Three Tips for Writing Product Copy Like a Pro

1. Benefits > Features

3 min readOct 28, 2021

Your customers don’t care about your product. It’s true. People don’t buy products, they buy progress.

When writing copy, focus on what your product does for the customer, not what your product is. For example, Snickers never talks about its ingredients: milk chocolate, caramel, nuts, and nougat. They cut straight to the benefit.

“Snickers Satisfies.”

It’s not about the features your product has, it is about the benefit of using your product. To translate features into benefits, you should ask “So what?”. How is this going to improve their lives?

Tips for describing your product to customers:

Use analogies. Make it relatable, and contrast your product to something already known. How would someone explain your product to a friend?
Be specific and clear, don’t just say that your product is “faster” or “cheaper”.

2. Translate Problems into Benefits

What things are holding your customers back from being the best version of themselves? Your value proposition is your product’s unique benefit that helps customers make progress.

For example, let’s say I am building a user feedback button that goes on your site.

Here are some problems with other apps:

They do not tell you exactly step-by-step what actions users took.
Obscure Logs. Engineers waste more time digging through obscure logs, when they could be spending more time on growing your business.

For each problem that you identified, ask yourself specifically how your product alleviates these pain points and why would someone want to use your service.

For example:

“To save engineering time, Kiktab feedback shows you exactly step-by-step what the users did before & during the error.”
“Instead of obscure logs that you have to piece together with trace ids, find exactly what happened in one search.”
“Easy integration with Jira so you can keep everything in one place.”

3. Write Catchy Headlines

Headline:

Great headlines concisely present the unique value proposition of your product. Take your value proposition and summarize it down to a sentence.

If the visitor only sees this headline, and nothing else, will they know exactly what you offer and why you’re offering it?

The headline should be simple, not technical. Keep it focused on the benefits.

Subheader

Below your main headline, describe & support with a little detail how your service accomplishes this value proposition.

Use varying sentence lengths to add rhythm to your copy. Don’t be afraid to use short sentences or broken sentences. They are easier to read.
Persuade with problems. To do this include the pain points, so you can show people how your service will make their lives better by contrasting it with what they are stuck with today.