I wrote a new e-book this past week and there was a section on describing ‘features vs benefits‘. Right after it went live, a good friend of mine Barry Langdon hit me up on Skype and told me he loved how this was broken down. Made me think, what a great topic for Plus 1 Daily 🙂
There is a difference between features and benefits and as marketers, we need to know that difference to market and advertise effectively to our audiences.
Here’s the thing…
As marketers we focus too much on features. We want people to know about our fancy new apps, or the glorious new additions to our websites…Those are features. Not benefits!
That’s the easiest way to think about it….A feature is what something IS, compared to a benefit which is what something DOES. Do you see the difference and how we can use that to our BENEFIT in ad copy, email campaigns and advertising?
A perfect example of how to frame a feature vs benefit was made my Steve Jobs when he was introducing and marketing the iPod years ago. The MP3 player was nothing new. It had been around for a while but how other companies marketed their product was to talk about the features of their player…
It can hold 2 GB of data…
It’s got great memory capabilities…
So Steve framed it by focusing on the BENEFITS of his new product the iPod…
It can hold 1000 of your favorite songs in your pocket!
See the difference?
Both describe the exact same thing, but one is talking about the features while another one is playing to the emotions of the customer. Imagine….All your favorite songs, in your pocket!
We can use this exact same kind of framing in our own businesses, we just need to stop telling our customers about what our features are and start discussing what they can do.
This brings your ‘features’ into a whole new light and really helps your message come across effectively.