If you are in charge of your content marketing blog or even an email subscriber mail-out, you will know how difficult it can sometimes be to come up with a headline that your audience truly engages with.
However, there are some simple tips that you can follow to make the process of coming up with truly effective headlines easier.
1. Use the magazine method
Used by some of the biggest content marketing agencies, the magazine method involves writing your headlines how you’d expect to see them in a glossy such as Cosmopolitan or Men’s Health.
Titles like ’22 ways you can…’ or ‘Revealed: the secrets you need to know about…’ are more likely to encourage engagement, thereby helping your firm to generate greater traffic and sales.
2. Let a machine do it
If you don’t have the time or inspiration to come up with some attention-grabbing headlines of your own, you could always let a machine do the job for you.
There are hundreds of tools and online services designed to generate headlines and strings – all that you have to do is input some keywords and an auto-generator will do the rest. While this process doesn’t always guarantee brilliant headlines, it can be a great place to start if you’re low on ideas.
3. Copy a competitor
While we would never advocate stealing content wholly unmodified, sometimes, the best way to learn is to see what your competitors are doing, and more specifically, what has generated the best responses for them.
That way, if you base your own headlines on their (loose) examples, you’ll have the confidence of knowing that you are writing content that will capture your target audience’s interest and that they will probably want to read.
Of course, you should also put a spin on things that adds value for your readers – why not give your own firm’s perspective on a particular industry hot topic, for example, or highlight a unique service that your business offers?
4. Get your friends and family to help
Creating headlines doesn’t have to be an office job – you can get your family and friends involved! You could use the ‘exquisite corpse’ technique, for example, where you write individual words on paper.
For instance, you could write ‘how to’ on a folded piece of paper, and the next player could add ‘design a’ before the final player finishes with ‘great website’. That way, each of the sections can be interchangeable and used in different scenarios.
5. Ask a question
Questions are always a great way to generate engagement and discussion on your website. ‘How can I…?’ articles, for example, tend to perform well on the search engine results pages (SERPs) that are so instrumental in driving organic traffic to your website and boosting sales.
Regardless of how you manage your content marketing strategy, you should make sure that you’re always directing your target audience to a great-looking website. Contact Piranha Designs today to enquire about our services.
