Ask these questions in the interview
Having trouble finding reader benefits? Maybe you need to ask different questions.
Ask your subject matter experts:
- What happens if our customers buy this product or service?
persuasion
How to define features and benefits
Focus on the reader’s needs
If you were giving away a Hawaiian vacation to people who signed up for your webinar, which would you lead with?… Read the full article
Avoid fake benefits of the product
No ‘Pat yourself on the back for choosing us’
“Clean your face,” demands a hotel soap wrapper. No, YOU clean YOUR face! I want to respond.… Read the full article
The difference between features and benefits?
Benefits are verbs; features are nouns
Remember Verb, the superhero on “Schoolhouse Rock”? He was great because he could do so many things.
His theme song went like this:
I get my thing in action (Verb!)
… Read the full articleHow to craft reader-centered writing
Use you for all audiences, channels
You. It’s a power tool of communications.
The second person increases readability, boosts opens and clickthroughs and is the most retweeted word in the English language.… Read the full article
Writer centered vs. reader centered writing
Stop We-We-ing on reader
It feels so good to talk about ourselves.
Talking about yourself activates the same pleasure centers in the brain as food, money or sex, according to Harvard neuroscientist Diana Tamir and her colleague Jason Mitchell, whose research on the topic was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.… Read the full article
What is reader-centered writing?
Avoid Institutional Narcissism
Richard Roll, an economics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, studies narcissism in CEOs. Turns out the more narcissistic executives are, the more likely they are to overrate their skills and make bad business moves.… Read the full article
Learn reader-centered business writing from Dale Carnegie
Take a tip from the author of How to Win Friends and Influence People
I was coaching a communicator for a California health insurance plan the other day.… Read the full article
Use WIIFM communication for news release leads
Move from event to impact to engage readers
Screenwriter Nora Ephron long remembered the first day of her high school journalism class.
Ephron’s teacher announced the first assignment: to write the lead for a story to appear in the student newspaper.… Read the full article
Use WIIFM marketing to persuade
Focus on what the reader wants
If you wanted to keep teens from smoking weed, what message might you communicate?
One health organization, reports Guy Kawasaki in his book Enchantment, used the message that young people who smoked weed were five times more likely to engage in sex.… Read the full article