George Blogs!

It goes without saying that you do not sell products or features - instead, you sell benefits. How will your product help the customer? What benefits will it provide? How will it make your customer’s life better, easier, more exciting, more affordable?

The problem is, however, that, nowadays, you can’t sell what they call a core product. For example, you won’t get far with a product that simply teaches customers the basics of SEO or copywriting, simply because there are hundreds of similar e-books out there that all accomplish the same thing. To be successful, you will need to extend your product by adding new benefits to it - for instance, regular customer support, rarely explained strategies to drive more traffic to your site, exclusive members-only forum, etc. If you’re thinking product differentiation, then you’re not far off.

When differentiating yourself from the competition, however, you need to do so in an intelligent manner that emphasises points of key relevance to the customers. And that’s where a customer value hierarchy comes into play. Put simply, the hierarchy enables you to determine which of the benefits of are the really important ones. For example, if you are writing an e-book on SEO, the single most important benefit will also be the core benefit - that being, knowledge of how to optimize your site. But your second most important one may well a technical explanation of how to make changes to your code necessary to implement proper SEO practices (as you probably know, a lot of people are scared stiff by the very notion of fiddling around with HTML code).

In contrast, let’s assume your SEO e-book comes with a professionally illustrated, colorful e-cover. How much benefit do you reckon it will provide to your customers? The answer is - not a whole lot. While it’s nice to buy a product that you feel a lot of effort has gone into and that you can easily form a visual impression of, in the final analysis, this “feel-good” benefit is likely to be somewhere at the very bottom of the customer value hierarchy.

What does this mean for you as a marketer? Once you have constructed the customer value hierarchy for your product, you are in a much better position to write sales copy that will sell like hot cakes. You know exactly which points you need to stress the most, and which you can pretty much ignore or mention somewhere closer to the bottom of your copy. Properly-constructed customer value hierarchy pretty much writes the sales copy for you by helping you decide which of the benefits will help you sell the product - and which ones the prospective customer wouldn’t care one bit about.