Features Archives - Lars Lofgren

There are only a few LAWS in marketing. Out of all the advice, best practices, and books, there’s only a few principles we can rely on every time.

And one of them goes like this: push benefits, not features.

But there’s a subtle nuance that people never really discuss. But before we dive into it…

Let’s do a quick recap of how benefits and features work.

When you’re talking about your product and service, you’ll choose whether to prioritize your benefits or your features.

One will make you a massive amount of money. The other will open to crickets and closed wallets.

What’s even worse is that we don’t automatically choose the right one when we first get into business and marketing. Unless you learn the difference, you’ll slow down your growth and prevent your own success.

For someone new to business, they’ll get in front of a prospect, they’ll get super excited, and start saying “My product has THIS. And it has THAT. You NEED it.”

The whole time the prospect is wondering “Why?” She or he doesn’t get it. They’re not persuaded. And the entrepreneur goes home empty-handed wondering what went wrong.

If you’re going to persuade prospects to view your products the same way that you do, you need to spell it out for them and connect all the dots. You need to tell people WHY they should care.

The easiest way to do this is with benefits.

Check out this description of a product:

“My new vitamin supplement has Vitamin A, Riboflavin, Calcium, Potassium, and Sodium.”

BORING. Excuse me while I take a nap.

What about this one:

“My new vitamin supplement has all the ingredients you need to feel energized all day, look good naked, and is completely natural.”

Now we’re talking! Where can I get some of this stuff?

The first example focuses on the features of the product (the ingredients). This won’t get you anywhere.

And the second example pushes the benefits. In a nutshell, benefits tell your prospects how their lives will improve after using the product. Features describe what the product is made of. If you’re talking about the customer (or your soon-to-be customer) you’re on the right track and you’re focusing on benefits. But if you’re spending your time talking about your product, you’re going through the features.

This is usually where the lesson ends. You’ll be told to ALWAYS push the benefit instead of the feature.

And in general, this is pretty solid advice. Getting your benefits in front of people is a good habit to get into.

Buuuuuuuuut life isn’t quite that simple…

Take a look at this diagram:

It’s the Benefits vs Features spectrum. On one end, we have a raw benefit (you’ll look good naked) and on the other hand, we have a raw feature (50 mg of Vitamin B manufactured in XYZ factory).

After reading a few marketing books, you’ll forsake your feature-based ways and move on over to the Benefits side. Hurray!

Now let’s work through another example.

The other day, I was looking for some apps for drawing diagrams. Building content is a major part of my work and it’d be great to quickly build simple diagrams that looked great.

When it comes to professional diagrams, one of the most well-known tools is OmniGraffle.

Here are the 3 main selling points from their homepage:

New layout engine
Bézier lines
Mini inspectors

To me, this stuff is just a feature. You have bézier lines? That does absolutely nothing for me. But to someone that builds professional diagrams all day long, I bet they’ve ranted day and night about how they’d do ANYTHING for some bézier lines.

This sort of thing happens to me with analytics tools all the time. After helping countless clients with Google Analytics and working at an analytics company, I’ve gotten to know the benefits and features of the industry pretty well. On a regular basis, I rant and rave about how badly I need one tiny, little feature. And if someone said they had it, they would get my attention (they’d also have a strong chance of getting my credit card).

What’s worse it that marketing copy from analytics tools actually PISSES me off. Just lead me to the support docs already and get out of the way. But I’m not a beginner when it comes to analytics.

And I’m sure some people have gotten just as advanced with diagrams, they’re not beginners. For them, bézier lines might be a major selling point.

But maybe OmniGraffle would do a lot better with a heavier emphasis on benefits. There’s no way to know without talking to their customers and running some A/B tests to get our hands on the data. It’s very difficult to judge the effectiveness of someone’s copy until you have a solid understanding of who their target market is. And you’ll never be able to tell someone they’re doing it wrong until you have the data to back it up.

One person’s feature is another person’s benefit.

Remember, it’s the Benefits vs Features SPECTRUM. There’s a sliding scale between the extremes on each end. As a marketer, it’s your job to find the right mix that’ll resonate with the skill-level of your target market.

5 Best Practices for Using Benefits and Features

Here’s a few guidelines:

If your industry is new and people aren’t familiar with it, start with benefits.
When in doubt, go with benefits. It’s always better to err on the benefit side than it is on the features side.
For most people, most of the time, most of your copy should still focus on benefits.
The more advanced your customer is, the more you’ll need to include features.
Don’t ever go PURE features, use benefits to grab people’s attention then support those claims with features.

