As you work to create products and content and build your list with smart lead magnets, learning how to focus on the benefits of your offers will help you a lot. You’ve likely heard the phrase benefits over features during your business studies. This is exactly what we’re talking about here.
The main reason you must focus on benefits over features when explaining your offers is that your audience doesn’t care about you or much about how. They only care about what you offer them and the results of those offers.
What’s in it for them? is the central question you need to answer.
The first thing you’ll need to learn so that you can differentiate from features and benefits is how to identify a benefit. The best way to think about this is how the feature you’ve created impacts the user. The impact is the benefit. The impact is what you want to focus on when marketing to your audience because that’s what they care about the most.
You may be offering email customer service to your customers, but what impact does that offer have on your customers? Does it give them time freedom? Does your customer service give them peace of mind? What is the impact of your offer on them ultimately?
It might help you to do the following exercise. Ask yourself what the benefits are of various items you own, products you use, or services you buy? For example, what are the benefits of the deep side pockets on cargo pants? They let you put tons of stuff inside when you go on a hike without worrying about losing them. Choose some items you have around your home and list the benefits of them so you can practice getting this down.
To do better writing about benefits over features, you’ll want to think about what they do. What is the verb that the feature does? Start by listing out all the features of your product and then write down the benefits of that feature. Some features may have more than one benefit. For example, if you offer remote email customer care, a benefit of that is time savings, emotional protection, and the knowledge that your customers won’t wait for care.
When you’re writing about anything regarding your offers, don’t write like you’re in school. Forget the lessons your English teacher taught you about using the word you. In fact, you’ll want to use the word you and speak directly to your ideal customer and no one else as you write about the benefits of every offer that you put in front of them. Also, don’t be negligent about answering the questions they have about what’s in it for them.
