What Your Customers Really Want to Know: WIIFM

Sometimes I think I’ll go crazy saying this, or maybe people will think I’m crazy because I say it so much. It seems so obvious to me, and yet I see marketing every day that fails to answer or even address the fundamental question: What’s In It for Me?

• You can produce widgets in record time? Great! What’s in it for me?
• You’ve been in business for 20 years? Awesome! What’s in it for me?
• You’re taking the headphone jack out of my iPhone? Why? What’s in it for me?

Here’s how to fix that: whenever you share a feature (faster, cheaper, new), be explicit about what it means to the customer by saying out loud, “and what that means to you is….”

• We can produce widgets in record time, and what that means to you is you’ll always have your order on time with no backorders or delays.
• We’ve been in business 20 years, and what that means to you is you can 1) ask your friends and colleagues about our service and 2) be assured that in our 20 years of experience we’ve learned to tailor a custom solution to meet each customer’s needs—no “one size fits all” solution.
• We’re taking away your headphone jack, and what that means to you is that you won’t have to worry about getting your headphone cords tangled up or snagging them on something so that your phone falls on the floor. Did you know that headphones are the leading cause of phones being yanked out of people’s hands and crashing on the floor?

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. They have a problem. There’s either something they have that they don’t want (e.g. “pain”) or something they want but they don’t have (“pleasure”). If they could fix this problem easily by themselves, they wouldn’t need you. You have a solution (or more than one). The more explicitly you connect your offering with their problem, the greater the chance you will be able to make a sale.

And you do want to make sales, don’t you? If so, start connecting the dots for your customers. Explain to them what’s in it for them (even if it seems obvious to you), and watch your marketing efforts really pay off.

If you aren’t sure how to tie your product’s or service’s features into the practical benefits your customers are looking for, shoot me an email so we can discuss it.