Why you should stress more on benefits and less on features

Oct 06, 2006

This is an oft-repeated question, but while writing, sometimes we don’t realize when from the luminescent land of benefits we quietly segue into the marshes of features and jargons while writing copy for various clients.

When you write about the benefits of a product or a service, you automatically think from the perspective of the reader and that should be the fundamental goal of every copywriter: to write copy for the customer, not for the seller. And it’s not that difficult. Whenever your client says, “My product has this feature,” immediately think how this feature can benefit the customer.

Take for instance, a word processor. Most word processors today come with tons of features. There are so many features that if you start listing them you can end up creating a dedicated Wiki. Instead, it is very easy to tell the prospective customer that:

Our word processor doesn’t usurp 60% of your computer’s RAM
Our word processor is very light and loads very fast
Your document is preserved even if your system crashes
It doesn’t cost you much
It lets you manage your various blogs
You can format your documents in whatever way you want
All word processors can open your documents

As you can see, this is a pure list of benefits. These benefits can be of great use to a regular word processor user like me.

Your copy should be able to convey to the readers how the offer of your client can improve the way they do business or live their lives. If you can do that, your client is going to be a prosperous person.