Archive for Copywriting
Translating Features to Benefits
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Your product’s features, no matter how revolutionary, are not what will sell your product. Features are simply facts. They carry no emotional weight.
If you want to sell your product, you have to translate those features to benefits.
Benefits are features, translated into “what’s in it for me” statements. Instead of telling your customer what your feature is, you tell them exactly what it can do for them and how it can change their lives.
Features are about you and your product. Benefits are about them and how their lives can improve.
Here are a few examples to illustrate the difference:
Feature: 1 Gigabyte Storage
Benefit: 1,000 Songs in Your Pocket
Feature: 1,380 Watt Motor
Benefit: Blend veggies or fruits with zero leftover pulp!
Feature: Tri-band phone
Benefit: Your phone works with any SIM card in the world
Features are simply facts about your product that don’t necessarily mean anything to the buyer. On the other hand, the benefit statement gives them a crystal clear interpretation of what they get by purchasing.
The Translation Process
Take a piece of paper and draw a line straight down the middle. Label the left-hand column “Features” and the right-hand column “Benefits.”
Now on the left-hand side, write down every feature your product has. Write down every feature your company has.
One great place to find features of your product is in your existing marketing or promotional materials. You can also look at your product specs.
Try to fill up one or two entire sheets of paper with features.
Once you have your features column filled out, fill out the right-hand side. Ask yourself: What does this feature mean to someone? What’s in it for them? Why should they care? How would it change their lives?
Repeat this process for each benefit on the right. If you come up with multiple benefits, just write all of them down.
Spruce It Up
After writing all your benefits down, let that piece of paper sit for a couple days. Then come back to it.
Now that you’re looking at your benefits with a fresh eye, look for ways to spruce it up.
Add power words and action words. Instead of saying “increase your profits,” say “explode your profits.” Instead of saying “stop being afraid,” say “get rid of fear once and for all!”
Keep tinkering with your benefit statements until you nail it right on the head. Then replace the features on your website and your marketing materials with benefits.
Once you do, you’ll likely see a sudden jump in your conversion rates, opt-in rates, retention rates, pageviews per visitor and length on site stats.
Benefit statements make more emotional impact, improve customer motivation and make the overall process of interacting with your brand more exciting and persuasive.
5 Simple Copywriting Techniques
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One way to look at copywriting techniques is as the art of creating motivation using the written word. The written word carries profound power to persuade. How do you use this powerful tool to create motivation? By mastering and implementing these five principles.
==> Technique #1: Benefit Driven Language
Most business owners focus a lot of attention on telling consumers why their company or product is the best. Yet at the end of the day, that’s not what consumers care about.
Consumers care about what you can do for them. They don’t care that you have the biggest company, but they do care that you’ll always have their product in stock. They don’t care that you’ve been in business longer than anyone else, but they do care about reliable service.
Translate statements from “about me” to “about what we can do for you.”
==> Technique #2: Use Power Words
Power words or action words are words that pack an emotional punch. Instead of saying your product saves energy; say it “slashes your energy bills by 40%.” Instead of saying your product helps bring in leads, say “new leads will be flooding in your inbox.”
Power words create mental imagery and have an emotional tone that helps sell your product.
==> Technique #3: Proof, Proof and more Proof
Prove every claim you make. People today are extremely sceptical – and rightly so. There are so many people making bold claims that promising a benefit simply isn’t enough anymore.
Prove what you’re promising, then prove it again and throw some proof on top. It’s much better to solidly prove that you can help someone lose 15 pounds than it is too loudly proclaim that you can help them lose 40 pounds without proof.
People won’t feel motivated unless you can prove that you’re the real deal.
==> Technique #4: Removal of Risk
Doing business with a company for the first time is very risky for consumers. They don’t know if you’ll fulfil your claims, they don’t know if your product is good, they don’t know how good your service is – they really don’t know much at all about you.
That’s why risk removal is such a powerful way to get people to act on their motivation.
Risk removal doesn’t actually create motivation. Instead, what it does is remove barriers to getting people to act on their desire for your product.
Add a powerful money back guarantee to your product to reduce and remove risk.
==> Technique #5: Urgency
When people think they’re going to miss out if they don’t act, that’s a powerful motivator. It’s called the “Fear of Missing Out” or FOMO for short.
Learn to leverage FOMO in your copywriting techniques and you’ll be able to motivate and generate real action. Use it to take people from wanting your product to actually buying it.
How to Produce Effective Online Copywriting
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Coming up with highly effective online copywriting is in part about doing careful research into your reader’s psychology, in part about using proven copywriting tactics and in part about crafting an extremely compelling offer.
Here’s how to properly use each of these copywriting tactics.
Researching Your Reader’s Psychology
What does your reader want? What keeps them up at night? What would they give anything for?
What are their insecurities? What do they want – and why do they want what they want? What do they want that they don’t want other people to know they want?
Often the “magic bullet” in a sales letter comes from addressing wants other people don’t even know they want.
The copywriter who wins is often the copywriter who can dig two or three levels deeper than the other copywriter.
Before you put a single word on paper, get into your reader’s head and understand their psychology. Spend time with them, talk to them, get to know them.
Using Effective Online Copywriting Tactics
There are many online copywriting tactics that an expert copywriter needs to learn.
On a basic level, you need to learn the basic copywriting formulas like AIDA (Attention Interest Desire Action) that show you how to emotionally guide a reader through the buying process.
You also need to learn how to properly utilize each component of the sales letter. This includes (but isn’t limited to) Writing strong headlines, using subheads, writing the PS, having buy buttons, using proof elements, picking images and so on.
There’s both art and skill that goes into each and every element.
Learning all the different tactics can take as long as a year. But you don’t have to wait that long to get started – all you need to learn is the basic AIDA formula and as much as you can about writing good headlines.
Once you have the basics down, you can launch a product, see how it performs then move forward from there.
The Compelling Online Copywriting Offer
No matter how good your copy is and no matter how deeply you understand your customer, you’re not going to sell if you don’t have a good offer.
If you’re selling golf clubs at twice the price that everyone else is charging and they aren’t any better, you won’t get many sales – even with all the tactics and all the psychology in the world.
On the other hand, if you have a one of a kind product, coupled with unbelievable bonuses at a price that’s such a steal that few would believe you’re selling it at that price and it’s limited to only 200 people – then you’ve got an offer people will bend over backwards to take advantage of.
When you combine these three things: understanding of your reader’s psychology, strong online copywriting techniques and a killer offer, you’ll have a sales letter that’ll pull and pull and pull.
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