You may have heard of the marketing concept of Features Vs. Advantages Vs. Benefits, but you really know what the differences are among them? Well hello, my name is Brian Lewis with TinyFrog and today we’re going to be talking about that along with when it’s best to use features, advantages, and benefits in your marketing copy, especially on your website.
So let’s kick things off with features. What are features? So features are the actual details, components, specifications of the product or service that you sell. They’re especially important to a technical audience and especially so if you also sell a technical type product. An example of a feature would be, let’s say you sell smartphones. The feature for that might be the highest resolution camera.
But let’s take it up a level to the actual outcome versus a feature, and that’s what an advantage is. An advantage of a product or service is the outcome, usually looked at in terms of what problem does it solve for the person, and typically that’s what your prospects are looking for, a solution to a particular problem. And as such, advantages can actually do a better job of selling than features.
So, an advantage of our example of a smartphone, where we were talking about the highest resolution camera, could be that it takes stunning photographs and videos. But you can actually take things one level further and that would be to the level of what benefits are.
Benefits are the emotional outcome or how your prospect or customer feels when they’re actually using your product or service. And that can be the most powerful. As you’ve probably heard, as humans we tend to make decisions based on emotions more so than logic, so we really want to appeal to those emotions.
An example in our smartphone situation with the highest resolution camera that takes stunning photos would be the feeling of being thrilled that you’re taking precious memories, of being able to capture precious memories, again appealing to that emotional aspect.
So that’s the difference between features, advantages, and benefits. Now when you want to use one or the other, well, we probably always want to use benefits because I said before that’s so important to the decision-making process, that emotional aspect. But in terms of features versus advantages, again think back to what it is that you’re selling, product or service, and the typical target market. If they’re more tuned into the technical specifications then you may want to prioritize that over the outcomes, but usually what we see is that the outcomes or the advantages tend to be more important.
A kind of a very rough general rule of thumb to think about is maybe lead off, and if we’re thinking about a web page, maybe lead off with the benefit statement being the emotional aspect with the feeling that the customer is going to get, then supported by maybe two, three, four sentences of the advantages or the outcomes and then finally having those supported by maybe a few bullets of the features. So anyways, hope that was helpful for you if you have any questions be sure to reach out to us at TinyFrog, thank you!
