Uber-Benefits – how they turbo-charge your sales

Focussing on benefits rather than features is Direct Marketing 101. Sales and marketing professionals encounter the phrase at almost every turn. So why is truly benefit-driven copy the exception rather than the rule – at least in the publishing sector.

Two possible explanations spring to mind:

1. The ‘demonstration effect’. The majority of firms, led by the big UK consumer publishers, who quite frankly should know better, frequently apply the ‘benefit’ label to copy that deals with anything but. Other marketers and publishers see this practice, and assume it must be right because "so-and-so does it and they must know what they’re talking about".

2. Marketers who are generalists rather than specialists. UK marketing staff have a broader range of responsibilities than ever, yet they’re still expected somehow to find the time necessary to write hard-hitting sales copy. (Interestingly, no self-respecting US publisher expects their marketing team to write all their copy in-house, in addition to all their other work responsibilities – or to have the necessary skill and experience to do so. But that’s a topic for another day…)

Crafting a piece of truly enticing, benefit-led copy takes time and effort.

First, you need to really understand your product, your market, and the reasons why people will buy from you – and why they don’t. That means: periodic subscriber surveys; talking direct to subscribers on the phone or in focus groups; speaking to your editors, telesales team and customer services reps; reading the trade press appropriate to your market sector; and more.

All that before you even start writing…

It’s difficult for marketing staff at the coal-face to do all this when they’re already under pressure to get other things done. Their (understandable) instinct is immediately to get stuck into writing copy, without spending the necessary time on preparation.

So, what can be done to help you write copy that’s more benefit-driven, and thereby get you more sales, without adding to your already-busy day?

I’d like to suggest one simple technique to tease out your product’s features, advantages and benefits. I call it FABB Analysis.

But first, a quick ‘refresher course’ on the different levels of product attributes, one that will also explain the FABB acronym along the way.

Moving up the ladder from features to benefits:

Level 1 – Features. These are the fundamental aspects, facets or defining characteristics of the product, as they apply to your target market – medium, frequency, market sector and the like. If it’s a magazine, then it could be "History Alive is a monthly-published magazine available on subscription." If it’s an online financial markets data service, it could be, "Our news pages are updated round the clock by a global team of experienced business journalists."

Level 2 – Advantages. This is what features do – but not, as nowadays is far too often the case, to be confused with benefits. Here’s a commonly-expressed advantage of a 1-year magazine subscription: "… so you’re guaranteed 12 issues delivered to your door at no extra cost."

This is emphatically not a benefit, though try telling that to most UK consumer publishers nowadays!

Level 2 – Benefits. Here’s your chance to tie both the feature and advantage to the prospect’s own situation or concerns at a level which, because it enables you to strike a deeper, more personal chord, dramatically increases your chance of a sale. "By choosing home delivery of History Alive … you’re guaranteed never to miss a copy of your favourite history magazine – even when you’re away on holiday, or too busy at work to get down to your local newsagent on time."

You could even add, for good measure: "you’ll never have to make an after-work dash to the newsagent only to be told ‘Sorry, we sold the last copy just this morning’."

This is the beauty of benefit-laden copy; it has a direct relevance to the personal trials and tribulations of your prospect that gives it immediate and emotional resonance. It strikes home – even if you’re describing a situation that has never yet happened to your reader – but which is all too possible.

Let’s not forget that people are more likely to take action to avoid loss, than they are to make a gain – it’s a fundamental tenet of the psychology of human persuasion that specialist copywriters frequently draw on.

Level 4 – Benefits of the Benefit. You seldom find this level of benefit mentioned in copywriting books and other resources. But it’s well worth knowing about, particularly if you’re in B2C marketing. Such uber-benefits (or ‘ultimate benefits’) appeal mostly to consumers or, in the case of B2B products, to ‘opportunity seekers’ interested in products of a self-help or personal development nature rather than those which are purchased for corporate advantage.

While benefits are deliberately intended to strike an emotional chord, uber-benefits strike a personal note. So make sure you know what you’re doing when you use these. B2B marketers should be cautious about using level 4; B2C marketers, on the other hand, should be looking for every opportunity to employ them.

