Copywriting – Features or Benefits?

Subtitle: Productivity enhancements by text expansion.

From the very first marketing course that I ever attended (many years ago) the difference between features and benefits of any product or service has always been pushed as one of the most important thing is to understand about effective marketing copy writing. It’s a concept which is relatively easy to understand in principle. But, it is remarkably difficult to apply in practice-particularly in relation to your own service or product.

A little while ago one of my clients asked that I check out a product called BizAutomator, and he provided a link to the website where this product was described. Here’s an extract of what I read…

BizAutomator can…

• Automatically take care of repetitive customer inquiries so that you can free up your time for more complicated work
• Quickly and easily relay technically complex answers that you’ve previously obtained from a computer-savvy person to customers who want to know the answers
• Ensure 100% gramatically-correct, error-free, professional answers every time by responding with perfectly pre-defined templates to your emails
• Perform tedious web design tasks such as setting up just the right table alignment with just a few simple keystrokes
• Write scripts and software code even if you don’t know how by inserting code templates that you receive from a programmer or download from the Internet
• Remember all of your affiliate links and URLs so that you have them at your fingertips, so that next time when you want to tell someone about a web site you can just hit a few keystrokes and insert the right information
• Automatically type a signature for you on message boards and emails and get some free advertising in around the clock
• Instantly insert phone numbers, addresses, and email addresses into documents and emails by just typing a pre-defined “nickname” or “alias” (for example, type “john’s email” and BizAutomator will type “john@hotmail.com” into whatever document you’re typing in)

Whatever you do on the computer, BizAutomator can automate and simplify it, which will directly result in you having more free time to make more money and just plain relax.

Sounds pretty good, Eh? but, since I had been asked to comment on the product by next step was to see if there was an alternative, perhaps more in the mainstream. Being a Mac user I already use TextExpander which has similar capabilities and I assumed that there would be a equivalent application for the PC.

A simple little search found RoboType (version 3). Here’s an extract from the RoboType description…

Do you find yourself typing the same phrases and paragraphs repeatedly? Perhaps you prepare business documents that contain standard paragraphs. Or maybe you’re a tech-support provider and you have to answer the same questions over and over via e-mail. Do you constantly have to type the same long and complicated URLs? You could save your reusable text in a document and cut and paste from there, but that approach is clumsy. Some programs have macro expansion facilities, but not all. RoboType 3, which adds a text-expansion feature to almost any Windows program, is a better solution. You define abbreviations for the words, phrases, and paragraphs that you frequently type and RoboType 3 does the rest, replacing your abbreviations with the expanded text. This latest update of RoboType includes numerous enhancements. A new groups feature lets you organize your abbreviations by category. A new tag feature lets you use variables such as date and time when defining expansion text. And you’ll find many smaller refinements throughout the program.

Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with the latter description which clearly describes many of the features of RoboType. The question is, which are you most likely to download, BizAutomator with its list of benefits or RoboType with its description of features?

Although I have not used either of these applications, there is no doubt that an application which efficiently converts typed shortcuts into previously remembered content is highly likely to improve your efficiency and the amount of work you can get done in a day (assuming, of course, that your work involves a significant amount of typing).

You can buy BizAutomator at http://www.BizAutomator.com (about $67).

I’m not sure about the continuing availability of RoboType (or its compatibility with Vista) which was originally released in 2002. You can find out more here

A few more Google searches failed to find more than one alternative application. This is texter from lifehacker.

If you are using a text expander on your Windows PC please let us know via a comment.

Anyway, the actual application is a bonus-the purpose of this post was to reflect on the nature of features versus benefits!

Tags: advertising, code templates, Marketing, text expansion