By Kayla Carmicheal

Great marketing copy doesn’t just sell a product, it builds a connection with the audience. The beauty of proper messaging is that by communicating either the benefits or features of your product or service, you can tell customers what they need to know in a clever, concise way.

Without knowing when you should use benefits versus features in your content (and the difference between the two), you could run into poor, or ineffective messaging. We’ll dig into when it’s best to use each of these options below.

Both terms are useful and give customers important information they’ll need during their buyer’s journey, such as design, price, and real-world relevance. Ultimately, the benefits of having a product or service are what make consumers purchase, which means it is often best to highlight benefits over features when writing marketing copy. This paints a picture of what life will look like after the customer purchases the product or service. If you do decide to highlight features, you’ll want to make sure consumers understand how they’ll benefit from those features.

Take this ad from Qordoba, an IT company that utilizes AI to help organizations manage communication.

Source

The company’s ad caught my eye by communicating the benefits reading the report will have when it comes to customer-facing content, which does interest me.

‘How are tech companies managing their voice, tone, & writing style guides across their various types of customer-facing content?’

After reading this caption, I knew exactly what I would gain from this product, and why it was worth my time.

Let’s look at another example of features and benefits at work. This is a marketing email I got this morning from Marriott hotels:

This ad starts with the benefits of becoming a Marriott member — ‘yes to vacation views’ — while the rest of it explains the features of the program, including ‘no annual fees’ and ‘3X points per $1 spent at more than 7,000 Marriott locations.

Emphasizing that Marriott members enjoy free perks, then expanding on how this is done (by earning rewards points), is a really effective way to explain the benefits and features of the rewards membership.

This is relatively straightforward — but what if you have multiple products being sold at once?

If you’re working with more than one campaign, the answer to whether you should use features versus benefits ” can change depending on the product or service being marketed.

How to Tell When it’s Best to Use Features or Benefits

If you’re unsure whether you should list features or benefits for a given product, consider this — features are an optimal choice in a saturated market. For instance, a small business making a meal-delivery kit would have some competition (such as HelloFresh or …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron