Your headline is one of the hardest workers in your marketing collateral. It’s a handful of words that can make the difference between your copy being read, and ignored. But writing headlines can feel like your brain has been picked over by a tribe of garage sale fanatics.
You know the feeling… You’ve been trying to come up with a headline for hours. The ones you have are okay; some of them are even pretty good. So how do you know when you’ve got the one?
This is a handy test of four U’s I picked up from Bob Bly’s Copywriters Handbook.
Is your headline unique?
You can grab your audience’s attention by offering them something new or unique. Even if your product or service is far from unique, look for new and interesting angles that will get your audience’s attention.
“Book a Japanese Beauty Treatment” turns into
“Discover the beauty secret that keeps Japanese women young.”
Your headline should also be unique to your business (as much as possible). If your headline could just as easily apply to a business that sells swimming pools as beauty treatments, you know you’ve got work to do.
“Get ready for summer” turns into
“Get your legs summer-ready with a free bronze”.
Is your headline ultra-specific?
Making vague claims in your headline secures your seat on the ‘Ignore Me’ bus. Use concrete, quantifiable terms to make your claims more credible and trustworthy. Numbers are great as they imply you’ve done some research but you can also use specific names, titles, descriptions, projections and results.
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Is your headline useful?
Being helpful is a great way to build trust with your audience. Include your most highly desired or unique feature or benefit, or hit upon your audience’s big worry and the problem you solve. You can even let them know about a problem they don’t know they have yet!
Five familiar skin troubles – which do you need to overcome?
Guaranteed to go through ice, mud or snow – or we pay the tow.
Toxic Killers in Your Grocery Cart.
Is your headline urgent?
While your headline might nail your key benefit and be ultra-specific, if there is no urgency there is no need to act. Urgency gives people a reason to turn later in a specific time frame. It might be today, next week, or the end of the year but when you add a time frame to your headline you start a countdown.
7 easy ways to boost your savings from today.
Is your child really prepared for their forthcoming exams?
Why tomorrow’s coffee is one too many.
Grade your headline
After you’ve written a whole bunch of headlines* (that’s right, you should be writing more than one headline!), rank each one against the four categories above, on a scale of 1-4 (1 being the lowest and 4 being the highest).
You probably won’t rank highly in every category but if your headline doesn’t rank highly in at least 3 of the 4 categories, you can do better.
How do your headlines hold up?
Belinda
* Write 25 headlines for every headline you need.
6 Responses
I always try to create headlines with a clear value proposition inside.
Numbers and percentages can be reall useful to grab readers attention.
To your greate list, I’d add “Does your headline raise curiosity?”. What do you think about this issue?
I think curiosity is a very powerful tool. Do you agree?
PS. Thanks for your copywriting pills, which I’m addicted to! 🙂
Great point Pennamontata! I love headlines that make me itch (with the need to click).
And I absolutely agree with including a value proposition, which I then narrow down so I can’t apply to any other business. Good headlines are hard to write but when you get them right, they are so very powerful. Worth the effort (and the brain scramble)
Thanks for commenting. I’m glad you’re digging the shiz!
Hi Belinda,
Organized and seemingly simple….but not!
I like the idea of having a list of essential ingredients for your headlines. Sort of like making a pie (I like to cook!).
I you leave out something important in the pie…nobody eats!
Translated for creating Headlines…Leave out an essential and no one READS!
Using this to create titles for articles would be a step up! After all they are the headline for your post!
Several years ago, I had a piece of software that would grade titles for you, but my old computer crashed and took it with it. One of the things it did like was the use of numbers….and what I called the fix it words like how to and guaranteed to.
Nice.
Cararta