< Back to articles

Features vs. Benefits
What does your prospect get out of your product or service? What is their answer when they ask, “what’s in it for me?” These benefits should be the foundation of your advertising.

Simply, a feature is the product’s or service’s basic qualities: how many pages, the color, the financing, the certification, the warrantee, the size, the pay plan, etc. A benefit is what you receive from a feature. If a feature is “durability.” The benefit is “saves you money and time because you won’t have to replace it.” The easiest way to transform a feature into a benefit is to ask "What's in it for me?"

For example: if you’re trying to “sell” your school, a feature might be: teachers are on staff for an average of ten years. But why would a parent care about this? The answer to that question is the benefit. They’d care because their child would be learning from experience. It’s peace of mind.

If you’re selling a car that gets 55 miles per gallon, this is a feature. The benefit is that you will only have to stop to get gas half the time as everyone else and you save double on your gas bills!

All you have to do is go down a list of features and ask yourself two simple questions:

1. What's in this for me?
2. What do I get out of it?

Don't make people search through your advertising to find out what's in it for them. Put it right up front...in the headline, in the opening paragraph, in the offer, throughout the bullets, and all the way to the close.