Know some Key Elements of Customer-Focused Web Content

Part of your job is to become an expert on the services or products of the company that you work for. While this expertise is extremely valuable, it can actually hurt you when it comes to creating content that relevantly speaks to your customers. We often tend to become so knowledgeable about the features and technical specs of what we’re trying to sell that we feel that all of our customers want to know about all of these intricate details.

The hard truth is that most of your potential buyers don’t care about these things, but instead care about how it makes their lives better and how it fulfills their wants and needs. The first step to creating better content that converts is to learn how to take your vast feature knowledge and turn it into believable benefits.

How to Convert Features Into Benefits

We all know a lot about the awesome features of whatever it is we are trying to sell, but how do we convert those into benefits that truly resonate with a potential customer to help them see what they get out of it? When it comes to converting features to benefits, here is a great five-minute-check you can follow. This check includes taking the last persuasive piece you have created for your company (blog post, landing page, sales copy) and listing all of the features you talked about.

By doing this, the new phrases will be something like this:

Our powerful analytic reports are created with the simple click of a button, so you can save time showing your boss impressive analysis without ever firing up an Excel sheet. The sleek design of our hearing aid makes it virtually unnoticeable, so you can feel confident in how you look while also being able to more fully interact with your family and friends. We take pride in our no-questions-asked return policy, so you can order worry-free. This fantastic exercise changes your thinking from you and what you offer and switches it over to thinking about them and what they gain from it.

Don’t Oversimplify Benefits

 As content marketers, it is in our inherent nature to simplify text and messages into compact and concise points to save time, words, and space. This practice often hurts the conversion ability of our content as it takes some of the emotional storytelling away from the features and benefits we are trying to sell.

Stop Trying to Think for Your Customers

At some point in time, we’ve all sat in a room with our co-workers to hash out a profile/persona of our customer base. While it’s relatively easy to find out basic information about your customers such as age, geographic location, medium income, etc., it’s not as easy to guess how they think. Yet we all do it! We sit in a room and talk about what possibly could frustrate the customer, what they are worried about, or what they wish our product/service could do, but it’s all a complete guess and a completely pointless exercise. 

Instead of guessing what your customers are thinking, just ask them! Some of the most common mediums of getting information from customers are: Customer interviews Email surveys Review and testimonials Chat logs All of these mediums are incredibly valuable as they can give you the truth regarding how customers feel about what you are providing. If you want to embark on creating a customer survey, it’s important to make sure you ask the right questions in order to give you the right information.