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.

The post How to find benefits, not features appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

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..

I once reviewed an article for a company’s sales force with the headline:

Extraordinary customer experience: Be a customer advocate. Be Extraordinary

What followed was a reminder about the company’s guiding principles, an announcement of a new program, a bulleted list of tasks for participating in the program and a reference to a handout with all the rules.

Then, 228 words in, this oh-and-by-the-way aside:

Here’s the best part: Winners are treated to an amazing, all-expenses paid trip for two for four days in Las Vegas.

Here’s a simple tip for getting people to participate in your programs, buy your products and services and read more of your promotion:

Stop writing about your programs, products and services and promotions.

Start writing about what people can do with them.

If they might win a trip to Vegas, that’s your headline. That’s your lead.

It’s the easiest way to draw readers in and move them to act: Lead with the benefits. Substantiate with the features.

How to find the benefits

To lead with the benefits, first you have to find them. And that can be a tough, given that our assignments come to us in the form of features.

So start there.

1. Start with the features.

The feature is What it is. It’s an attribute of the product, service, program or idea.

Take Apple’s new MacBook Air. It includes a:

New Apple battery

Would you drop $1,100 and change for that thing? Me neither.

And that’s how people feel when they read about features in your pieces. Nobody’s looking for features. So you need to translate.

2. Translate into advantages.

The next thing you ask, is “Why is that feature important?” That will lead you to the advantages. If the feature is What it is, the advantage is What it does.

In the case of that MacBook Air, the advantage is:

It’s a long-lasting battery with a 12-hour charge.

One thing I’ve noticed by doing this a million times for my clients: When you get to the feature, you will have landed on a noun: battery.

When you get the advantage, you will have landed on a modifier — an adjective or adverb —  like long-lasting and 12-hour.

I’m starting to get the picture, but it’s not long-lasting or 12-hour that readers and buyers are looking for. So you need to keep translating. The next thing you’ll translate into is the benefits.

3. Land on the benefit.

If the feature is What it is, and the advantage is What it does, the benefit is What it will do for you.

In the case of the MacBook Air, that benefit includes:

Taking a transatlantic flight? Line up the movies, because MacBook Air is ready to play for up to 13 hours — nonstop.

Now we’re talkin’.

Lead with the benefits.

Once you find your features, advantages and benefits, lead with the benefits and substantiate with the features. Features work at the end of a positioning statement, but don’t start your message with them. Sandwich the advantages between the features and benefits:

Play movies for up to 13 hours — nonstop — with our new long-lasting Apple battery.

[Benefit] Play movies for up to 13 hours — nonstop — with our [Advantages] new, long-lasting [Feature] Apple Battery.

The post How to turn features into benefits appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

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.

The post What is reader-centered writing? appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..