The Difference Between Bad and Good Copy
“What’s in it for me” is all you need — two examples
Your primary aim with marketing is not to tell your customers how amazing your company is but to tell them how much better off they will be if they buy what you’re selling.
This is known as the “What’s In It For Me” principle (WIIFM), and it is the cornerstone of great sales copy.
Your ability to effectively apply WIIFM to your business copy will often be the only thing that separates you from your competitors.
The benefits of using the WIIFM principle in your copy are threefold:
1. It shows your customers that you understand what they want and need.
2. It makes them feel special.
3. It convinces them that you are the one to give them what they want.
If you’re thinking, “But our features are the best on the market, we should shout about that,” then good for you, but your customers won’t give a rat’s ass about those features unless the benefits to them are clear.
To turn your tentative web browsers into buyers, you need to frame everything in a way that speaks to their inherent self-interest.
Your USPs won’t be worth a thing if another company with second-grade offerings can speak to your customers' deepest desires better than you can.
Below is an example of using the WIIFM to turn a regular customer service feature into a convincing selling point.
Case Study One
Let’s say you’re a fitness clothing brand. And unlike your competitors, your customer service line is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The benefit of this feature to your customers is convenience. They don’t have to wait until certain times of the day to contact you. They can get in touch for help whenever they need to.
You could say, “Our customer service line is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week!” But all this does is let your reader know that the feature exists. It says nothing about what they could get from it.
Applying the WIIFM principle, you might say something like this:
“You can access expert support and advice at any time of day, any day of the week, with our dedicated 24/7 support line.”
Here, you’re not leading with your feature but with what your audience will get from that feature.
Case Study Two
This is a real case study from a client project I did last year.
One of my clients, who is a personal trainer, wanted to promote a new class she was putting on at her gym. This new class was for women, focusing on their glutes and hamstrings.
Before I put pen to paper, I asked my client why she thought her class would appeal to her target market.
She told me that over the last 12 months, most of her female clients expressed wanting to look and feel fitter. Many of them wanted to replicate the “Instagram booties” they had seen influencers flaunting online. And they wanted to feel safe whilst working on this part of their body in the gym. This class, she believed, was the answer to their prayers.
Without asking this question, I could have written that my client is “a highly skilled expert, who knows everything there is to know about booty building” (which she does). But, instead, I focused on using the WIIFM principle and this was the result:
Using only this leaflet to promote her class, my client was fully booked before the launch date, with a waitlist of over 20 people itching to join.
To break the magic down for you: the copy starts by acknowledging the target market’s deepest desires: “Blasting fat, Building Strength and Toning your Legs & Bum...for maxi-bum results.”
Then, it persuades them further by showing them exactly how they can get what they want with “this high energy fitness class, combining resistance training and cardio, targeting those tough Leg & Glute muscles with a variety of equipment.”
Conclusion
There is no point in shouting about how amazing your company, products, services, and features are if you can’t figure out what those things do for your customers. When you know WIIFM, you can use it in all your marketing copy to convince your audiences that you are the one to give them everything they need, before even mentioning how you’ll give it to them through your products and features.
