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Marketing Brochures: Benefits or Features? They're Both Important in Business-to-Business Marketing Brochures

How many times have you read a marketing brochure or an ad and found the copy to be limited in important information? The writer concentrates on telling you how wonderful the product is (benefits) and forgets to give you the specifics (features) so that you may come to your own conclusion.

As competition becomes higher and it is more difficult to tell what the real difference is between one product or another, companies need to use both benefits and features in their company literature.

When a piece of company literature discusses only benefits, the copy may be perceived as a “puff” piece. Readers in specific industries can extrapolate the benefits from the features. However, this does not mean that you don’t include the benefits, especially if your product has new innovations attached to it. It means that you need to include the hard “dry” facts along with the benefits. Readers can then choose to focus on either the benefits or the features, or both. By not including both benefits and features on an equal footing, you deprive your readers of using their expertise when evaluating a product.

Benefits appeal to the emotional side of the reader, while features appeal to the logical side. Both are important when persuading a business-to-business customer to strongly consider your product. Use them both strategically in your company literature. Better yet, consider intertwining the two and see what results you can come up with. For example, when presenting a case study involving a satisfied customer, you might mention the feature first, followed by the conclusion of the end result of the feature, or the benefit.

You can use creativity to include both features and benefits if you aren’t comfortable with presenting a linear summation of the benefits and features, as you would with a chart or table listing the features on the one side and the benefits on the other.