So, what’s the uber-benefit of a subscription to History Alive? Perhaps it’s, "So you’ll get your monthly history ‘fix’ without fail and therefore…". What lies after the ‘therefore…’ only your longstanding customers can tell you – so you need to call a few of them and find out. They’ll be only happy to tell you why they’re so keen to read a history magazine every month – when for the rest of us history is a subject we associate with school!

Let’s recap the History Alive example, and see how the four-rung FABB ladder helped us tease out the emotional ‘triggers’ that’ll get you so many more subscriptions.

In this example, we wrote the copy in such a way as to play on four emotional ‘trigger points’, both positive and negative:

1. The fear of missing an issue of the magazine – which would mean you’re missing out on whatever is the gut or fundamental reason why you get the magazine each month;
2. The security of knowing that now you won’t have to experience those negative feelings;
3. The reassurance that the responsibility has been delegated to someone else, which goes a long way to ‘compensating’ you for your up-front 12-month subscription commitment; and
4. The desire to avoid the irritation of discovering that your local newsagent has already sold his last copy of your monthly ‘fix’…

See how much more convincing that is than merely saying "you’ll have 12 issues delivered to your door".

Constructing your FABB Analysis Table

OK, now for the simple FABB analysis exercise I promised earlier.

Allocate the time to do this exercise properly, and you’ll have all the features and benefits copy you need, on tap, for the next couple of years – or at least until you’re promoted to bigger and better things… It’ll hugely speed up your copywriting – particularly when you’re forced to write a sales letter or landing page at short notice.

1. Construct a basic four-column table in MS Word, making it 20 or so cells deep. Head the four columns, Feature, Advantage, Benefit and Benefit of the Benefit, respectively.
2. In the left-hand column, brainstorm all the product features you can think of, in no particular order, one feature per cell.
3. Give the list to your deputy, your product manager, or someone else you’re working with, and ask them to add any features you’ve forgotten.
4. Now work through each feature, identifying first the advantage, then the benefit, and finally the uber-benefit if applicable.
5. Circulate the completed table to all relevant parties for their comments and suggestions - publisher, editor, product manager, telesales manager, customer services manager. Anyone and everyone who is involved in the conception, production, sale and maintenance of your product.
6. Add all of these comments to your original master copy, and circulate to all listed in 5. above.

You’ve now got all the key reasons why someone should buy your products set out in one handy source. You can use this information time and again, whenever you write a new leaflet, sales letter, email campaign, new web site copy or have to do competitor analysis. And if you ever get in an outside copywriter, you’ll be able to brief them in a fraction of the time.

Remember, you’ll find the up-front effort invested in assembling your FABB table repays itself a hundred times over. What’s more, your FABB table can be put to good use by everyone else associated with the product, especially those in telesales, editorial and product development. So you’ve done a good deed for all your colleagues as well…

Identifying the real benefit

Finally, a quick suggestion on how to find the real benefit of a feature – as opposed to merely an advantage. Let’s take the financial markets online service we mentioned earlier, and develop the feature first into an advantage, and then into a benefit.

The secret is to keep ‘interrogating’ a feature until you feel you can’t go any further with it. That’s invariably where the real benefit lies.

Here goes: "Our news pages are updated round the clock by a global team of experienced business journalists" so "you’re guaranteed the very latest, on-the-spot information delivered to your desktop" (ie. the product advantage), and that means…

At the ‘and that means’ point, you can probably come up with more than one reason, if you know your market well enough. For example, "… you can take a view on the markets at any time in the trading day, secure in the knowledge that your decision is based on the very latest information available…"

Of course you could go even deeper, to say and that means, "you’re more likely to be on the fast-track to promotion owing to your successful forecasting track record…"

But that sort of person-centred uber-benefit is almost certainly best left unsaid, at least in the B2B world of this particular example. Of course, if you identify and express your benefit statements correctly, canny business sector prospects should be able to work the personal benefits out for themselves! So you could say, "and that makes it much more likely that you’ll make the right trade time and again – even in situations of extreme volatility like the present credit crunch."

Because your copy is so much more convincing, it also avoids the ‘me-to’ trap – the tired ‘boiler-plate’ phrasing that appears in subscription copy time and again. By contrast, your copy is fresh, unique and a much more convincing sales proposition than that used by your competitors – unless of course they also read, and act on, the techniques described in this article.