Benefits vs features: why both matter in marketing

There's so many ways to market your app.

While I agree that at the end of the day a merchant needs to understand why they need the app (benefits), or what pain you solve, there's a time and place for content that is very much feature driven.

App store is a great example of when features matter more.

Search on the app store is critical.

When a merchant identifies a pain they need to solve, they're usually very specific when they search the app store.

Let's just say they want to grow their email list. Chances are they know that "popups" are a great way to grow their list.

When they're browsing results, it's critical they can understand from your name and headline that you solve that problem.

From day one, we've found significant growth by naming our app accordingly. Look at our app name and headline. Very feature driven rather than benefit.

Our app name, from a brand perspective, should probably be Privy - all-in-one marketing partner for shopify stores. But that doesn't help satisfy intent, or search.

Yes, we include a lot of benefit based talk "list growth, grow sales" etc in the app listing, but we reserve the name and headlines for features.

Our core marketing site is different. A ton more brand and benefits focused.

Another great example of when features matter is around integrations and blog posts around new features.

We recognized that as you add new features and products, you want to capture demand that already exists.

Focusing on benefits is critical, and helps with sales-led models, but showcasing features is critical for self serve, product-led models.

If you don't talk to your users before they begin using your app, making it easy to understand what the hell you do, and what features you offer, is critical to getting them in product.

In the early days, a lot of our growth came from landing pages and blog posts around "exit intent popups for [integration name]". At the time we just offered list growth, and integrated with every ESP.

We knew their popups sucked, and merchants may have been happy with the ESP but wanted to ramp up list growth.

We were able to rank highly, quickly for every new integration we launched by writing a blog post and creating a landing page describing the primary feature of the integration, and making it specific to that ESP (i.e mailchimp, klaviyo, constant contact).

So yes, you want to describe the benefit you offer (make more sales, save them money, or save them time) but you also need to be writing about specific features as well.