Distinguishing Features and Benefits
Features and benefits are often misunderstood. They are very different, and each has its own place within the buying funnel. A feature is a component or function of your products and services. This is often the big list of details found on the outside of a product’s box or included in the PDF description of a product. Features are facts about the product or services. Features are easy to list—just create a bullet point list about the product. For instance, this book is being written on a Sony Vaio laptop with these features:
This list could go on for hundreds of bullet points. Look at any product or service, and start writing down its components. Features are easy to determine. A benefit is something the product or service will do for you. How will the service make your life better? Why should you spend your hard-earned money on a particular product? Essentially, if you can answer “What’s in it for me?” you’ve come up with the product’s benefits. Benefits are based on evoking emotional responses. It is easy to turn a feature into a benefit by adding a “so,” “to,” or “will” to the end of the feature and completing the sentence.
Always keep your customer in mind when creating your benefits. If your customer does not travel, a 14-hour battery life might not be a benefit. However, if your customer is constantly examining large Excel files to optimize keyword lists, being able to manipulate a million rows in Excel could save them both time and money. You can take the extra step of segmenting your customers into different demographics and then examining what features and benefits are most important to each segment. For instance, if you sold the Sony Vaio laptop I just described, which features and benefits would be most beneficial to these groups?
By segmenting your audience into groups, you can send custom messages to those users. This can sometimes be difficult with keywords on the search network; however, across the content network (discussed in Chapter 9, “Understanding the Display Network”), you can examine the demographics of individual websites and then write appropriate ads based on the website’s visitor demographics. What do your customers want? Your benefit list can be paired with the lists earlier in the chapter about what people want and what they avoid. By creating emotionally beneficial statements about your product, you can move past the features of a product to showcase how buying your product will improve someone’s life in a particular way. Benefits, Features, and the Buying Funnel When writing ad copy, you need to keep the buying funnel in mind (we covered the buying funnel in Chapter 2, “Performing Keyword Research”). Users have different concerns and questions throughout the buying funnel, and adjusting your ads appropriately can help engage users to click on your ads and eventually do business with your company. The buying funnel starts with the awareness and interest phases. At this point in time, searchers do not know much about your products or services. Using jargon confuses consumers because they do not yet know enough about the products to understand what the jargon means. At this phase of the buying funnel, you need to emphasize why your products will make someone’s life better. Why should they want the product or want to learn more about your services? Using benefit-driven ad copy that tells a story of how you will improve their life will help to engage users. The next step of the buying funnel is the learn phase. It is in this phase that a consumer’s research transitions from just understanding the benefits to also learning about the features. Mixing both benefits and features within your ad copy is useful. This will help transition users to understanding why they need the product and then start them down the next path of the buying funnel into feature comparison. If you do not know where a keyword lives in the buying funnel, it can be useful to first treat the keyword as part of the learn phase since your ad copy showcases both benefits and features. Once you write your initial ad copy, you should test these keywords with different ad messages to see which resonates better with the consumer to determine where the keyword lives within the buying funnel. These are excellent keywords to start some of your testing (discussed later). In addition, often the search buying funnel starts at the learn phase. Because a consumer cannot search for something they have no knowledge of, the Google Display Network is more useful in reaching users at the top of the buying funnel (more on the Display Network in Chapter 9). Once a consumer has learned more about a product and has decided they want to buy a product or engage a company’s services, the consumer moves into the shopping comparison phase. When someone is comparing products, they already understand why a product will enhance their life (which is a benefit of your product). At this stage of the buying funnel, it is important to showcase features. That’s why you often see shopping carts and reviews that have the ability to sort by color, size, rating, review, and so on. However, while you want to start emphasizing features during this phase, never forget benefits. Consumers eventually buy because of benefits; don’t lose sight of this fact. It is easy for a consumer to compare products side by side to see which product has which feature. It is usually more beneficial for you to make a comparison chart to highlight your best features. You may test some ad copy (more on testing in Chapter 15) that shows features and then list the benefits of those features on the landing page. Other ideas for ad copy are all features that tell a story about why your product is superior to the other products in the marketplace. You can always fall back on the standard ad copy to test one feature and the major benefit of that feature. In the shopping comparison phase, you can also make an assumption that the consumer has a basic understanding of the jargon associated with the products. It is now okay to use some jargon in your ads. Price-conscious shoppers will compare both features and prices. When the economy is in a downturn, often you will see consumers buy “good enough” products that are less expensive as opposed to the “best” product in the market. When to Use a Feature vs. a Benefit Finally, it is time for the shopper to make a purchase. While we comparison shop on features, we buy because of benefits. When your keywords fall into the buying stage of the buying funnel, you should include benefits in your ad copy. These are also excellent ads to test. In some cases, you may find an all-benefit ad copy works best. In other cases, a benefit-and-feature ad copy may work best. In many industries, the feature may not be about the product but instead about the final cost of the product. Therefore, items like shipping, prices, and discounts can serve to enhance your ads.
While ads should be written that reflect the keywords that trigger the ad to be shown, the content of the ads should change based on searcher behavior and knowledge. Do not just write all-benefit or all-feature ads regardless of where someone is in the buying funnel. Determine where someone is in their decision-making process and then write ads appropriate to their current mind-set. If you are certain where the searcher is within the buying funnel, emphasize the benefits or features of your products; doing so can serve to increase your CTR, conversion rates, and ultimately your company’s profits. © Advanced Google Adwords: 3rd edition >>> Back to TABLE OF CONTENTS <<< | |
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