Headline Detective

The process of copywriting is fluid.  Previous posts have offered a few practical tips to avoid overwhelm.  You must do all you can to get the odds of writing a winning sales message in your favor.  But there is not a right way, or only way.  Part of the fun is moving from the vague early stages, where I hope the aforementioned tips help you stay on track, to paring down your final draft to a lean, focused and targeted sales message. 

We are now poised at the difficult juncture of writing the headline.  We will address this in detail as it is crucial to getting your message read.  (And if they don't read, you won't get the sale.)  But to get started, it may help to lay some groundwork with a little sales sleuthing. 

Remember the old Abe Lincoln story?  "Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe."   Headlines are that important, and deserve a seemingly disproportionate amount of your attention.  Pick your industry.  Look through all traditional advertising media for that industry (trade journals for past several years, direct mail, book titles, etc.).  Find what has been tried before.  If the same ad appears frequently, you know it was successful.  If you're lucky, you can also check to see how an ad evolves. 

Once you have an education in what others have done, you can gauge the sophistication of the market.  As a rule of thumb, you may want to go with a shorter headline for less sophisticated markets.  Where advertising and marketing has been more aggressive, headlines that tell more of the story may strike more emotional appeal.  We’ll get to all that in future posts.  For now, do yourself a favor and know your market. 

For example, in the supplement industry, people are not really looking for a cure.  Most don't really have anything wrong with them.  But they are hungry for the next hot miracle.  In health stores, there was a Noni juice craze a few years ago.  It may come around again.  It was announced as a miracle, and stores that were lucky enough to stock it sold out.  Recently, ribose appeared in several newsletters.  Same result.  Or take the legal profession.  Lawyers' great fear, and the one that keeps them up at night, is missing a deadline.  Do you think knowing these things would affect the kind of headline you would write?  Knowing your market also offers opportunities to differentiate.

One more quick tip to check the pulse of your market, this one without getting out of your chair.  Go to Amazon.com and see what language reviewers are using for books in your niche, as well as the book's Amazon ranking. 

Next up, the rubber meets the road as we start to develop our first headline.

See you soon,

Sheridan

PS.  Want a head start?  Go to Barnes and Noble or some newstand and copy down all the headlines that catch your eye.  Same in the science fiction area.