Who am I writing for?
Marketers, copywriters, SaaS founders, and anyone else writing marketing copy.
Don’t write benefits driven copy if your target buyers are experienced and already in the market for solutions similar to yours.
Also, don’t write benefits-driven copy if the majority of your buyers have already used something similar to your solution in the past, and what you’re offering is an upgrade.
Instead, just tell them what extra you’re offering, and how you’re better.
In the “Why What How” model as propounded by Simon Sinek, experienced prospects are already familiar with the “Why” and they just skip that part of your website, landing page or ppt. Instead, tell the the ‘what’ and the ‘how’.
For example, at VWO we’re about to launch a comprehensive conversion optimization platform. Looking at the data, the majority of our buyers are aware of what conversion optimization entails. To that end, they’re familiar with tools like Hotjar, Mixpanel, Optimizely and Jira/Trello for project management.
After an internal discussion about what kind of copy we should write for the new platform, we did a small poll on the CXL Facebook group and on our Linkedin group. Here are the results (disclaimer: I might have biased some of the opinions on the Linkedin group due to a comment, which I then removed):
There are other reasons to chuck the benefits-driven copy. Experienced buyers have usually heard multiple pitches where the sales & marketing communication promised a lot, but the product failed to live up to the hype. And because of this, they’re naturally suspicious and take everything with a pinch of salt.
So do them a favour, create marketing that shows you understand their situation. Give out lots of details on your product, pricing, platform, features pages and sales pdfs.
