Your product/service is your best marketing idea. The graphic includes 100 “marketing ideas” for a lemonade stand, but the most important one is missing: make great lemonade. Whenever you are spending too much time trying to come up with the next gimmick, oops I mean marketing idea, to drive sales, it’s time to truly assess the benefit of your product or service. To do this, complete the following steps …
Step 1. Define your benefit. Every product/service should solve a problem or fulfill a need. It could be a functional need, an emotional need, or both. This is the benefit of buying your product or service.
Step 2. Categorize all the reasons potential customers are not buying your benefit into the 4 buckets below. You may need to do some research which can be as informal as asking friends what they think. For example, if you have a freshly squeezed lemonade stand, someone may not buy from you because they don’t like lemonade: list this under bucket 1 below. Or they may say that they love lemonade, but they already have some at home in the fridge: list under bucket 2. Or they may say that they don’t believe that your lemonade is really freshly squeezed: bucket 3. Or they may think that lemonade from the store is as good as less expensive than freshly squeezed: bucket 4.
- They believe that the don’t need or want your benefit.
- They believe they already have your benefit.
- They don’t believe you can deliver your benefit.
- They don’t believe that your benefit is worth the price or effort.
These are only 4 benefit barriers in marketing. These barriers apply to customer acquisition… so people who have not yet experienced your product or service but are aware of it. Lack of awareness is not a benefit barrier; even though it is a marketing problem that must be solved.
Step 3. Once you have the list of barriers completed, prioritize the top 3 that you believe are impacting new customer trial.
Perfect, now you are ready to attack these with some serious barrier busting …
