Front-loading your headlines with your topic word just makes sense if your readers are going to encounter those headlines in online lists — a search engine results page, for instance, or your online newsroom.

That’s because readers look at only the first two or three words of the headline when scanning lists (Rev Up Readership members only; join Rev Up Readership). This technique is so important that usability expert Jakob Nielsen ranks it the No. 1 thing you can do to improve the ROI of your website.

But what’s the topic?

Too many communicators (and, let’s be honest, their reviewers) believe that the company or its product or service is the topic. But the real topic is the reader or what they reader can do, as these Silver Anvil Award-winning headlines demonstrate:

Blood Cancer Patients and Advocates Visit Capitol Hill to Inspire Continued Support for Be the Match

July 18 Legislative Day event aimed at delivering more cures to patients in need

— Be the Match Silver Anvil Award-winning campaign

Teens Get Opportunity to Celebrate With an Idol

State Farm and Grammy Award Winner Kelly Clarkson team up for teen driver safety

— State Farm Silver Anvil Award-winning campaign

Parents and teen drivers dangerously disconnected

New State Farm survey reveals an alarming gap between parents’ and teens views on driver safety licensing laws

— State Farm Silver Anvil Award-winning campaign

Color Your Easter with Eggs

HGTV Interior Designer Sabrina Soto Offers Easter Decorating Tips to “Dye” for

— Edelman and The Egg Board Silver Anvil Award-winning campaign

Before spring planting, expert says, “Dig a little. Learn a lot.”

— Natural Resources Conservation Service Silver Anvil Award-winning campaign

Cover Crop Mixes — They Just Work Better

— Natural Resources Conservation Service Silver Anvil Award-winning campaign

Survey: Cover crops deliver strong harvest amid drought

Agency focuses on helping farmers build resilient farms through soil health

— Natural Resources Conservation Service Silver Anvil Award-winning campaign

JOIN THE TEEN DRIVER SAFETY CELEBRATION SUPPORTING NEW DRIVERS

Communities commit to drive safe in support of new drivers during National Teen Driver Safety Week

— State Farm Silver Anvil Award-winning campaign

Hey! Even the IRS is getting in on this approach. Here’s a recent newsletter headline:

10 Million Taxpayers Face an Estimated Tax Penalty Each Year; Act Now to Reduce or Avoid it for 2017; New Web Page Can Help

Don’t write about us and our stuff. To catch your reader, write about the reader and the reader’s needs.

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Screenwriter Nora Ephron long remembered the first day of her high school journalism class.

Ephron’s teacher announced the first assignment: to write the lead for a story to appear in the student newspaper. He told them the facts:

Ephron and the other budding journalists condensed the who, what, when, where and why of the story into a single sentence:

“Governor Pat Brown, Margaret Mead, and Robert Maynard Hutchins will address the Beverly Hills High School faculty Thursday in Sacramento …”

The teacher reviewed the leads, then paused for a moment.

“The lead for this story,” he said, “is ‘There will be no school next Thursday.’”

Not ‘just the facts, ma’am’

What’s the point of your news story? It’s probably not really the five W’s and the H. Instead of focusing on the event, focus in the impact, or how the news affects your readers.

Covering a:

• Speech? Write about the most valuable thing the speaker said, not the fact that she spoke.
• Event? Focus on what people will be able to see and do at the event, not the time, date and place.
• Meeting? Center the piece on what was decided at the meeting and how it will affect the reader, not on the logistics of the meeting itself.

What would Miss Piggy do?

To reach readers, think like Miss Piggy and write about MOI, counsels management consultant Alan Weiss. That’s “My Own Interests,” from the reader’s perspective.

One way to do that is to shift your focus from event — what occurred, when, where and why — to impact. That will make your copy more interesting, relevant and valuable to your readers.

___

Sources: Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Random House, 2007, pages 75-76.

Lorraine Glennon and Mary Mohler, Those Who Can…Teach! Celebrating Teachers Who Make a Difference, Wildcat Canyon Press, 1999, 95-96

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Too often, communicators think the topic is the topic. But the topic is never the topic. The reader is always the topic.

Here’s how it works:

Before:

Again, the visual assets for the homepage are due on May 16. 

Assigning colleagues a task? Make it go down easier by focusing on What’s In It For Me:

Make sure your homepage is pixel perfect. Please review it and have visual assets ready before it goes live on May 16. 

