Turbo-Charge Your Marketing by Writing Powerful Headlines

Any marketing professional or copywriter worth their salt will tell you the headline is the single most important part of any sales, marketing or advertising piece. In fact, most good copywriters spend far more time on the headline than they do writing everything else.

Why? Because the headline is the first thing people see. And because the headline alone is often what makes people decide whether or not to keep reading.

In today’s fast-paced, information-overload world, people don’t have time to read a bunch of text unless the think it has information they need. So if the headline holds no interest, you can bet they won’t read on.

And, consider this from world-famous copywriter and ad man, David Ogilvy “On the average, five times as many people read the headlines as read the body copy.”

Yet most small business owners rarely use headlines in their marketing and advertising. And when they do, they often write them almost as an afterthought.

“Welcome to Our Website” is not an effective Webpage headline.

How do you write an effective headline?

The two main goals of any headline are:

1) Get the attention of your target market

2) Convince them to keep reading

So start by asking these questions:

Who is my ideal customer?
What are the key and/or features and benefits of my product or service?
What is the number one reason my customer would want to buy this product or service (What problem are you solving?)?
What is your offer?

The answers should form a solid basis for your headline.

Then, try following these eleven proven tips paraphrased from David Ogilvy, copywriter Bob Bly and me for creating powerful, attention-getting headlines.

1. Putting your headline in quotation marks can increase recall by an average of 28 percent
2. Headlines that offer helpful how-to information attract above-average readership (I call these Reader’s Digest-style headlines)
3. If you’re selling something of interest only to a small group of people, put words in your headline to target them like: “asthma”, “bed-wetters” or “women over 35”.
4. Make sure your headline suggests there is something they want, or want to know, in the rest of the message
5. Whenever possible, avoid headlines that paint a negative picture. Go for the positive instead. People want positive things and changes in their lives.
6. Feature a free offer. This makes it easy for people to say yes to what you are offering.
7. When you have news (a new product or service launch, or a new use for an old product) use words like: “new”, “now”, “at last”, “introducing”, or “announcing”, to get the readers attention
8. Ask an open-ended (not yes or no) question like the famous “Do you make these mistakes in English?” It arouses curiosity and makes people want to know the answer.
9. Warn the reader to delay buying with a headline like “Don’t buy another vacuum cleaner until you’ve read this free report!”
10. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Get a book of proven sales letters or advertisements then choose a headline you like and rewrite it to fit your needs. John Caples famous—and famously successful headline—“They laughed when I sat down at the piano. But when I started to play…” could be rewritten for a cooking school like this: “They laughed when I invited them over for an authentic Vietnamese dinner. But when they tasted the food…”

Once you’ve got a couple potential headlines that seem to pack a punch, test, test, test to see which one works best. Happy headline writing!

Have you seen a killer headline lately that grabbed your attention and inspired you to action?

Do you have any other headline writing tips, ideas or examples?

Please do share by leaving a comment below…

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[tags] Copywriting, writing headlines, how to, small business marketing, advertising website, sales letter [/tags]