Sell more successfully with benefit-oriented copy

Do you want your audience to respond to your messages? Of course you do. One tactic that will help immensely is to stress benefits instead of features.

Features, you recall, are the elements or components of your product or service. Benefits, on the other hand, are what the customer will experience by using your product or service. Features are tangible, while benefits are intangible. As a marketer, you should strive to touch on those intangibles; play to your customers’ emotions.

Take a cue from the national advertisers. Some of the themes you’ll see and hear include:

– Save money
– Sleep better
– Feel better about retirement/plan for a worry-free retirement
– Feel better about yourself
– Spend more time with your family/your kids

If you’re having difficulty producing benefit-oriented copy, use this sentence as a guideline:

“My product [picture the precise item or service] helps you [fill in the blank].”

Take your time with this. Think hard: What does your product or service do for your customers? What do they experience by using it? How will their lives be improved?

Understand that your customers really don’t care what your product is made of. (And they really don’t care about all the finer points of your business that you usually cram into your marketing pieces.) All your customers care about is what your product will do for them. Find out what that is, and hammer away it.

Whether selling online or offline, remember to emphasize benefits.  You will quickly realize that your customers are responding to your information.

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Tom Fuszard, content writer, blog writing, pr writing, web copy

 

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2 thoughts on “Sell more successfully with benefit-oriented copy”

  1. Great point about using testimonials. It’s like the concept from sales training: If I say it’s true, that’s me talking. But if one of my customers says it, it must be true!

    Customers naturally talk in terms of benefits, so use their comments whenever you can.

    Thanks for stopping by, Elaine.

  2. Great video and post Tom.

    Excellent explanation as to the difference between a benefit and a feature.

    Features are just factual statements about a product or service.

    What the customer or client really wants to know is how it will benefit them. What will happen to them if they take the product or use the service. A benefit tells your client why your features matter or “what’s in it for them.”

    Personal testimonies and stories are one of the most powerful way to communicate benefits of a product or service. I believe it is because of the emotional aspect of a story. Since features are simply non animated factual statements they do not have the same powerful effect.

    Also, as we communicate the benefits of our product and service we are in turn reselling ourselves and reminding ourselves again how great our product is and who should benefit from it.

    Thanks again Tom and keep promoting great info.

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