Here’s another task for colleagues:

Please review the new name ideas for our transformation framework by EOW to ensure we collect customer feedback during next week’s focus groups.

Move colleagues to act by leading with the WIIFM:

To wrap up your transformation project on time, be sure to review the new name ideas posted in slack by EOW.

Before:

Want to know more about the Predictive Support solution?

Why would I? What’s in it for me?

You can now save time and money by predicting when your print/scan devices will fail with our predictive support solution.

Before:

XYZ’s coordinated addiction-care program can help you manage pain while ending your reliance on opioids.

You’ve got a good benefit there. Why bury it behind the name of your organization and your program? Focus on the WIIFM to readers:

Reduce your pain and end your reliance on opioids with XYZ’s coordinated addiction-care program.

Before:

The new XYZ integration is a smart, compelling solution for your business that will allow you to drive sales productivity and maximize your current technology stack.

Don’t bury the benefits behind an 8-word description of your product. Instead, lead with the WIIFM:

Streamline sales processes and get more value out of your investment with the new XYZ integration.

Before:

Using partners in deals is both beneficial to you and your customers. 

Pro tip: “Benefit” is not a benefit. Focus on what I can do differently by partnering with customers:

Increase your quarterly sales up to three times and cut your customer’s project implementation time in half by using partners in your deals.

Before:

With our updated ABC, you can now measure each engagement and iterate based on actual data.

That sounds helpful. Why not lead with that WIIFM?

Close more deals and find out what’s working with our updated ABC. You can measure results down to the click.

Before:

You should take this survey because it will help our team help you close more deals.

Don’t lead with the task. Focus on how your ask will help me:

Get the tools you need to hit your sales goals. Let us know how we can help you with this survey.

Answer What’s In It For Me (WIIFM).

As a reader, which would you rather read: the befores or afters? About the product or service or about how the product or service will help you?

How can you reframe your message to focus on the reader instead of on your organization and its stuff?

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It’s counterintuitive, but true: The product is never the topic. The program is never the topic. The plan is never the topic. The topic is never the topic.

The reader is always the topic.

Here’s how six PR pros made the reader the topic in their PRSA Silver Anvil Award-winning campaigns.

Use the ‘Y word.’

The easiest way to write about the reader, in PR as well as in other pieces, is to use the magic word: You. That’s what PR pros did for these award-winning leads:

Use the imperative voice.

Here’s another approach to leading with the reader: Use the imperative voice.

We learned in third grade to call the imperative voice the command voice. And it can be a command: Do the dishes. Make your bed. Clean your room.

When we use it, though, it’s the invitation voice: Grab a spade … prepare your senses … dig a little … learn a lot.

Use a placeholder for ‘you.’

I actually prefer to avoid you and the imperative voice in media relations pieces. For one thing, who’s you — the reporter or the end reader? For another, I still like to retain an objective, third-person voice in PR pieces.

The solution? A placeholder for you: Community members. New drivers. Farmers throughout the state. Teens who commit to safe driving.

That’s how these Silver Anvil award-winners set up their stories:

Put the end user first.

Sometimes, the topic is just one or two members of the reading community. In this case, start with a placeholder for you anyway. Here, instead of leading with CHS Energy or its Tanks of Thanks rewards program, brilliant PR pros lead with the award winners:

Want reader interest? Take a tip from these Silver Anvil winners and write about the reader and the reader’s needs, not about “us and our stuff.”

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Having trouble finding reader benefits? Maybe you need to ask different questions.

Ask your subject matter experts:

• What happens if our customers buy this product or service?
• What happens if they don’t?
• What happens if members of the community get behind this public policy?
• What happens if they don’t?

Or take a tip from Kelly Parthen, PR manager at Agilent Technologies. She keeps asking her subject matter experts: “So what?” “So what?” “So what?” Eventually, they get to the benefit.
Keep asking, and you’ll hit benefits like:

They’ll be able to watch twice the TV in half the time.

They’ll ensure that their children’s school buildings aren’t constructed of corrugated cardboard.

They’ll get the body of Kendall Jenner while following an all-Twix-bar diet.

However you find them, benefits will make your products, services and ideas — not to mention your copy — more relevant and valuable to your reader.

That means you will…

Having trouble finding your benefits?

Try prompting your subject matter expert with the line “that means they will …” The end of that sentence is likely to be a benefit.

Your subject matter expert says, “We can handle our client’s internal audit functions.”

