Friends with benefits
What the heck are features and benefits?
What the heck are features and benefits?
Picture this:
A tech company launches a simplified smartphone designed for digitally hesitant users, touting its “revolutionary 5G capabilities and 108-megapixel camera.”
Meanwhile, their competitor’s ad shows a grandparent video calling their grandchild, with the tagline “Never miss a moment.”
Which one do you think has a bigger impact on potential buyers?
If you guessed the latter, you’re onto something. Why does it work? Because the phone's benefit strikes a nerve, tapping into a deep emotional longing.
It’s so easy to get caught up in the bells and whistles of a product, thinking they’ll wow the audience and drive sales. But here’s the harsh reality—features don’t sell.
Features are mostly surface-level noise. They're easily ignored unless tied to real value. A carefully crafted benefit, on the other hand, can shift your product from something people see to something they can't live without.
Feature lists can overwhelm your audience. Some marketers bombard their audiences with details. This can overwhelm, confuse, or even alienate potential buyers. Someone looking for an easy-to-use camera doesn’t want to hear about ISO settings—they want to know it will capture great photos of their kids at the park.
Features don’t inspire action. While they may provide useful information, features rarely create an emotional pull. Emotional appeals—like helping someone picture their dream vacation or feeling the pride of accomplishing a goal—are what truly drive decisions. Without tying features to meaningful benefits, your pitch fails to inspire your audience to take the next step.
Stuck in a features-first mindset? It’s time to shift your focus. Dig deeper into your audience’s underlying motivations and connect your offering’s benefits to what truly matters to them.
Marketing expert and bestselling author Seth Godin champions the idea that marketing is storytelling. And his approach naturally lends itself to highlighting benefits over features. After all, a great story isn’t a list of technical details—it conveys a deeper meaning and leaves a lasting impression. Now we’re talkin’.
To communicate benefits effectively, you need to ensure they’re relevant. This is where segmentation comes into play.
Appealing to everyone with a single message often results in diluted, ineffective marketing. Different people have different needs, values, and aspirations, so segmentation is essential for delivering tailored benefits.
By grouping your audience based on shared characteristics (like demographics, behaviors, or values), you can better organize and understand what drives them.
Once you've segmented an audience, you can truly speak their language, offering benefits that feel relevant and personal.
The next step is to align your product or service's benefits with each audience’s specific needs and motivations, answering the question: “What’s in it for me?”
Step 1: Identify key motivations for each segment
Take a look at your audience segments and ask: “What do these people care about most?”
Examples:
Step 2: Map your features to benefits
Your product’s features only matter if they’re connected to outcomes your audience values. To do this, create a simple feature-to-benefit map:
Examples:
By focusing on how features create value, you ensure your messaging highlights outcomes your audiences care about.
Step 3: Prioritize the benefits that matter most
Not every benefit will connect equally with your audience. Focus on those that align most closely with the segment-specific motivations you identified in Step 1. For instance:
In most cases, prioritizing 3 to 5 key benefits ensures your messaging stays focused and compelling, avoiding the overwhelm or dilution that comes from trying to highlight too many points. For more detailed proposals or presentations, more benefits might be appropriate.
Want your benefits to stick? Wrap them in an emotional appeal.
Tell stories
Share real-life examples of how your product or service has improved someone’s life. Stories about customers reaching goals or overcoming challenges are far more memorable than specs.
Use emotive language
Tap into real emotions and speak directly to your audience’s desires. For example, “the relief of knowing your family is safe” is more compelling than “advanced safety features.” Avoid overly technical jargon and focus on how your product will make them feel.
Use vivid imagery
Help your audience picture the benefits in their own lives. For example, instead of saying “Save time with faster performance,” say, “Spend more evenings with your family thanks to faster performance.”
By pairing your carefully crafted benefits with relatable emotion, audiences are much more likely to feel understood and compelled to act.
Use this checklist to ensure your messaging is focused, relevant, and connects with what your audience truly cares about:
Jeff’s Rule #22