Unsexy Product? Make It Irresistible With This Content Strategy
Posted by Tracey Sandilands on Wed, Apr 04, 2012
Finding the right way to sell your product or service depends almost entirely on convincing others that they need it. Unless you can present an unequalled value proposition in your content writing, your offering goes into the average user’s brain recycle bin as fast as you can say Mona Lisa.
So how do you make a boring, unsexy product exciting enough to get the reader’s attention? By finding – and highlighting – the benefits, not the features, that’s how.
WIIFM
What’s in it for me? That what everyone wants to know, before they take on a cause, buy a product, sign up for a newsletter or do anything else that is on offer to them in this world. Even when it comes to causes, few people espouse them purely for altruistic reasons; usually, doing good at least makes them feel warm and fuzzy, allows them to believe they are “giving back,” or reduces their guilt about something like an affluent lifestyle. Often, it benefits their reputation in some way.
The point is, nobody does anything willingly unless there’s a benefit to themselves, their family, their business, or another aspect of their life. If your task is content writing, whether to sell, persuade, or recruit, you need to be able to identify the WIIFM factor.
Finding the True Benefit
Often, marketers become so wrapped up in their vanity about their product that they forget the potential customer is likely to be more objective. In their content writing, they enthuse about all the things the product can do, the 24/7 uptime, their great customer service. As if anyone would be looking for bad customer service!
Many of the features of a good product go without saying. It’s the benefits you need to highlight in your content writing, the ones that give your readers those “Aha” moments.
So, how do you find the unique benefit only your product can supply? How do you turn an unsexy product into an irresistible proposition for the customer? You find the one thing that makes him want your product – not four, five or six. The average reader can’t absorb that much information. So find the One.
Here’s how to do this:
- Identify your main feature. Then look at it critically and figure out what benefit it brings to people who use it.
- Turn it into a question. So you offer 24/7 uptime (that’s the feature). That means the customer has access anytime of the day or night (that’s the benefit). Why does anyone in your target market need that? (That’s the question).
- Answer the question. “When you need to work, wherever you are in the world, we’re here too.” That’s the unique selling proposition to use in your content writing.
Turning it into a Strategy
It’s one thing to find your unique proposition, and another to present it effectively. Part of the secret is to narrow your audience down. Don’t try to market everything to everybody.
Take the Fedex slogan, widely considered the ultimate example of a robust unique selling proposition: “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.” In a market saturated with courier services all offering a great list of features, Fedex came up with a benefit that told the customer exactly what its services could do for him. Not everyone, just those customers who needed to send items globally and who had a limited window in which to get them to their destination.
By doing this, Fedex found the “purple cow” that the avowed master of online marketing, Seth Godin, was referring to when he said “Do something remarkable if you want to stand out from the herd.”
Making it Irresistible
Once you’ve identified what makes your product remarkable, find a way to tell the story through your content writing. Present the conflict or the problem (When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight), in ways the reader can identify with. Follow it up with the call to action (use Fedex) and the resolution (we will get it there on time).
Tell the customer what’s in it for him, what it will do for him and how it will change his life. WIIFM. That’s what everyone wants to know, so tell them!