Advertising and Marketing

Your customer wants a cleaner kitchen, not a kitchen cleaner.

Your customers are interested in benefits, not features. So sell benefits in your sales letters.

The difference between a feature and a benefit comes down to this: A feature is what something does. A benefit is what something does for you.

Everything you have to say in your direct marketing sales letters boils down to features and benefits. With every piece of copy you write, however long or short your copy, you are always talking in terms of features and benefits.

When I worked on the Bell Mobility account, I discovered that the marketing folks at Bell have a policy of always presenting the benefit first, followed by the feature. I had usually written things the other way around. But they had a good policy.

For example, I would have said, “Digital Data2Go lets you receive email with your cellphone, saving you the hassle of finding a phone jack for your laptop whenever you need to check email while travelling.” Bell insisted that I present the benefit first, so I instead wrote something like this: “Never again waste time hunting for a phone jack when it’s time to check email while travelling. Digital Data2Go lets you receive email with just your cellphone.”

I think Bell has the right idea, although there are times when the feature needs to come first.

The tough part in all of this is translating features into benefits before you start writing. Some benefits are obvious. Others require some detective work to uncover. I learned that lesson all over again when I taught copywriting at the University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies.

I gave my students an exercise that always turned up a surprising benefit. I told my class that the CN Tower in Toronto, Ontario, Canada was 1,815 feet and 5 inches tall. Their assignment was to come up with as many benefits as they could that related to that feature. Most of them stared at me.

Then they picked up their pens.

Slowly, they started to write.

Each time I ran the exercise, a student or two came up with a benefit that I had not thought of. Here are a few of the benefits of having the world’s tallest free-standing structure in your city:

• attract tourist dollars by charging for tours
• see the whole city from one vantage point
• generate revenue by selling souvenirs
• impress your date with dinner at the revolving restaurant
• host fundraisers (a race up the stairs to the top is a popular annual fundraiser)
• generate revenue from organizations that monitor the weather
• navigate around the city easily because the tower is a landmark visible from almost everywhere
• generate revenue from TV and radio companies by hosting their antennas on the communications deck
• improve the flow of traffic along the nearby Gardner Expressway by locating traffic cameras on the tower
• generate publicity by hanging a banner down the side of the structure

There were many more benefits, some worthy and some just wacky, but all of them were benefits of one kind or another. Together, they demonstrated that products and services, including yours, probably have more benefits than are apparent at first glance.

So hunt for those benefits that are relevant to your potential buyers and current customers. And remember this, every time you craft a sales letter: your client wants a 5/8 inch hole, not a 5/8 inch drill bit.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alan Sharpe is a business-to-business direct mail copywriter and lead generation specialist who helps business owners and marketing managers generate leads, close sales and retain customers using business-to-business direct mail marketing. Learn more about his creative direct mail writing services and sign up for free weekly tips like this at http://www.sharpecopy.com.

Tags: B2B, benefits, business to business, creative, direct mail, direct response, examples, features

Each year the advertising industry magazine called Advertising Age nominates the very best advertising and marketing campaigns in corporate America. Of course the consumers are not stupid and many times they can guess who is going to win.

There’s a lot to be said for award-winning advertising in corporate America and it is amazing what you can learn from a talking gecko. Consider if you will how many people have bought Geico Insurance or visited their web site for a rate quote due to their advertising campaign.

Small businesses can learn a lot from corporate America advertising and brand building. Just because Geico Insurance has millions of dollars to spend on their advertising does not mean those same strategies cannot work for you in your small business in your small community. Many small businesses have logos, which seemed to come alive and this strategy works quite well.

If you look at the theory and practice you can see that you can learn a lot from award-winning advertising in corporate America and specifically the Geico Insurance mascot; the talking gecko. It is memorable, funny and the message is simple; just call up or go online and ask for a rate quote. If enough people do this then odds are that many people will end up buying insurance from Geico. The strategy has worked and it can work for you to. Please consider this in 2006.

“Lance Winslow” – Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; http://www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/

Tags: Award Winning Advertising, What you can learn from a talking Gecko

You ever been tricked into attending a multilevel marketing sales recruiting meeting? It starts out something like this; “I have this great new business I want to explain to you and you to be very good at it because you have all the right personal qualities.” As soon you go to meeting you find out all the great reasons why someone needs to do their own business.

They talk about Ray Crock from McDonald’s and all the great entrepreneurs of all time. They talk about your income, retirement and the fact that Social Security will not be available to you. They tell you about 95 percent of the people are either dead or broke at age 60 and that this awaits you unless you do something and take action in your life.

Of course this whole time you are thinking yes, yes, yes and then they ask you if you might be interested in the business of your own, which will prevent this from happening to you. Pretty sneaky isn’t it? Interesting considering that they haven’t even told you what the business is yet or what you will be doing or what your mission is. What a bunch of crap.

Now then, did you know that international terrorist cells use the same methods to recruit people of lower IQ. They look for weak individuals with no self-esteem who are afraid of the future and then they play upon those fears in order to recruit them. They even have sponsors and the sponsors help the new recruits by pumping them up and telling them about their part of the greater cause now.

Eventually they convince the international terrorist recruit to commit to strapping a bomb to themselves and blow themselves up. Of course only a moron would do that or someone who has no manhood. But the recruit does not even stop think that he is merely being used. There are so many similarities to how these multi-level marketing companies and international terrorist operate indeed. Consider this in 2006.

Lance Winslow

Tags: International Terrorist Cells, Multi-level Marketing, Sinister Plots