When developing marketing and sales content for their business it’s easy for business owners and their teams to focus on the features they’ve lovingly developed for their products and services, rather than on the benefits customers get.
But research tells us that people buy based on the benefits they’ll gain, not the features they’ll get.
So how do you make sure your messaging focusing on benefits, rather than the features?
The difference between features and benefits
A feature is an attribute of a product or service that is tangible and quantifiable. For example, the screen size of a mobile phone is a feature.
A benefit is often more intangible and can be described in terms of how the customer feels and what they can do as a result. For example, the benefit of a large screen on a mobile phone is that it makes it easier to read and view information and that it makes the device more attractive to people who want to use the phone to watch videos or play games.
A single feature may provide different benefits to different audiences. For example, if you were targeting business customers, having a larger mobile phone screen would allow them to review stock reports and business news more conveniently. Whereas if you were targeting casual gamers, the large screen’s benefit would be how it enhances gameplay.
This means a single product, with a single set of features, may use very different messaging when targeting different audiences to communicate the benefits specific to them.
Turning features into benefits
if you’re able to tell your customers how your product or service specifically benefits them, they’ll be far more interested than if you simply list a set of features, so as you work to create your marketing and sales content you need to ask yourself: What are the benefits my customers will get from the feature I’m describing?
If you want to avoid sending your sales and marketing messaging to the trash, or to the kind of customer who buys on price alone, you need to focus on the benefits your customers will get from your product or service rather than the features it has.
To help you remember this, and to make sure you’re always talking about benefits rather than features, you might want to use the word “so” to lead into your descriptions of features. For example: “Your mobile phone has a large screen. So you can easily read emails and view text messages.”
Alternatively, you can lead into the description of a feature by saying “with” before the feature. For example: “With a large screen you can easily read emails and view text messages.”
With this in mind, think about how you’re describing your products and services in your marketing materials. Are you providing a ‘shopping list’ of features, or describing the end benefits, or the transformation, that the customer will receive?