How To Pitch A Product’s Benefits, Without Sounding Like A Hype Windbag

I’m not going to shock you when I say that landing pages live and die by how well they persuade. And bullets form the foundation of any persuasive message you put out there. They’re specific points which you expect will persuade the reader or listener.

Truth is, though, that your reader comes across thousands of marketing messages per day. You need to have a way of persuading them, without invoking an automatic “yeah, right” type of response. If you do it the right way, you can talk about getting rich quick, body part enlargement, or any other product idea and still be convincing. First and foremost, be clear on the benefits you’re providing. Ted Levitt of Harvard noted that “People buying a 1/4 inch drill bit don’t want a 1/4 inch drill bit, they want a 1/4 inch hole.” Focus as much as you can on the benefits of your solution, not on the features. Nobody cares about the drill or how it works. They are willing to pay for the result. You will always be most persuasive by looking through the customer’s eyes. It’s a common mistake to see lists of features next to products, written from the product creator’s perspective, disregarding the user’s needs. Not seeing your product in terms of the benefits it provides is a common problem, even for established businesses. Find out what benefits are important to your customer. Conduct customer interviews. Then test with advertising. You will always be safe in the world of your customer’s (or prospect’s) worldview. If your don’t frame benefits from the customer’s point of view, or you forget to include them, you rapidly become a pest. The real challenge nowadays lies in pitching your product’s benefits without sounding full of hype. Ah. Well, I’ve learned there’s always a balance between hype and proof. You can’t have too much of one or the other. Too much hype, and you’re not credible. Too much proof, and you’ll have the charisma of a spreadsheet. There’s a few decent techniques you can use to counterbalance sounding too hypey. You’ll find them in Launch Tomorrow. It’s the only book on the market which deals with landing pages as minimum viable products. Tests. I’m happy to talk through the bullets in your landing page MVP copy to make them sharp and hype-less. So you convert more leads.