Creating Digital Assets: Clear benefit, difference, or both

👉 This is part of the Creating Digital Assets series.

For your service to have been valuable to your known buyer, you either offered a very clear benefit, a unique difference to other options available, or possibly both.

The benefit could simply have been that you were first to the party, they were ready to buy, and you were ready to start. Benefit = they no loner need to search.

But hopefully, it was something else. Something you can bottle-up and repeat.

For BrandPocket, interviews uncovered a handful of each (which is why I've bundled them together in this email):

1. One centralised location for all files: no Dropboxes, Inboxes, Google Drives or other people's hard drives where random files were being kept
2. Sharable: this one's cheating (almost everything online is sharable) but by simply moving files to this centralised location, these specific files were now sharable, which they weren't previously
3. Always up-to-date: Things like your marketing material or website change all the time, but brand files almost never change. When they do, it's not a one-off thing like changing the headline on your website - a LOT of things likely need to be updated to align with that change. BrandPocket needed to guarantee that the version you were looking at on the dashboard, was the last approved version of everything.

Those are benefits that I could just build in to the tool, but the big difference to some alternative products was the service component.

I had been recommending those very alternative products for years. In some cases, clients would open their own account and figure it out, but more often I did it for them.

Attempting to stay across feature and pricing changes for several brand management tools is what eventually did me in.

I was constantly having to partly re-learn some features which my clients didn't use, but were still required to know to even build the simplest dashboard.

Pricing went from cheap, to free, to "contact sales to discuss your needs". It pushed me to build BrandPocket with fixed-price options, and add in the "I'll just do it all for you by default" component.

The point is, if you have the shortcut of having delivered a service in the past, there's a good chance you can uncover what the very clear benefit was at the time, or an obvious difference between you and the alternative... or possibly both.

Tomorrow: A clear scope.

(Again - if you disagree with anything here, or have more to add, please let me know).