Headlines that get more clicks For Digital Marketing Campaigns
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On average, five times as many people read the headline as they read the body copy. When a brand has written their headline, they have spent eighty cents out of the dollar, words of famed copywriter and the Father of Advertising David Ogilvy.
Think about how many headlines an individual sees every day. There’s an endless stream on social media, on the viral news sites an individual visits, and the hundreds of emails they get every day. People know why they see those viral clickbait stories at the top of the Facebook feed because they get a high click-through rate. The News Feed algorithm factors in stories that people interact with, whether it’s a click, comment, or alike.
This over-saturation means headlines and content are even more crucial. Simply pushing whatever headlines first come to mind won’t cut it. The company has to compete for people’s attention, and it takes effort. So what’s the best way to create a click-worthy headline?
The experts and copywriters typically brainstorm a few dozen headlines and write them out in a document. Then, they’ll narrow it down to the best ones and pick the one they think will get the most eyeballs. Ogilvy once wrote 37 headlines for a Sears Roebuck advertisement. That’s a lot, but companies will be surprised how many headline variations they can create for one piece of copy. Creating a solid headline is a lot of work, following through with solid content is another battle.
Creating followers
Your company can have an impressive number of social media followers, but when it comes to shifting the audience from social media to the company website, it can be challenging to see the conversions. When social media followers aren’t turning into website visitors, and paid ads aren’t doing their job, there is something wrong that the brand is doing, and it could be bad headlines.
Bad headlines seem to plague the marketing world, especially on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, but it is not the company’s fault. Writing headlines is hard, and there’s a reason that copywriters can get paid $100+ an hour, and it’s not just because they create good content, but it is because they get clicks.
Writing great headlines is essential for getting social media clicks, but the same headlines can be applied across the company landing page, blog, and even sales page. A great practice is to pay attention to the headlines on the newsfeeds. Once the brand can get a handle on writing captions, they can use them on:
- On your sales page
- As the title for the presentation
- As the title of the blog posts
- With in-person sales communication
Copywriters use 3 headline-writing strategies to turn followers and paid ads into website traffic.
The 3 headline writing strategies used by copywriters are:
- Social Proof (Piggyback) Headlines
95% of people between the age group of 18–34 read local business reviews, 57% of consumers will only buy from a business with 4 or more stars, and 91% of 18–34-year-olds trust online reviews just as much as personal recommendations. If statistics tell a story, this one is crystal clear. People want to see other people like a business or product before they make a transaction themselves. By placing social proof in the company’s headlines, they can have a jumpstart in the process.
Headlines that showcase social proof look like this:
- Why Writers Are Obsessing Over This Grammar App
- $10k+ MRR Drop Shippers Are Shipping This Automation Tool (Here’s Why)
- 5,000 Digital Marketing Agencies Used This App to Hire Freelance Designers
Copywriters are smart as they leveraged this social proof and then took it a step further by adding high-authority sources. What if you went to purchase a knife set on Amazon, and while doing your diligent consumer duty of research and reading reviews, you stumbled upon a review from a guy named Gordon Ramsay saying that this is the best freaking knife set he has ever used? Would you keep shopping for knife sets, or would you buy this one?
Copywriters have figured out that by leveraging high authority professionals’ social proof, they can make their content’s headline that much more clickable and enticing.
- Threat Headlines
Threat headlines aren’t as scary as they sound. The threat headlines will show consumers how they can avoid pain by reading our article through the threat headline.
What kind of pain are we talking about?
- 13 Things to Do so You Don’t Lose Your Dog
- Read This Checklist Before Flying to a Foreign Country
- The 5 Biggest Mistakes Made by New CrossFitters
- Gain Headlines
Gain headlines follow a 2-step formula of benefit and promise. What is the benefit of somebody clicking on the social post, and what is the promise you are making them in return for the click?
- 10 Last Minute Valentine’s Day Gifts You Can Buy Today
- 15 Dinner Ideas Using Ingredients Already in Your Fridge
- 10 Easy Workouts for Beginners
For example, NYT bestselling author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson, is a master of gain headlines. His headline, “5 Skills You Need to Be More Emotionally Intelligent than the Average Three-Year-Old,” gives the benefit of 5 skills that will make the reader more emotionally intelligent and the promise that they’ll have a higher IQ than a 3-year-old after reading his article.
3 Simple Ways to Improve Your Headlines
There are 3 simple approaches that the brand can integrate with the above strategies to drive action from their headlines.
- Add the Words “How To”
The “How To” headline can play into the piggyback, threat, and gain strategies mentioned above. For instance, Harper’s Bazaar piggybacked off of Victoria’s Secret’s social proof as leverage to make this Facebook post more clickable by using the headline, “How to Work out like a Victoria’s Secret Model at the Gym.”
CNBC merged the threat headline and the “How To” headline to create the headline for a YouTube video titled, “How to Avoid the Latest Phishing Scam Targeting Direct Deposit.” BuzzSumo paired the gain headline strategy with the “How To” to create the headline, “How to Create and Promote Content That Gets 100+ Links in a Month”.
- Communicate Time
If you can give people a time frame for when they will receive the benefit they are promised in the headline, the company will skyrocket the headline’s success. Tasty communicated a time frame with a “quick quiz” that promises the benefit of telling Facebook quiz takers what they want for dinner tonight.
- Add Fascination
Fascination is the headline’s verbiage that makes people stop scrolling and think, “That’s interesting.” In 2019, this was one of the hardest things to do as an average person has an attention span of 7 seconds. The Verge used the fascination strategy to talk about 5G networks, using cows as the bait to get users to stop scrolling and click on their Twitter post.
How to Use the Social Media Headline Swipe File
The headline swipe file is designed to help companies write headlines without an expensive, albeit incredibly good copywriter—a creative headline on advertisements, blogs, social media help in attracting consumers. But don’t stop there; the more you work at it, the better your headlines will be.
We are constantly surrounded by headlines all day long. A great practice to move from the headline is to pay attention to the headlines on your newsfeeds. What strategy is being used, and does it make you want to click? If no, how could you rewrite it to be more clickable?
Using headline strategies that actually work, the company can make its own way toward becoming a headline master. Using creative headline means that the brand will soon be getting more conversions from their social media followers, more click-through on their paid ads, and more page views on their blog.
Test Your Headlines to Ensure Most Impact
A company’s best tactic to ensure that their headline is creating an impact is by A/B testing the headlines.
Create different headline variations for the same content and determine which one performs better with click-through rates, engagement and even likes, shares and comments.
If a brand finds one headline isn’t spurring a high enough click-through rate, then change the headline to something else that might draw a user. It’s always important to regularly test the pay-per-click advertisements to find out which headlines perform better, getting the brand the most clicks and conversions.
One way to test the headline’s strength is to use headline analyser tools to help you get the most impact. One headline analyser tool used by Thrive Internet Marketing Agency is via CoSchedule, which gives the company a final grade from 1 to 100 based on overall structure, grammar and readability.
We can help you write catchy headlines and content, Let’s Plan a Project Today
Read more about How to Write Title Tags
Reference
How to Fail-Proof Your Ad Campaigns with These 7 Headline Formulas: https://neilpatel.com/blog/ad-campaigns-headline-formula/
5 brilliant headline tips guaranteed to improve click-through rates: https://thriveagency.com/news/5-brilliant-headline-tips-guaranteed-to-improve-click-through-rates/
Learn to Write Headlines That Get More Clicks: https://www.digitalmarketer.com/blog/write-headlines-that-get-clicks/