You say, “That means our clients will …”

Your subject matter expert says: “That means our clients will free up their own employees for bottom-line projects and better control the costs of producing internal audits.”

Now you’re talking benefits.

Present your benefits, too.

“That means you will …” also makes a great way to present your benefits:

Try it.

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If you were giving away a Hawaiian vacation to people who signed up for your webinar, which would you lead with? The vacation, or the webinar?

From what I’ve seen — from training more than 25,000 communicators in more than 1,000 organizations over 20 years — most folks would choose the webinar.

Sign up for our webinar
and get a dream trip to Hawaii!

But leading with the webinar won’t grab your readers’ attention and move them to act.

Instead, lead with the benefits and substantiate with the features. Focus on your reader’s wants and needs first, then follow up with your organization and its products, services and ideas.

Steal a trick from these Silver Anvil winners.

These benefits leads from PRSA Silver Anvil-winning campaigns are great models of leading with the benefits and substantiating with the features.

Make the switch.

Sometimes, a small switch is all you need to put the benefits first. Check out these before-and-afters:

Next time you write a press release, brochure or newsletter article, put the reader benefits first.

The post How to define features and benefits appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

“Clean your face,” demands a hotel soap wrapper. No, YOU clean YOUR face! I want to respond.

I’ve been seeing a lot of messages like these: messages that sound like benefits but that really are not. Fake benefits.

These fake benefits mirror the structure of benefits messages — Do/this (Save/money) — but not their spirit. Instead, the structure of fake benefits is “Non-benefit-focused verb/feature.”

The structure of benefits messages is:

Do/this

For instance:

Save/money

The structure of fake benefits is:

Non-benefits-focused verb/feature

For instance:

Enjoy/our new product

To move readers to act, avoid these three types of fake benefits.

1. Get our product.

Yesterday, I received an email with this subject line:

“Learn more about New Media Gateway”

While that looks like a benefits statement — it starts with a verb and the implied “you,” after all — it’s actually a fake benefits statement. Its real subject is not the reader, but the communicator’s organization.

Instead of using your verb to point to your product, service, program or idea, write about what readers can do with your product, service, program or idea.

2. ‘Congratulations on choosing us.’

We tend to send these messages out after we win an award: “Pat yourself on the back for choosing us.”

With these benefits, we’re really writing about how great we are:

Get XYZ feature.

Reap many rewards.

Rely on our 75 years of experience.

Value the attention we pay to detail.

Appreciate our dedication to accuracy.

Pat yourself on the back for choosing us.

Instead, write about how the readers’ lives will be different because they chose you.

3. Go to your room.

We learned the imperative voice as the command voice in high school. And it can be a command: Go to your room. Make your bed. Take out the trash.

But you use the imperative voice to move people to act, make it the invitation voice — not the command voice: Save money. Make money. Save time. Avoid effort.

Avoid the command voice. These messages are actually tasks:

Take our class.

Stop by our booth.

Attend our conference.

Subscribe to our ezine.

Sign up for our webinar.

Make it the invitation voice instead. Rather than tell readers what to do, let them know what they’ll get when they do it:

Learn to double your income when you take our class.

Get a chance at a free Apple Watch when you stop by our booth.

Network with peers — maybe even meet your next boss — when you attend our conference.

Nix ‘get our feature.’

The hardest part of crafting a benefits statement is finding the benefit, not writing the line.

So dig in. Think. Don’t be satisfied with a statement like “Get our feature.” Learn enough about the subject you’re writing about and your audience members to figure out what the former will do for the latter.

Remember what you learned in kindergarten: When you cheat, you only hurt yourself. But when you cheat on benefits statements, you hurt yourself, your readers and your organization.

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Richard Roll, an economics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, studies narcissism in CEOs. Turns out the more narcissistic executives are, the more likely they are to overrate their skills and make bad business moves.

In one study, Roll used a simple technique that’s been validated by psychologists to gauge executive narcissism: He counted the number of “I’s” they used in their communications.

The first-person pronoun — “the vertical pronoun,” as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jacqui Banaszynski calls it — is bad enough. Its cousin, the first-person-plural “we,” is a symptom of another disorder: We-We Syndrome, or organization-focused, not reader-focused, writing.

Are you suffering from We-We Syndrome? Here are three techniques for diagnosing your copy:

1. Run the we-you test.

Use Microsoft Word’s “find” function to search for instances of company references versus reader references. Aim for a ratio of at least two reader references to one company reference.