Bottom line: benefits are still the safe way to go, they will serve you well. But we can’t judge the benefits/features mix without having a deep understanding of who the target market is.

So the benefits vs features law isn’t that good of a law. It makes a great rule-of-thumb though.

Want a simple rule for how to write an advertisement or design a web page? Let’s say you have a month to write an ad. Spend 27 days of that month working on the headline. Use the last 3 days for everything else.

You think this is an exaggeration. It’s not.

Of all the elements on your site that need improvement, you need to focus on your headlines above all else. This is also true for print ads, PPC ads, emails, sales letters, and every other piece of marketing material you’ll ever use.

Why are headlines so important?

Many people are going to see your ad or website. Some of them can be sold, some of them can’t. It’s your job to reach out and tell the right people that they’re in the right place. The headline does exactly this, it’s your filter. It grabs your target market (the people that can be sold) and convinces them that they should look through the rest of your ad.

You see, headlines are the only element of an ad or web page that every person reads. In just a few seconds, people decide whether or not your entire ad has any relevance to their lives. And they use the headline to make this decision. So great headlines flag your target market down and convince them that it’s in their best interest to stick around.

Without a solid headline, your target market will never realize that you have something that will help them. They’ll take a quick glance at your ad or web page, decide it has nothing to offer, and move on. They’ll be lost forever. If you even want a chance to make a sale, you have to hook people with the headline. People will cut you some slack on everything else in your ad but they only give your headline one shot. Take advantage of it and spend the majority of your time getting the headline perfect.

Don’t Make Your Headlines Cute, Make Them Clear

Since we’re trying to filter out the portion of our audience that will actually buy what we have to offer, we need to be extra careful not to be confusing. If there’s any confusion, everybody bails and we don’t have any hope of making the sale.

Here’s a list of cute headlines that I pulled from a recent issue of Inc.:

Tomorrow Never Stops Exploring.
Tough Just Got Better.
Choice is Not an Option, It’s a Necessity.
Business Can’t Wait.
Ignite a Movement. Accelerate Impact.
Let Your Inner Business Mogul Shine.

Do any of these headlines grab your interest and make you want to find more information about the offer? Of course not. These headlines are so abstract and cute that we have no idea what they’re talking about. If we don’t know INSTANTLY how our lives are going to improve by continuing to give out attention to something, we move on and never look back. Remember the cardinal rule of all marketing: don’t be cute.

What a Clear Headline Looks Like

Here are a few more headlines (from the same issue of Inc.) that do a much better job at being clear with what you’ll gain if you keep reading:

Now, TEMPUR-PEDIC Beds come in SOFT, FIRM and EVERYTHING IN-BETWEEN!
“Their custom-fit solutions are enabling CenturyLink to add 1,150 employees faster.”
Check “Launch website” off the list (before lunch).
Build Your Business Without Sacrificing Your Family.
Homeowners Insurance. Now Available at your Favorite Online Insurance Store.
Be the ENVY of Your Well-Traveled Friends

These headlines create a completely different dynamic. Now, you might not be interested in these offers. But it’s not due to confusion, it’s because you’re not in the target market for the ad. You’re being filtered out (or filtered in if you’re wishing I included the rest of the ad).

The Most Important Aspect of a Great Headline

To dramatically improve your headlines, focus on the benefits that you have to offer. Remember, benefits are how your customers improve their lives, not the features of your product. I’ve discussed the benefits versus features concept here.

Figure out the benefit that your customers care most about and get it right into the headline. The second batch of headlines does this much better than the first. Stop talking about yourself and talk about how the lives of your customers will improve.

The astute reader (that’s you) probably realized that a few of the headlines above talk about features instead of benefits. This is true. The Tempur-Pedic and homeowner’s insurance headlines only reference new features, not benefits. Talking about features can work once you’ve built a national brand and everyone is already familiar with what you have to offer. For these two headlines, each is supported by the millions already invested in advertising. Bottom line: the rules change if you’re a Fortune 500 company and have the budget to do any marketing you want. For the rest of us, I recommend sticking with benefits.

Now there are dozens of other headline formulas out there. Don’t worry about any of those to start with. Keep it simple.

“But Lars, I’ll exclude too many people if I make my headline too clear!”

You’re approaching this from the wrong direction. Nobody cares about abstract ads that are trying to appeal to everyone. We don’t have the time for it. So we move on and look for something that does appeal to us. If you go after everybody, you get nobody. In other words, every ad starts at zero. The job of your ad is to find the small group of people that do care about what you have to offer. Forget about the rest, you never had a chance to get them in the first place.

The Shifting Divide Between Features and Benefits