MarketingExperiments Blog: Research-driven optimization, testing, and marketing ideas

Writing an effective headline takes time. It’s arguably the most important part of your copy, and skimping on the time investment usually produces skimpy results.

When will inspiration strike? What will be your muse? As Douglas Adams said, “Writing is easy. You only need to stare at a piece of blank paper until your forehead bleeds.”

Unfortunately, as a marketer, you don’t have the time (or goatee) of a creative writing master’s student. However, you do have to write.

Your goal isn’t different though. It’s not art; it’s income. So you don’t have time to produce perfect headlines for every piece of copy you generate. And you can use a reproducible methodology that gets you in the ballpark of effective, conversion-driving headlines (and testing will take you the last mile).

So the question is this: how can you (a time-strapped marketer) write effective headlines in a relatively short amount of time?

In part one of this series, I proposed a methodology for getting headlines done quickly. It involves a methodology for evaluating and refining raw headline drafts. When you have a method for a task, it automatically becomes more manageable. In this case, you can write headlines the same way a plumber fixes a pipe.

However, I only gave you the first part of the methodology for evaluating your headline drafts.

For those who didn’t read Monday’s post, let me quickly fill you in.

I first wrote three headlines for our December 7^th Web clinic and chose one to evaluate:

The Year in Optimization: The top insights and transferrable principles from 121 tests in 2011

In Step 2, I underlined the noun phrases as these generally communicate the core value or what the audience will get.

Then in Step 3, I evaluated the force of the noun phrases around four key elements:

• Appeal: How attractive is the phrase to our ideal reader?
• Credibility: How believable is the phrase?
• Exclusivity: Can anyone else credibly claim to have what is offered in the phrase?
• Clarity: How easily can the reader understand it?

This second post highlights the part of the methodology for refining your headlines into a finished product.

So without further ado, I’ll continue with Step 4:

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There’s a lot written about headlines. Most of it is fluff. A little of it is true, or at least based on solid evidence. But I don’t think I’ve ever read anything that actually helps marketers write effective headlines in the fury of the daily grind.

When you’re working on a project or a campaign, the last thing you need to do is sit around and wait for the creative muse to strike. You need to be able to write headlines (and copy for that matter) quickly and efficiently.

This post is my attempt (with a lot of help from Flint McGlaughlin) to give you a methodology to diagnose and solve the problem in a workman-like fashion, just like a plumber or mechanic would, for example.

After running several headline tests (one example), MECLABS has developed a methodology for writing headlines.

And unless you are a headline genius and you can nail your headlines on the first try every time, a methodology is exactly how you can make your headlines consistently successful in a timely manner.

So how can you write an effective headline on time, every time?

To answer that question, I sat down with our Managing Director, Flint McGlaughlin and worked on a few headlines for our previous Web clinic. The process he laid out is essentially four steps and based on the discoveries we’ve made through our research.

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In college, I had a journalism professor who said, “Make your headline twice as powerful as the event.” This is sage advice if you’re covering the Kardashian beat for a weekly tabloid, but it doesn’t seem to directly apply to today’s marketers.

(Apologies to any members of the Kardashian marketing team who may have been offended by the previous comment. You’ve done a terrific job promoting whatever it is that made them famous.)

But maybe it is applicable, after all. Despite a marketer’s goal of thoroughly conveying value on a landing page through well-crafted body text and use of images, there often remains a need for a powerful “hook” to further motivate a potential customer.

(Just recently, MarketingExperiments held a Web clinic that covered this very subject.)

When it comes to landing pages, one would think that it would be much easier to get users to convert, as they have already expressed a certain amount of interest via search or email clickthrough. But these users still need to be quickly reminded of why their clicks landed them there in the first place.

In the following test, you’ll see that a continuation of the value proposition was deftly handled with the addition of a few short, powerful words, alongside a much-needed change in the way our partner asked for information. Read more…

This insight came to me while conducting live optimization during our most recent Web clinic – Copywriting: How ordinary marketers are achieving 200% gains with a step-by-step framework.

I was optimizing an e-commerce surfboard website, yet I think this lesson applies equally well for many other consumer marketers as well as many in the B2B space. Let’s look at the challenge this surfboard website is facing to understand why…
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Every once in a while we like to test our audience’s marketing intuition on the MarketingExperiments blog. And we like to sweeten the pot a little bit if we can with a nice prize for three marketers with an uncanny sense for what works. We do this by asking you to predict the outcome of a recent experiment from our lab.

What’s at stake this time?

For starters…your reputation. 

Kidding aside though, if you can correctly predict which copy treatment received the best conversion rate, we’ll not only feature you on our blog tomorrow as a marketing wizard, but the three most intuitive commenters (in our opinion) will receive a free copy of Inbound Marketing, by HubSpot founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah. HubSpot is providing educational funding for today’s web clinic at 4 p.m.  EDT, Copywriting on Tight Deadlines: How ordinary marketers are achieving 200% gains with a step-by-step framework, and was kind enough to provide some books to give away in this post. All you need to do to enter is leave a comment stating:

1. Which treatment you think won
2. Why you think that

So, here we go…
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Copy that converts. That’s what every marketer is looking for. Sometimes you have a professional copywriter you can hire to write that copy for you.

Sometimes you have to do it yourself. Very quickly.

Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director, MECLABS will be sharing some of our copywriting discoveries on Wednesday, July 20^th, at 4 p.m. EDT in a Web clinic entitled – Copywriting on Tight Deadlines: How ordinary marketers are achieving 200% gains with a step-by-step framework (educational funding provided by HubSpot).

But first we asked your peers and copywriting professionals for their tips. We received 44 submissions from freelance writers and marketers and one from an accountant. Here is some of our favorite advice…and, of course, I had to include what the accountant had to say (he’s the last one)…
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