Focusing on Value Instead of Features in Digital Marketing

When creating marketing materials for your business, it’s easy to get bogged down in listing out the various features and specifications of your products. However, to truly connect with customers, marketers should actively focus more on conveying the genuine value and benefits your offerings provide instead of merely describing features. Features describe what a product can do, while value illustrates how it can improve customers’ lives – a much more powerful concept that resonates emotionally.

Product features encompass technical specifications

Individual parts and functions. While useful information for some audiences, features often fail to communicate why customers should care. On the other hand, value represents the practical and emotional gains that customers realize through using your offering. Features are tangible, while value resides in the intangible improvements made to customers’ lives.

For example, explaining that a running shoe has a specialized outsole with multiple flex grooves describes a feature. Whereas highlighting how that technology translates into less impact force on joints to reduce pain and enable more comfortable all-day wearability communicates real value. Value focuses on the impact and benefits to the customer, not just the producer’s intentions.

To incorporate this value-driven approach into your digital marketing communications, begin by thinking like your prospective customer instead of merely presenting your product.

Ask yourself:

• How will using my offering make customers’ lives better? More enjoyable? Easier?
• What specific goals does it help them accomplish or obstacles does it help them overcome?
• What feelings might customers associate with the benefits it provides?

Articulating the impact in these ways allows customers to personally relate, connecting your product’s value with their own goals and desires.

Then, translate those customer-centric perspectives into your marketing materials by:

• Highlighting real customer stories – Incorporate testimonials, case studies and social proof that demonstrate tangible value others have gained.
• Describing benefits, not features – Lead with what customers get in return for their investment of time or money.
• Using impactful adjectives – Describe the improvements customers experience as meaningful, life-changing or confidence-boosting.
• Focusing on emotions – Illustrate how your offering makes customers feel – happier, healthier, more productive, confident, etc.

Overall, moving the focus of your marketing from listing product features toward clearly communicating the genuine value and benefits customers gain by using your offering represents a highly effective strategy for connecting, engaging and motivating action.