Benefits not Features
Seth Godin says marketing should start before a product. This sounds strange when you take it literally. The Business of Software forum participants say you should focus on benefits, not features. These pieces of advice go together. When developing a product you must have the big picture in mind, which means an answer to the question “why are you making what you’re making?” The answer to that should, at the very least, center around meeting a customer’s needs. Ideally, your product should also make life better for your customers, and provide value and benefits not found elsewhere…
At this time, my product doesn’t really have a list of benefits. The difference between benefits and features is subtle, but at the end of this post hopefully it’ll be more apparent. Maybe the difference between “what it does” and “what it does for your customers” is an accurate analogy.
Here are my product’s current features, which are more about what the product can do.
- Proper solution to the “complex product attribute/pricing” problem
- Freedom to customize AND get updates
- Every bit of text can be displayed in multiple languages
- A full year of free updates
Number one is horrible because nobody knows what the hell it means. Number two sounds ok, but the benefit isn’t explicit enough. Number three’s wording isn’t as clear or direct as it could be. Something like “translate your storefront with ease” would be better.
To help me out I had to look at the verbiage for some other successful software products. Here are the benefits for the Bingo Card Creator software.
- Take the busywork out of bingo
- Tailor your activities
- Keep students interested in learning
- Teach almost any subject
- Never buy another bingo product
And here are the benefits for Balsamiq Mockups.
- Improve your Usability. Explore Different Designs in Minutes
- Get to Agreement Early with a tool everyone can use
- Cut down spec-writing time. Spend your time coding, not churning
- Use it with your clients. Let them help you bring their vision to life
- Integrated in the way you work
The benefits for Bingo Card Creator and Balamiq Mockups are non-technical. They outline what the user of the software gets by using the product.
While focusing about this, I’ve realized my benefits are beneficial to differing audiences. My product doesn’t have just 1 user. This makes things a bit more difficult for me, but I think it can be dealt with through good website organization.
Being a programmer, I want my product to make other programmers happy. But programmers often work hand-in-hand with a graphic designer when setting up a storefront; designers are directly affected by my decisions as well. And of course, the third party affected is the retailer. All three are “users” of my product, so I might as well outline the benefits for all three. Makes sense, right? Maybe I’m making it too complicated. Time will tell.
For Programmers
- Customize with less pain.
- Software updates won’t squash your customizations.
- Never again retrofit multi-lingual functionality.
For Designers
- Skin faster. Easy to navigate templates, simple syntax, no abbreviations, easily discernable template logic.
- Translate storefronts with ease.
For Vendors
- Customizations and branding are less painful for your development team.
- Grow your customer base by selling in other languages.
- Sell any type of product.
Now it’s time to work those into the website. Any thoughts?