Persuasive marketing: why you need a copywriter who can sell the benefits

“Sell the benefits.” It’s the oldest rule in the content book, but sometimes one of the hardest for B2B marketers to get right.

As a marketer, it’s your job to persuade clients of the benefits of your product – and much depends on how you position it in the market.

Why is your technology brand important to your client? Is it resilience? Cost-effectiveness? Is it what it can help the end user to do? Or is it personal service, coupled with the depth of your expertise?

Ultimately: how do you help the client – and why should they buy from you?

These are the kinds of questions I ask as a freelance copywriter – to help you articulate your sales messages as clearly as you can.

Benefits before features

Trouble is, a lot of B2B copywriting doesn’t focus on benefits. It focuses on the features of the product or brand – and the client has to ask: “Yes, but how does that help me?”

In a brochure, for example, the customer doesn’t want to know, for example, that you have 39 vans in your fleet. What they want to know is that you’re committed to providing service on time – so they can keep their business up and running. Say this – and then mention the vans.

On your website, similarly, don’t just write a press release saying you’ve won an innovation award, tack on a quote from the CEO, and decide your job is done. On its own, it’s little more than a feature of your brand. Instead, use that award as a proof point when telling clients about how your culture of innovation benefits them.

These are just examples. But persuasive copywriting is about working out what customers’ needs are and addressing them – often surprisingly directly.

As a copywriter, I help you move from features to benefits, so your marketing is targeted at your customers’ needs. This should help make your copy more effective.

Benefits in wider content marketing

“Selling the benefits” is most obviously applicable to marketing collateral: i.e. sales-focused copy such as brochures, sales sheets, product pages and core web pages.

But it’s also important to blog posts, case studies, white papers and wider content marketing. It’s just that here the “benefits” are of a more subtle kind.

Often, the goal here is to understand how you’re helping the client not with the sale, but with the next stage of the customer journey.

With blogs or articles or white papers, try to find the “why”. Why is the client reading? How can you help them as best you can? What value can you offer?

83%

of B2B marketers cite “the value our content provides” as the reason for their success in content marketing – the top-ranked reason.
[Source: B2B Content Marketing: Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends – Content Marketing Institute, Sep 2020]

As a copywriter, I can help you provide the value your clients are looking for – helping to guide them, over time, from blog post to product page to sale. 

That’s the benefit I can provide.