Usable Words

OK, so you’ve managed to attract a bit of traffic to your website, and you’ve been clear enough about what you’re on about so that you’re on the shortlist of your target customers. What next?

Well, what’s next is that they choose you over anyone else on the shortlist. Duh. And there are two basic things you need to do for this to happen:

1. You need to convince them that you understand their problems and you can make them go away. (Even one of their problems would help.)
2. You need to convince them that you can do the above better than anybody else.

In other words, the way to get people to choose you is to make it all about them.

In the next post in this series, I’m going to be talking a bit about point 2, convincing people that you do it better than anybody else. But for now let’s concentrate on point 1, convincing them you can make their problems go away.

What we’re fundamentally talking about here, as many of you will have realised, is selling benefits, not features. In other words, don’t tell people what you do, tell them how you can help them. In the classic formulation, people don’t care about you, they want to know “what’s in it for me”.

I don’t want to reinvent the wheel here. There is a lot of stuff out there about using benefits to sell. I mean, really a lot, and most of it is just some variation on “Tell the prospect what’s in it for them. There, you’re now a copywriting genius. Give me $100.”

So yeah, really important principle no doubt, but do I have anything original to say about it? Maybe one day I will, but in the meantime, let me direct you to two of my favourite posts on the subject, by Sonia Simone at Copyblogger. Sonia suggests you bait the hook with emotional benefits, then reel them in with logical benefits, a formula I’ve found extremely useful.

So go and read Sonia. When you come back, you will be a copywriting genius (and not even $100 poorer), and you’ll be ready for me to tell you how to convince people you’re special. Because you are.

Image: mackz