Here are the results I got on one of my clients’ proposals:

It’s a good thing we had a chance to edit the proposal before it went out: We-We Syndrome can be fatal to business development.

As one of my clients says, “You’ll go ‘We, We, We’ all the way home — without the contract.”

2. See what you say.

One way to visualize We-We Syndrome is to create a tag cloud for your copy. Tag clouds display the words you use the most frequently in the largest type, those you use less often in smaller type.

You’re looking for your customer, the word “you” and benefits-oriented verbs to show up in large type and your own company and product names to be smaller. Here’s the tag cloud for a Federal Home Loan Bank release about apartments for special-needs residents:

Remember, write about your readers, not your topic. If you find results like these, rewrite your copy to focus more on your customers and what they’ll be able to do with your product and less on the organization and the product itself.

3. Put the reader first.

Did these diagnostics reveal a bad case of Institutional Narcissism? One way to cure the disease is to lead with the reader, not with your company. Check out this before and after by Melanie Allen, Marketing & Public Relations manager at Inova.

Before:

Inova Loudoun Hospital has multiple emergency rooms around Loudoun County.

After:

Spend less time in the car and in pain with Inova Loudoun Hospital’s three conveniently located emergency rooms.

Can’t use “you”? Use a placeholder instead. Start your headline, lead, paragraph or sentence with your target reader: “Asthma sufferers,” say, or “PR professionals.”

Take the cure

We-We Syndrome is contagious, so be careful out there. Don’t let We-We spread. The minute you’ve diagnosed the patient, apply the remedy: Rewrite your copy to focus on the reader, not the organization.

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If you wanted to keep teens from smoking weed, what message might you communicate?

One health organization, reports Guy Kawasaki in his book Enchantment, used the message that young people who smoked weed were five times more likely to engage in sex.

Have you ever met a 17-year-old football player? For that matter, have you ever met a 58-year-old writing coach?

Many humans — except perhaps for those who work for this one particular health organization — actually enjoy sex. I myself have met several people who feel their lives would be much less interesting without it.

One group tried to cut teen weed use by saying that weed smokers were 5 times more likely to have sex. … Have you ever met a 17-year-old boy?
Click To Tweet

Not to say that the five-times-less-sex message wouldn’t work on a different audience. If you were trying to convince parents, teachers or school board members to campaign against teen weed-smoking, then that data point might be compelling.

For most other audiences, though, the promise of five times more sex might just convince the most sober among us to wake and bake, nod off on the couch during all-day “I Love Lucy” marathons and come to surrounded by empty Cherry Garcia cartons.

And that’s the problem with this message: It has a WIIFM, or a “What’s in it for me?”

It just focuses on the wrong M.

Answer your reader’s No. 1 question.

The first thing your reader wants to know from your message is “What’s in it for me?” Advertising writers long ago shortened this term to WIIFM, pronounced “wiffum.”

So think like your readers:

• Your customer readers don’t care that your organization is putting $100 million more into R&D this year. They want to know whether that means their computer will be faster and easier to use.
• Your employee readers don’t care that your organization is adding $10 million to the profit-sharing coffers. They want to know whether that means they’ll be able to retire early.
• Your media contacts don’t care that your organization has launched a revolutionary new toothpaste. They want to know whether it’s going to reduce their own readers’ dental bills.

So answer the reader’s No. 1 question: “What’s In It For Me?”

But first, you need to know who Me is.

Whatever happened to Step 1B?

You remember Step 1B of the five-step communication planning process. It’s “Target your audience.” It comes right after identifying the business challenge and before setting goals for, developing, implementing and measuring the success of your communication plan.

So whatever happened to Step 1B?

I’ll tell you what happened to Step 1B. The internet happened to Step 1B. All of a sudden, we weren’t targeting our readers — our readers were targeting us.

Which meant that instead of targeting anybody, we were suddenly targeting everybody. (And remember what Mom said about trying to please everyone.)

