The single greatest question a marketer can ask is this:
What’s the headline?
A marketer should be focused on questions such as “Are we growing?”, “How did our campaigns perform?”, “What is our net profit?”, or “What did they say about us?”
Those are all good questions.
But they’re not the best questions. The answers to each of them are directly tied to the biggest, smartest and best question of all:
What’s the headline?
Look at your Plans & Pricing headline if you’re not growing. If your last three campaigns failed, examine your sales page headlines. Although the headline is more tactical than strategic, startups and growth hackers can’t afford to ignore tactics like large companies can. You’re likely to find success by examining your tactics to see what’s going wrong or right.
What is the headline for every page on your website?
A powerful headline is not important simply because it will sell your product. In fact, a powerful headline is not designed to sell at all. Master advertiser the late-great David Ogilvy told us it is important because “On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy.” (That’s perhaps the most over-cited quote in marketing, but it’s a good one, so I’m not gonna stop using it.)
The headline on every page of your website is important for your marketing success.
Your Headline Is Your First Point of Connection
With Your Prospect or Customer
In marketing, the most important thing is the connection between you and your potential customer. You know this because you have read a lot about finding the right product-market fit, learning from users, targeting an audience, and narrowing to a niche. Your landing page headline is your first chance to make a real connection with your potential customer. They will either feel welcomed into your space—like you might have something that could help them—or they will feel unwelcome, out of place, or even rejected.
Your opportunity to sell something or build a relationship starts with your landing page headline.
Headlines are still important, as seen by this free headline worksheet that gets loads of downloads. This has been turned into a free headline scorecard, so you can measure how effective your headline is.
If you’ve gotten book 3, you’ll know what’s on the scorecard. But even if you haven’t read the book, let’s go over what’s on the scorecard so you know what you’re measuring.
1. Make a promise. Be specific.
Before we click on anything, we do a quick calculation of the potential benefits versus the cost.
Is the value of the content higher than the cost of my time?
The role of the headline is to quickly signal the benefit to the reader and convince them that it is worth their time.
If you want more clicks on your website, make sure your headlines are specific and promise a great benefit.
Ask yourself what the benefit to you is of reading this text. If you can’t find a good answer, you’re likely to fail.
Ask this question:
Does it match visitor expectations?
We can usually tell what our visitors are looking for by either noticing the keywords they use to find our page, or by making separate pages for different keywords. However way we do it, on the internet knowing what our visitors want often comes down to knowing the words they use to search for us… and then using those same words in our headline.
So if I were to search “virtual assistant services” like so…:
…I’d expect to land on a page where the headline closely matches those expectations. When I clicked TaskBullet’s SERP result, I landed on a page with this headline + subhead combo:
The headline reflects the benefits I want from “virtual assistant services,” but does it actually meet my expectations?
It is not necessary to use the search term that the visitor used in the headline. You just need to reflect what the visitor wants.
Successful writing of headlines requires the ability to understand how readers will react to them. Having empathy is the most important trait for marketing success.
2. Use power trigrams
Steve Rayson of Buzzsumo looked at 100,000,000 headlines to study what makes them effective and what correlates with social media engagement. His research was different in that he looked at trigrams, which are groups of three words.
It turns out that certain trigrams have large correlations with social engagement.
Headlines containing certain trigrams are more likely to receive social engagement.
Warning! No clickbait!
If you think this is clickbait, keep reading. I’m not suggesting writing clickbait headlines. You shouldn’t try to trick the reader. Your article has to match the promise in the headline.
3. Use numbers
List posts are popular because they are easy to read and provide a variety of information.
Numerals are an important part of creating a headline that stands out. Using numbers instead of spelling out the number in words makes a big difference in how attention-grabbing a headline appears.
According to LinkedIn, headlines with numbers perform better than those without. This is likely because numbers often indicate that an article is supported by research.
Headline examples:
- 17 Social Media Books That Will Make You a Smarter Marketer
- How to Increase Conversion Rates by 529%
- 101 Ways to Write Top 10 Lists that Increase Traffic By 21%
You get the idea.
4. Ask a question
Second, question headlines are usually interesting, which makes them more effective at stopping the scroll. Question headlines offer two benefits. The first is that they exploit a psychological effect, causing the reader’s mind to take the next step: either answer the question, or else wonder about it. The second is that question headlines are usually interesting enough to make the reader want to find out more.
The second benefit of using Google is the focus on meaning rather than just words. This is called “latent semantic indexing” and it helps Google understand the usefulness of an article.
