Guest Post: How to Make Your Boring Products a Thrill Again
If you sell boring products, it's not the end of the world. However, if you're not careful, it might be the end of your business. Boring products compete on a different level than custom ones. For starters, boring products are usually commodity ones - like light bulbs, razor blades, pens, and hard drives. How do you get people excited about your company if you're General Electric or some other "boring" corporation?
Tell A Story
Telling a story is probably the oldest form of sales. Don't think your product has an interesting story behind it? That's OK. You can tell a story about how your company started or how your product helped you. If you can tell a personal story, you'll create rapport with potential customers. Why? Because people like to know that you understand their problems.
And there's no better way to understand a person's problems than to have lived them yourself. There's also something to be said about a CEO that uses the same product he sells - it means he believes in the company. He believes in the product, and customers can then trust that what the company sells is legitimate.
Use Customer Case Studies
This tactic works exceptionally well if you already have a customer base, but you only need a few stellar case studies to make your product interesting. Almost every company has several loyal and enthusiastic customers.
Use them as the basis for your case study. Explain the problems that these customers faced, then show how your product solved that problem. For example, if you're a company like NextDayLenses, you can select your top 10 customers, ask them for an interview (or to simply tell you their story), and then publish it.
Continuing the example, let's say that there's a customer who just couldn't find the right set of lenses. They tried other contact lens companies, but it always a hassle dealing with the shipping or returns or customer service when it was time to reorder. Packages always arrived late, and lens quality was inconsistent.
Along comes your company - a superior lens retailer. The customer is blown away by your attention to detail. You follow up with him after the sale, make sure the lenses fit properly, and you frequently offer discounts on bulk orders. Not only that, you ship items quickly and they always arrive on time. On the rare occasion when they don't, you pick up the shipping costs the next time around. Do you think that potential customers would be amazed by how you help your existing customers? You bet. Would you get more sales from a story like that? Absolutely.
Solve An Unexpected Problem
There are probably 1,001 uses for baking soda. While not all products are like this, maybe your product can solve problems your customer hasn't even thought of. If you can come up with more than one use for your product - even if it's a boring commodity product - you'll instantly make that product more interesting.
Kurt Smith is a business branding and marketing consultant. He mainly deals with online and digital businesses and his articles appear on various marketing blogs.