Your headline is
gateway to your advertisement. it will either entice your reader to continue reading, or turn them of before they've read a single word about your product. A good headline translates into leads.Headlines are first thing eye falls on. If it loses your reader's attention, you automatically lose a potential lead. This translates into a single fact: your headline is what sells your product. An effective headline will be impossible to resist, and it will force reader to learn more about your product or service.
You only have a few seconds to seize your reader's attention. That being said, it is imperative that you earn how to write good, if not brilliant headlines. Let's start by examining what function of a headline is.
A headline should grab reader's attention, communicate potential benefits to that reader, and set-up an expectation of what will follow in body of ad-and headline must do this all at once, instantaneously! Additionally, an effective headline is a filter that attracts your target audience.
Your headline should be educational rather than overly commercial. The best headlines declare an issue or a problem faced by marketing professionals, and they contain subtle promise of your product or service being able to solve that problem.
For example,"How to…" headlines work well because they appeal to need for information. Headlines written as a question appeal to reader's emotions because they will automatically want that question answered and be moved to read on. Headlines written as commands, such as "Double your traffic…" focusing on most vital benefit of your product or service literally demands your reader's attention.
Another strategy is using a news item as headline copy, such as announcing your new breakthrough service. Finally, consider using best sentence, subtly rewritten, from a testimonial: My traffic has increased by 50% and sales are at an all time high! Testimonials, which must always be reliable and true to their source, inspire your potential customer's trust and peak their interest.
Obviously, learning how to write elective headlines is essential. But to do that, you must first understand what qualities of effective headlines are.
An effective headline must be immediately credible. You have to make a claim, but it must not sound impossible or miraculous. If it sounds too amazing, reader will not believe you, and you will lose them before you get chance to explain your product or service.
Following this line of reasoning, effective headlines must also be short because average reader's attention span is short. For same reason that sound bites work, headlines must be brief and notable. They must be easy to remember, and even better, impossible to forget. Quotation marks work well in headlines, for example, because they both grab eye and reader's attention. This is most likely due to conditioning people receive from reading books. A reader tend to focus more on whats being said within quotation marks.
Use no more than fifteen words at most. The shorter better, so eliminate all extraneous words, such as adjectives and adverbs. These words can make a headline sound unbelievable or like hype, so only use these modifiers in your ad copy.
Headlines should appeal to reader's emotions rather than their intellect. Generally, strong emotions motivate people to take action, and more powerful emotion, faster action. So aim to write headlines that inspire awe, excitement, curiosity, even fear, and you will have solidly caught your reader's attention.
Write in active voice, using first or second person. Keep all your verbs in present tense, as it makes headline more immediate. Aim to write a headline that is in imperative tense in order to motivate your reader to take some kind of action. In this case, reading on to rest of ad.
