How to create a benefit ladder & use it.
The Benefit Ladder is a classic tool to get you thinking about what matters to your audience. Often, we are too close to our brand and product. We might think a new feature is mind-blowing just because we invented it.
The Benefit Ladder gets us out of our heads and into our audience’s heads.
The simplest way to use it is to first identify the features that matter most to the audience.
Remember, it could be one feature, several features, or the absence of a feature.
We then climb the ladder by asking these questions:
1. What do those features combine to do (what’s their function)?
2. How does this function make people feel (what’s the emotional benefit)?
Truth be told, when many of us explore this kind of thinking, what’s really going on inside our heads would look much closer to a mind map shooting fireworks all over the place rather than a neat and tidy, box-by-box exploration.
So, after you’ve tried the tidy stuff, let yourself repeatedly ask, “What’s the benefit of this? And of this? And of this?” See where you end up.