There is a solution to this problem, and it is to have readers target themselves:

• Offer separate doorways on your website. For a health care site, for instance, you might offer doors for patients and doctors — and never the twain shall meet. Understand that if I stumble onto my doctor’s web pages, I will decide that your site is not for me. And if my doctor finds herself on web pages targeted at my level of medical expertise, she will decide that your site isn’t for her. Target each of us, separately.
• Offer separate social media feeds. A river runs through my city, and 14 bridges connect the east and west sides of town. If my bridge is closed, I want the DOT to tweet urgent updates every five seconds. But if your bridge is closed, I never want to hear about it at all. The solution: Offer separate Twitter streams for each bridge.
• Offer separate news releases, tag intranet articles for certain departments, segment email blasts. That doesn’t mean you need to multiply your work. Just finesse the headline, deck, lead and nut graph of each piece to focus on your targeted audience’s needs.

But every day, I work with communicators who don’t do that. Instead of targeting audience members or helping audience members target themselves, they target everyone.

Their every web page is for all comers. Their all-in Twitter streams drown disparate followers in irrelevant messages. Their e-zines and newsletters go to employees, to customers, to legislators.

Even if the WIIFM that would compel one audience would repel the rest. (Remember: sex.)

We need Step 1B. Help me bring back Step 1B!

Because not all of your Me’s are the same. The rich, for example, are different.

The rich are different.

I’m not just saying this. It’s true: While most parents tend to teach their kids to prioritize the needs of the group over their own needs, wealthier parents tend to teach their kids to succeed on their own.

It shows up in charitable giving: Wealthy adults are less likely to share what they have with others.

So how do you get the wealthy to give? Frame their giving as a personal accomplishment, say three researchers.

They found in one study that wealthier people — those with incomes higher than $90,000 — were way more likely to click “Donate today!” when giving messages stressed individual achievement (“You = Life-Saver”) instead of emphasizing a common goal (“Let’s Save a Life Together”).

In another study, alumni from an elite business school gave $150 more on average when asked to “Come forward and take individual action” than when they were asked to join their community to “support a common goal.”

That’s their WIIFM.

That message won’t work for everyone. And that’s OK. It doesn’t have to. You can use the common-goal message with your less wealthy givers.

But do target your audience members and focus on what’s in it for them. That’s how you put the M in WIIFM.

___

Sources: Guy Kawasaki, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions, Penguin Group (USA) LLC, March 8, 2011

Ashley V. Whillans, Elizabeth W. Dunn and Eugene M. Caruso; “How to Get the Wealthy to Donate”; The New York Times; May 12, 2017

Ashley V. Whillans, Eugene M. Caruso, Elizabeth W. Dunna; “Both selfishness and selflessness start with the self: How wealth shapes responses to charitable appeals”; Journal of Experimental Social Psychology; volume 70, May 2017, pp. 242-250

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You know that the topic is never the topic: The reader is the topic.

You’ve acknowledged that readers don’t care about “us and our stuff”; they care about themselves and their needs. You buy into the notion that the first thing your reader wants to know about your message is WIIFM, or What’s In It For Me.

Now what?

The next step is to find some great WIIFM copy to model. And have I got a piece for you. Here’s Briefings Publishing Group’s promo for a how-to video. The WIIFM copy is well worth modeling.

Here it is — with, of course, my notes:

Say Goodbye to the 60-hour Work Week

The headline starts with the imperative voice — aka the implied “you.” That’s great.

Plus, it’s specific. Not “long hours at the office,” but “the 60-hour work week.” Don’t forget to quantify and specify your own marketing copy.

Here, we move back from the second person to the third. Not a great choice.

A braver, more benefits-oriented approach would be to speak directly to “you,” as in, “You can’t do your sharpest, most creative work when you’re burned out …”

It’s a smart choice to lead with the problem in the first paragraph and follow up with the solution in the second.

But instead of moving into first person plural (“we’ve created”), keep focusing on the reader (“Now you can make time to relax and recharge and ensure that your time spent in the office is creative and productive with our new video …”)

The second sentence is a masterpiece of you-focused benefits writing.

This is a nice list of benefits, but a verb list would highlight the WIIFMs more effectively — and unload 14 words in repeated “How to’s.”

To create a verb list, set up the “how to” in the intro to the list: ” … you’ll discover tips and tactics guaranteed to help you free up your time and get your life back, including how to:”

Now you can start each bullet with a verb. See how much stronger this list is with bullets that begin “Liberate,” “Streamline” and  “Avoid.”

Guideline: Start your lists with verbs whenever possible. It will condense your copy, activate your language and bring the benefits to the front of your list. Here’s how it works:

All right: You’ve got your model; now use it. Reach more readers and sell more ideas when you write in WIIFMs, not about “us and our stuff.”

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