How to Decide Which Solution Features to Emphasize in Your Marketing

A key objective of this newsletter is to share buying insights that will help marketers develop strategies and messaging that influence prospective buyers of higher stakes buying decisions – those where multiple solution options are considered, the buying decision is made infrequently, and there are significant consequences in making the right or wrong choice.

These insights are gleaned from nearly 15 years of conducting interviews with buyers involved in these decisions across a wide array of industries and solutions. By looking across all the buyer interviews (thousands of them!) we can identify truisms that have important implications for marketers. These are things we hear from buyers loudly and consistently.

The first insight addresses a question that marketers and sellers frequently have:

Which features of my solution should I include or emphasize in my marketing communications, and which should I leave out or deemphasize?

The simple answer:

1. Talk about features that prospective buyers care about
2. Talk less (or not at all) about features they don’t care about
3. If you’re not sure which features provide value to buyers and which do not, go talk to them and find out – guessing is detrimental to your success

Let’s discuss each of these in a little more detail…

Talk about features that prospective buyers care about

Buyers consistently tell us that the solution features (or provider capabilities) that influence their buying decision the most are those that:

1. Help them solve an important need or challenge that they have – does the feature help them achieve an outcome they care a lot about?
2. Alleviates a concern that they have about making the investment, or making it with you – does the feature diminish their fears that you and your solution can REALLY deliver?
3. Makes it easier for them to adopt and use your solution – does the feature improve time-to-value and adoption by end users?

Solution features that accomplish one or more of these objectives are the ones that buyers continuously self-identify as influential in their buying decision.?

I can hear the question now:

But what about features that differentiate our solution? The ones only we can uniquely offer.

Shouldn’t we include those in our messaging and proof points?!

Absolutely, but ONLY if you are confident that the feature also provides value buyers care about. If it doesn’t, leave it out (as painful as that might be!).

Talk less (or not at all) about features they don’t care about

One of the other things we consistently hear from buyers is how difficult it is to compare solutions, particularly those involving higher stakes, more complex buying decisions that include multiple decision influencers and provider alternatives. Inputs and opinions are coming from many directions, and it gets confusing very quickly, particularly for a solution that buyers may know very little about until recently.

In this environment, including features in your marketing that don’t provide clear value to buyers is white noise (at best) or a distraction (at worst). Cut them. Be ruthless. Walk in the shoes of your buyers and ask yourself, is this additional information helpful or detrimental to their ability to make a confident decision?

Conversely, messaging and proof points that aligns with what buyers care about most instills greater confidence in you, as the provider, and simplifies the buying decision for the prospective customer. This improves your positioning and chances of winning the business.

If you’re not sure which features provide value to buyers and which do not, go talk to them, and find out – guessing is detrimental to your marketing success

Talking to buyers who were recently involved in a buying decision that you’re trying to influence is one of the most valuable exercises you can do to align your marketing to what buyers' value most. ?As one marketing executive recently told us after developing buyer persona insights:

“The research told us what’s really important to buyers. We streamlined our messaging to the most important touch points, to the kind of education buyers actually want. Now we can say to?our colleagues, ‘These are the messages we need to say and why.’”

As I wrote about in prior editions of this newsletter, focus these interviews on the buying decision, not just the profiles of individuals involved in them.?Better yet, conduct interviews that enable you to draw conclusions across five key areas of the buying decision that will directly inform your marketing and messaging strategy.

We’ll discuss tips and best practices for conducting these types of interviews in future editions of the newsletter.

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Thank you for reading this edition of Buyer Persona Buzz. I hope you enjoyed the topic, and we welcome your comments and suggestions.

Here are some other ways to access insights about your target buyers:

• Follow me or the Buyer Persona Institute on LinkedIn for timely tips to better understand your target buyers and join the conversation on my posts
• Visit the Buyer Persona Institute website to learn how to gain insight into your persona’s buying decisions and align your teams to enable their purchase journey
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