An Ignoble Experiment: Small Business Conversations by Network Solutions - Emotional Benefits for your Small Business-Where you Can Start.

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Emotional Benefits for your Small Business—Where you Can Start.

In my last blog post, I talked about the importance of defining the emotional benefits your company delivers and subsequently integrating that into everything you do. Recall that an emotional benefit is one where you are able to get your customers to feel an emotional pull towards your company. You want your customers or potential customers to be able to answer this question…"When I buy or use this company, I feel ___." If you don't know what your emotional benefits are, you can conduct some quick, easy and inexpensive research with your target audience. Better yet, you may already have some data, but you don't even realize it. Here's where you can start:

Analyze your existing customer feedback: If you have comment card feedback, customer service emails, posts from your facebook account or anything at all that provides insight into customers' sentiments, this is the place to start. Review all the information to see what they are saying about your company. Look for statements/words that highlight how they feel about your product or service like "fun", "comfortable", "taken care of". You could easily end up with a list of several words/statements that reflect your emotional end benefits!

If you should be so lucky to have that, then it'll just be an exercise in paring that list down to the ones you feel should truly reflect your business and what you stand for. If it turns out that your list includes quick a few negative impressions that is good learning as well—it gives you a focus on what you need to work on.

Conduct research via quick polls or surveys: Assuming you don't have enough data to help you define the emotional benefits, you could garner this feedback through your website or social media presence. In fact Amishi's post last week provides insights on different research options for you to consider.

These are the types of questions you want to have your customers answer:

How satisfied are they with your product/service/company and why?
What are you doing well? What are you not doing well and why?
What should you be doing to improve your experience?
Is there anything that your competitors doing that they love and that you should be considering?

By answering these types of questions, you will undoubtedly get feedback on their feelings. This will then help you define what you want to stand for from an emotional end benefit perspective. Also it can give you insight on how you can differentiate yourself vs. your competitors on these benefits. Hope that helps provide a good foundation to start with. Good luck!