What lesson did I learn this week..? That people buy benefits, not features.
But that’s a bit basic, I hear you say..! Well, yes, it is. And I first learnt it about 20 years ago. But somehow it’s one of those things that I keep forgetting.
So what prompted this re-awakening..? I re-read some text ads that I had put up a while ago and nearly fell asleep before I got to the end. (And they were only 70 characters long).
They were all about features. Zero excitement, zero emotion, zero anything, really!
So I focused for an hour or two and re-wrote them, focusing on benefits. And doubled my CTR. Literally. It went from 0.6% last week (I’m not sure how I was brave enough to admit that I had a CTR of 0.6%, but it’s out there now) to 1.3% this week. Still not great, but a lot better than 0.6%!
But why would I forget to sell benefits? I’m not sure really. I think it’s because the program I’m selling sells features and, because I mentally assign my own benefits, I assume that everyone else will as well.
Therefore, because I’m naturally lazy, I didn’t bother to sit down and articulate the benefits – I just copied what the program said. Not clever!
But I have to say, I’m not alone. I use Google Alerts to keep me up to date with any new web articles or postings on my business programs and 99% of the articles that I read, whether they’re press releases, blogs, even auto-responder emails, all repeat the blurb put out by the program itself.
In fact in the last 5 days I’ve found only 2 postings that are original.
In a previous post I talked about differentiating yourself if you’re promoting a business program that thousands of others are also promoting. Well, if you want an easy way to do that just convert all the features into benefits and talk about those in all your postings.
That would make it three originals. Sorry, four, including mine.
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