Features And Benefits: The Easy Way To Make Them More Compelling
We’ve all been there.
You write a piece of copy to promote your new, shiny, wildly helpful gadget or gizmo. And once it goes live, well, you hear crickets.
You know the gadget has the potential to solve your audience’s problems. And you know it can add value to their lives.
You even mapped out all the features and benefits. And the formatting in your copy is a dream.
But you’re just not getting the results you want. It’s okay, my friend. Sometimes copy misses the mark. And I’m a big proponent of using moments that miss the mark to do better the next time around.
One way you can improve your copy — and your results — is using emotionally charged benefits. I mean like, supercharged.
Allow me to explain. There’s a framework for smarter sales and it’s based on Tony Robbins’ “6 Categories of Human Needs.”
Essentially, you can use these categories of human needs to connect to deep emotional experiences in your audience. And when you connect to deep emotional needs, your audience is likely to respond with higher conversions.
As a professional sustainability copywriter, I spend every day digging for the emotionally charged benefits behind every feature. I’m all about increasing your sales and making them smarter.
Aside from your headline, your benefits and features are the most important part of your copy.
Which is why it’s worth it for you to present them well.
Using the 6 categories of human needs, you can use an easy framework to emotionally charge your benefits.
First, let’s dig into the difference between features and benefits.
Features Vs Benefits
Features are the tangible qualities of your product or service. And benefits are how those features help the prospect.
For example, I offer blog writing services to my clients. A bullet describing those services could look like this:
1,200+ words (Feature) — Long enough for Google’s bots to use it to boost your SEO (Benefit)
When thinking about benefits, it can help to ask yourself, “So what?” in response to a feature.
Each blog is 1,200+ words. So, what does that mean for the prospect? How does it help them?
When you’re marketing the features and benefits of your gadget or gizmo, you’ll find more success if your benefit speaks to an emotional experience.
With that in mind, let’s rework “long enough for Google’s bots to use it to boost your SEO.”
An emotionally charged alternative could be, “ensuring that your brand becomes a trusted name in [niche] with an SEO-compatible word count.”
Now that you’ve got a handle on the basics, let’s look at how to emotionally supercharge your benefits.
Why Your Audience Buys From You (Always)
Before we go any further, we’ve got to get clear on one thing.
Why does your audience buy from you?
Your offer?
Your brand?
The surface-level problem that you’re solving for them?
Nope, nope, and nope.
Your audience buys from you (always) because of the emotional transformation your gadget or gizmo can offer them. Which is exactly where your features and benefits come in.
You see, your prospect has a current emotional state and a desired emotional state. Positioning your offer as the easiest way to get from current to desired is the secret sauce to smarter sales.
Note: always do this *ethically*. Copy is powerful. Use it to add real value to your prospect’s lives.
If you’re finding your sales are lower than you’d like or your copy is feeling flat, creating an emotional experience in your benefits and features could be a game changer.
While there are a lot of ways to do this in copywriting, the one I’m about to share is the easiest framework I’ve ever come across. If you want your features and benefits to be compelling, but aren’t interested in complex emotional techniques, I got you.
Let’s look at the 6 Categories of Human Needs and discover how to use them for maximum impact.
The 6 Categories of Human Needs by Tony Robbins
These six categories are powerful human motivators. Especially when you use them to create connective features and benefits. They are:
Certainty — assurance you can avoid pain and gain pleasure
Significance — feeling unique, important, special, or needed
Growth — an expansion of capacity, capability, or understanding
Variety — the need for the unknown, change, new stimuli
Contribution — a sense of service and focus on helping, giving to, and supporting others
Love + Connection — a strong feeling of closeness or union with someone or something
We can all connect to these needs. And that’s why using them in your copy can be wildly effective.
A lot of businesses use external pressure to sell, like flash sales. While that can be effective, buyers are much more motivated by recognizing their own internal pressure.
And these needs speak directly to our internal pressures.
So, let’s look at how can you use them in your copy to create more compelling features and benefits.
The Easy Framework for Emotionally Charged Benefits
When you can tap into the desired emotional state of your audience and show them how your offer is the path of least resistance to that emotional state, you’ve made the sale.
And if you can connect your features and benefits list to one of the 6 human needs outlined above, then you’re on the right path.
Since these human needs are core needs, they’re immensely powerful at influencing your prospect.
The journey from the current emotional state to the desired emotional state looks like this:
Uncertainty to certainty
Lack of significance to significance
Lack of growth to growth
Lack of variety to variety
Lack of contribution to contribution
Lack of love and connection to love and connection
Let’s use that feature and benefit example from above about blog writing services.
In uncertainty, you feel anxious about your content marketing. You’re not sure if you’re writing blogs that are long enough for Google. You’re not even sure if people are reading them, SEO is working, or your audience is finding them useful.
That’s the current emotional state.
But in the desired emotional state of certainty, you know that your blogs are educating your audience. You know that SEO is working because you see your site ranking go up. You feel confident that the blogs fit within your content pillars.
So, to rewrite the features and benefits bullet from above using this framework, it could read:
1,200+ words — so you can sit back and watch your Google ranking skyrocket
Much better.
With features and benefits, you want to be clear and concise. But you also need to be compelling.
When using these categories, you’ll often find that one emotional journey will stand out as the one that the audience wants or can connect with.
And if you find that multiple could speak to them, choosing the one that’s the most powerful will keep your messaging uncluttered.
So, how does this change your features and benefits?
How To Use This Framework
The sky is the limit.
I like to add this as one extra step in my prep work that I do before I write any copy. When I’m listing out features and benefits, I’ll look out for an emotional journey my audience might connect with.
And when I write the copy, I try a couple of different ones until I find the one that fits the best.
While you can do this on your own, sometimes getting help from a professional makes things easier.
To get some suggestions that can emotionally charge your features and benefits, you can book a free 30-minute call with me. You can follow this link to book yours.
