How much time do you spend writing and testing headlines for your campaigns?
If there’s one thing that is often misunderstood in marketing, it’s the importance and power of headlines.
In the offline world, you’ll find headlines on the cover of magazines, on billboards, and in direct mail.
In the online world it’s your subject line in your email message, the headline of your search ad, and the first thing someone sees when they come to your landing page.
The truth is this: if your headline is bad, your visitors will never bother to look at the rest of what you’re offering. If your headline is great, then it can carry even average copy below it, because you drove home the biggest benefit of what you’re promoting.
Now, headlines are nothing new. As long as we have been selling in print there have been headlines. And here’s a little secret: the offline print world is a treasure chest of good headlines and copy to be inspired by. There is so much good copy out there on magazine covers and in direct mail letters that you’ll never see if you’re just looking at online ads.
Start looking at magazine covers when you’re standing in the checkout line at your grocery store. Editors at print magazines know that what’s on the cover will make or break the sales of the issue. So they take their work very seriously. Whenever you need to write copy, it’s a good exercise to head to your favorite bookstore, library or online magazine outlet and browse through the magazines. Look at both cover headlines and story headlines to get inspiration for your campaigns. One source to start with for headlines is Reader’s Digest and their website at RD.com.
You might even find a whole new niche that you never even considered! If there are a lot of magazines for a niche topic with a lot of ads in them, there’s a good chance that there is an online audience for it too.
Want to find the real gold? You will need to do a bit more digging. Head to your local library and ask them to bring out a couple of years of back issues of the magazines you’re interested in. What you want to find are direct marketing ads that have been running for a long time. If the ad is running for more than a year it’s likely making money.
Now you might ask, what type of headlines work more often than others?
The best headline is the one that offers a solution to a defined problem that your prospect wants solved. That’s why you’ll find a lot of headlines that start with: “How to”, “Five Steps to” and “Seven Secrets to” either wealth, happiness or health.
So keep your eyes open to headlines all around you, do your homework and remember to test, test, test.
Ola Edvardsson is the CEO of Performancy, an online publishing company.
Download the entire FeedFront issue 11 here – http://www.scribd.com/doc/29057000/FeedFront-Magazine-Issue-11
FeedFront issue 11 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/article00date/2010/07
