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.

Today, I came across a very interesting concept in marketing that you can often use as a rule of the thumb to determine whether you’ve gotten your marketing sorted out or if your brand still needs extra tweaking and positioning. The concept I am talking about is that of brand mantra.

What’s a brand mantra, you ask? Put simply, it’s a 3-5 word statement that described your brand, its unique characteristics and points of difference. If it sounds like no small task to accomplish in just 5 words, then you’re right. However, let me ask you the following question - if you, as the owner of the product, cannot explain in five words what your product is all about and what separates it from the competition, how can you expect your customers to know the difference?

To clarify a little bit what I mean, let’s look at some of the more successful out there. For example, Nike’s is as follows:

“Authentic Athletic Footwear”

It’s simply, concise and direct to the point. It doesn’t wander into the realm of complicated mission statements that need a dictionary to interpret, and it is not ridden with corporate buzzwords that sound lovely but, when taken together, don’t mean a thing.

And yet, when you drill down to it, this is what Nike is all about - authentic athletic footwear. Or let’s take another example - Disney’s brand mantra of “Fun Family Entertainment.” This is what Disney stands for, this is what its products are all about, this is how the brand is positioned. You don’t need a 10-page sales copy to explain it - it’s essence can be distilled into three words which perfectly capture the essence of the offering.

Now, let me ask you this question. If you have any info products, for how many of them can you come up with a brand mantra? And if the answer is “none”, then you are probably not doing your marketing right.

Make your opinion heard - do you have a brand mantra? If so what, is it? Post in the comments below - inquiring minds want to know!

Today, I would like to share with you a strategy that is nothing short of miraculous. If applied correctly, it can make you a small fortune with very limited investment in terms of time and effort. And, in the process of applying it, we are going to practice the art of STP marketing (Segment, Target, Position).

Frequent readers of my blog know that it is marketing, rather than content, that sells a product. No matter how great your info product really is, no one but you (and, possibly, your ghostwriter) will appreciate it if no one’s buying your e-book. Further, you will also recall the importance of segmenting your market and targeting your product to appeal to a specific target segment, rather than the market in general.

But here’s something interesting to consider - how much difference is there between market segments? For example, for a divorce-prevention e-book, we can use the following criteria to segment the market:

• Gender (whether the book is aimed at men or women)
• Causes (whether the book deals with divorce prevention in general, or specific causes in particular, such as infidelity, finance, etc)
• Age (recently married couples will likely face difference divorce issues than those who have been together for 20+ years)

Let’s assume now that we segment the market using the Gender criterion, which, for the most part, is the safest way to do it (you don’t want to target a segment that hasn’t got enough prospective customers). With that done, ask yourself the following question - if you were to produce one divorce prevention e-book aimed at women and another aimed at men, how much difference do you think there would be between the two in terms of content?

And the answer is - not a whole lot. To be sure, there will be minor differences - but, for the most part, the real difference between the two products will lie not in content, but in packaging - in other words, the graphics of your site and the style and content for your sales copy. You will want to hit different emotional buttons and appeal to a different audience - but the content of the book will not actually change that much!

Using this trick, you can easily turn a single product into two without too much research on your part. Remember, the product itself is nowhere near as important as how you market and position it to your prospective customers. Better still, a product that is positioned to appeal to a well-defined market segment - rather than the entire market in general - will almost always have better appeal - and, consequently, feature higher conversion rates - than a product that attempts to be mainstream in a segmented market. By splitting your product into two, you’re not only making more money with two products instead of one, but you’re actually making each one of them convert better. If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is!