How to Market Like the Big Brands

Focus on your Customer Outcomes

I have three words for you to remember when marketing your products and services:

Most. Desired. Outcome.

Do you know what it is for your clients and customers? Do you gear your messaging towards helping people understand what outcome you provide?

If you want to know how to do this, look no further than the biggest brands in the world.

They’re not focusing on what they’re selling their clients, they’re allowing them to see the benefit that they’ll receive.

Look Beyond the Features of your Products and Services  

It’s easy to get mired in the details about what you do or make. You can talk about the features of your product or service all day long. These details are what we’ve worked so hard on to perfect in the background, and they’re the bones of what makes our offer work.

However, features are not where you should be focusing your marketing time and energy if you’re looking to show potential clients why they should choose you over the competition.

Market like Apple 

Let’s use Apple as an example. Despite being a technology company, it’s actually ridiculously hard to find Apple’s product features on their website. You have to do a little digging to find out what’s really inside the machines - the processing speed, which camera each iPhone comes with, or how many megabytes the Macbook Pro has vs. the Macbook Air.

Instead of images of motherboards, trackpads, and screen sizes, their website contains words and images that resonate with people.

Apple is making technology human. 

They sell what you can do with their devices and how you will feel when using them. They emphasize the connection you’ll make when you FaceTime with family and friends, and the warmth you feel when you look at the amazing photo and video memories made.

Apple is selling a lifestyle product and humanizing a very technological business in a way that makes us as users love and adore the devices – and feel connected to the brand.

They sell their customers’ most desired outcomes.

Market like Nest 

Nest thermostats are another great example. Thermostats aren’t exactly the sexiest piece of technology. In fact, they’re often unattractive, but necessary fixtures in your home or office. However, Nest has taken an ugly, boring, essential device and created something beautiful and state of the art. And they show their customers the outcomes of using the product.

They make sure you know that even on the coldest of winter days, you can arrive home to a toasty warm house because you can operate the thermostat from anywhere. If your partner accidentally left the heat on and you’re already three hours into your road trip, (too late to turn around now) you can simply open up your phone and turn it down with the press of a button.

In their content, they demonstrate how it saves you time, energy, money, and how it’s good for the environment.

All desired outcomes of its loyal users.

Focusing on the desired outcomes is a secret of the world’s top brands.

Apply this concept in YOUR business

Maybe you're sitting there thinking, “Well, Apple and Nest have huge budgets, teams, presence, and endless marketing dollars…”

That may be, but I assure you that we as small businesses and solo-preneurs can use this concept without any of that.

Ask yourself if you're clear on the outcomes that your clients get in working with you. If you’re not, how can you change the language of what you’re sharing to show what they get rather than just what the actual trinket, widget, or service is?

Ask yourself, how does your product or service meet the needs of your audience? What do they desire out of what you have to offer?

If you’re only selling the features of your products (colour, size, etc) and services (3 calls, a workbook etc), then you’re putting yourself into the ring with everyone else that offers the same thing you do.

When you’re selling the features, you’re selling a commodity. 

Here’s an easy way to remember this …

Share the outcome they’ll receive from working with you, rather than what you’re giving them.

At Lab Creative, we don’t focus our messaging on selling logo design and branding. If we focused on the product or service in that way, we’d be constantly competing against whoever is cheaper or came up first in a Google search. Instead, we focus on the transformation and what our work does for our clients. We show them the outcomes they can expect to receive when working with us.

We recently had a client who chose to work with us because she knew we were the right company to be on this journey with her. She was attracted to how she would feel in the process of rebranding and what outcomes she would receive in choosing us. The best part is, she made this decision even though we were twice what she’d allotted as a budget for her branding.

That’s the importance of selling the desired outcome and the experience - people will choose to work with you over the competition, and pay you what you’re worth.

Take a look at your own business and messaging and see how you can start to shift how you’re selling your products and services.

How often do you say “I’ or “we” vs. “you”?

How much focus is on what you’re giving vs. what they’re receiving?

When you start to shift the language of how you’re selling what you offer, you start attracting the right clients who will pay you what you deserve because of the outcome you will provide.

. . .

If you’re ready to dive into this deeper, I invite you to join me in my upcoming session of Brand Camp where we go into this (and so much more!) to help you clearly understand what your clients value, what they WANT - and how YOU can stand out from the competition!