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I honestly think that confusion between features and benefits is one of the biggest single reasons why external copywriters and creatives are used to implement marketing, rather than in-house copywriting and design teams.
Writing copy about your own business is always difficult, because it's hard to see things from an external audience's perspective. You spend your whole working life developing better ways of doing things, so it's easy to believe that people will be most interested in what you do and how you do it.
In fact, people are interested in what they do and how you can help them do it.
Incidentally, features are very important and need to appear somewhere. But you can leave them on a page for people who want to know more. In the meantime, you need to flog the benefits to death, which involves turning around by 180 degrees what you know about your business. For example
- Shellshock vodka contains 50% alcohol by volume (feature)
- Get drunk fast (benefit)
- The inspirathon boasts a 5Ghz octocore processor (feature)
- Your computer will play solitaire faster than ever (benefit)
- ACME cuts your cleaning costs by an average of 15% (feature)
- Use your cleaning budget for something more productive (benefit)
The last of these examples highlights how slippery the concept of features-versus-benefits can be. Most companies offering 15% lower cleaning costs would insist that this is a benefit, and it sort-of is. However, effective marketing needs to go beyond the obvious benefit and empahsise what it is about the prospects current existence that will be improved. Of course the most significant improvement can be used as the USP for a campaign.
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