Intelligence has revved the content production machine to maximum, and there is significantly more competition for audience attention.
- Trend Three The number of internal stakeholders required to review and approve a piece of content is growing in volume and influence.
The first two trends would suggest marketers should aim for higher quality content to compensate. It gets more bang for your buck, while also allowing to cut through the white noise wall of AI generated content.
However, the third trend is becoming more influential.
If a CEO sees a piece of marketing content, the company objective has to be front and centre. If the product team see it, the USPs must be prominent. If sales see it, the piece is littered with marketing superlatives. Before too long, the customer is looking at corporate puffery with little correlation to what matters to them.
These individuals are proud of the company and the product, and have made that the focal point of the story. The pressure to appease everyone internally misses the point of good marketing; if your customer has to translate your technical specification into why it matters to them, you have made them do the marketer’s job.
As many marketers face budgetary pressure and increased competition, internal cultures are forcing content down the path of least resistance as opposed to one which produces the greatest impact.
Why outside-in matters more
The approach of outside-in marketing is one which places the customer at the heart of the story. Customers generally do not care about the mechanics of a solution, just that it delivers the right outcome to add value where they need it.
The inside-out approach may be easier to approve internally because every internal stakeholder can find themselves in it, but is it any good?
This is the theory which sits at the heart of everything we do at The Content Store. Content can tell a story which helps build more meaningful relationships with audiences, which is not something which can be delivered overnight, but it does create more value for your business.
In proving the value, the simplest approach would be to A/B test, but measure metrics which genuinely add value to the business. Measuring clicks/views/reads is too simplistic and open to misinterpretation, as success is driven more by the result rather than the click itself.
This is perhaps the misunderstanding across the business. Clicks and views are a good short-term measure of success, but they are a means to an end. Value comes after the click, such as changes to brand perception, generated leads or greater understanding of the company itself. This is what should be measured, which largely can only be delivered through impactful content.
If a customer exits the page immediately, or stops reading, the content piece has not done its job. The outside-in approach is not just nicer storytelling, it is a response to a market where audiences have more choice, more information and less patience.
Audiences can be interested in the technical specifications, but that is rarely the initial motivation. They have an outcome in mind, you have to align to it.
This in itself will help cut through the white noise wall of AI generated content, but also, provide more meaningful outcomes from the engagement with your audience.
