Want Better Results? Write Better Headlines!
Categories: 1to1 Marketing, Advertising, Direct Mail, Journalism, Marketing, Media Relations, News Release, Press Release, Public Relations, Publicity, SEM, SEO, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Writing, blogging, social media.
Regardless of the specific industry you work in, everyone is always looking for ways to be more successful and generate better results. For those of us with marketing and/or communications responsibilities, that means getting more people to read, listen to and/or watch our stuff.
Why? Because the more people we can engage with our marketing/communications stuff the more successful we will be and that invariably means MONEY!
So if you really want better results, that means writing better headlines . . . at least that’s what MarketingSherpa says.
MarketingSherpa is one of the leading publishers of information and data on what really works in all areas of marketing and marketing communications. They have hundreds of thousands of subscribers to their free online newsletters, and do a substantial business in selling reports and studies and producing conferences around the U.S.
Last week, MarketingSherpa.com ran a great story in their online newsletter titled “4 Takeaways from MarketingSherpa’s Newsletter Subject-Line Analysis.” (Not necessarily the snappiest headline, but it does follow one of the four rules. See below.)
In summary, MarketingSherpa had their own people go back and analyze every headline for every article they had published in the last year to see if they could identify which articles were the most successful. Naturally, each article topic stands on its own and one topic may be inherently more interesting and/or relevant to more people than the rest.
But by the time they were all done - particularly analyzing click-to-opens (the number of people who clicked on a link to see an entire article) and reviewing clickthroughs (the number of times people clicked on a link within, or connected to, an article) - they came up with Four Takeaways, namely
- The first two words in any headline are the most critical (such as How To, Top 12, Simple Email, and HTML vs, among others),
- Use “trigger words” in your headlines (you’ll need to read this one because there isn’t a simple rule to follow, but they did suggest you “dedicate at least a few hours to the subject line“),
- Avoid hard-sell headlines or headlines that ask for reader action (NOTE: The worst performing 10 headlines for MarketingSherpa last year ALL USED HARD-SELL LANGUAGE OR REQUESTED READER ACTION), and
- Use “hot brands” in headlines wherever possible and practical (headlines that included company names like Facebook, Google and Wikipedia pulled the best for MarketingSherpa articles).
They also came up with a BONUS TAKEAWAY, which is
- Shorter headlines are ALMOST ALWAYS better (but there are exceptions, and MarketingSherpa provides a few examples).
This article has really inspired me to work smarter, harder and longer (when necessary) when it comes to writing any headline.
I believe that anyone who is focused on following the principles of The Betty Factor will do the same.
2 comments.
How to Revolutionize Education Forever: Social Media Tools and Strategies = Education 2.0 »« Mark Cuban, Dallas Mavericks Owner and Billionaire, Charged with Insider Trading by the SEC