These days, people are using their voices to search, not just their fingers. They are asking complete, full-sentence questions, and naturally, they expect complete answers. This helps Google connect people to your content.
5. Put impact words at the front of your headline
On mobile devices, subject lines are cut off after about 45 characters. In search results, title tags are cut off after around 60 characters. The same problem occurs with podcast titles.
Consider this question:
Does it grab visitor attention… in a non-scuzzy way?
If you don’t like trying to create headlines that will grab attention like those often seen in Cosmo magazine, you may find the whole process to be irritating.
However, you don’t need to use drastic methods to get your prospect’s attention. You don’t have to use magic phrases like “the secret way” or “the forbidden truth” or “from the vault”.
You just have to do these two things:
1. Use interesting language or phrasing
Make more of an effort to draw someone in than to trying to sell them something.
Consider also these examples. These are really the same headline:
- 10 Simple Communication Tips That Can Help You Ace Your Job Interview
- How to Ace Your Job Interview with These 10 Simple Communication Tips
6. Write very long headlines
This means that the headline is started with impactful words and phrases to grab the reader’s attention, but the headline itself is not always short. According to research by Steve Rayson, longer headlines are more successful on Facebook.
It turns out that headlines with 15 words had the most interactions on average. I’m guessing that very few marketers have written headlines that long before. If you try it, you’ll probably find yourself writing longer, more complete sentences. Or maybe even two sentences.
Check out these headline examples from some viral content sites:
- It is now legal to breastfeed in public in all 50 states. Just now. In 2018. (16 words)
- Incredibly Unfair: Even Though Billionaires Work Way Harder Than Everyone Else, Then Only Earn 4,000 Times As Much Money (19 words)
- Devastating: Kid Makes the ‘Pull Horn’ Sign But the Trucker Accidentally Pulls the Self Destruct Cord (16 words)
This is likely because longer headlines give readers a better understanding of the benefits of clicking on the article.
Give it a try.
Whenever truncation isn’t an issue, we recommend using longer text. This is applicable to social posts and
tags (page headers). However, it won’t work for title tags or subject lines since they’ll always be truncated by Google and inbox providers.
7. Put the keyword first
Placing keyphrases at the beginning of headlines can be effective.
Using the target keyphrase at the beginning of the title tag and header helps to indicate its relevance to search engines. This is not as important for subject lines and social posts.
When creating headlines, it is effective to use a colon in order to separate the search-friendly keyword from the social-friendly triggers. This makes the headline more visible in search engines and more appealing to readers.
The headline includes key phrases that are prominently displayed but still uses psychological techniques to appeal to the reader.
Check out these examples from past posts on this blog:
- How to Research Keywords: A Step-by-Step Process (with video)
- Neuromarketing Web Design: 15 Ways to Connect with Visitors’ Brains
- 3 Internal Linking Strategies for SEO and Conversions
- What to Blog About: 17 Source of Fresh Blog Topics
This author uses the beginning of each headline to target a specific keyphrase, in order to optimize ranking. The rest of the headline is designed to connect with readers on an emotional level.
So here’s Orbit’s formula for writing headlines:
If you want to learn how to make money online: 4 steps to get started If you want to learn how to make money online, this article will show you four steps to get started.
If you search for any of the phrases before the colon in the headlines above, you will probably see the post ranking for the phrase. This is because of the numbers and the benefit statements which make people want to click on the link.
You may want to ask yourself also these 2 questions when strategizing a powerful headline:
a. Does it get to the visitor’s point?
Your headline has to speak to that. The only thing that visitors care about is their own wellbeing. Your headline should reflect that by addressing their needs.
Your copy needs to be written with these 2 things in mind to score well on this point:
1. Your visitor is busy
2. Your visitor only cares about herself
Make sure you know what your visitors want and give it to them quickly.
This means that you can use more than 7 words in your headline, although some instructions suggest that your headline should be extremely short. It can be difficult to create a compelling headline in 7 words or less, so don’t put too much pressure on yourself. Long headlines can often be more effective than short ones.
Here’s an example of a home page headline – this time on InQuicker.com – that uses only as many words as are required to get to the visitor’s point:
b. Does it highlight something beneficial or valuable for your prospect?
The benefit is what your prospect really wants.
The most important thing to your visitors is the benefit they will receive from using your product. If you have satisfied the points 1 and 4, then this point should be easily attainable. Most people make decisions based on emotion, so if you can get your benefits across early on, it will go a long way.
Related posts:
