Small Business Owners - 5 Critical Tips For Creating Headlines in Your Sales Copy

Your headline is the single most important piece of your sales copy.  It is amazing how much advertising out there does not even contain a headline.  Your customers are bombarded by over 5000 marketing messages per day.  If you cannot grab them by the throat and get their attention with your headline, they will not stop for a second to read the rest of your ad.  Your headline will make or break all of your marketing material.  Here are 5 tips that you can use to help with your headline creation:

1.  Do not try and win an award, be cute, or tell jokes in your headlines.  People don't want to be patronized by "cleaver copy."  The only thing they want to know is what the product or service will do for them.  Not everyone will find your jokes funny, and you may create a piece that is so cleaver, no one understands it.  Your headline needs to be written in very simple, straightforward language.  The one and only reason to have marketing material is increase the bottom line of the business.  You can be entertaining, but leave it out of your marketing material.

2.  The sole purpose of the headline is to get the prospect to start reading the rest of the copy.  You must capture their interest, but you do not have to sell the product in the headline.  You just want the person to keep reading the next lines below it.

3.  You must integrate your Unique Selling Proposition (USP) into your headline.  Sometimes, your USP alone makes an excellent headline.  Your USP is the foundation of your business and it's critical that it's integrated into all of your marketing materials.  Your headline must echo the message that you are trying to give in your USP.  This will tie your entire business image together in one package that a customer will always recognize no matter what kind of marketing material they are looking at.  As soon as they read a headline and recognize your Unique Selling Proposition, if they are interested in your product, they will recognize you.

4.  DO NOT USE ALL CAPS in your headlines.  It makes them much harder to read.  Use a combination of upper and lower case letters, just as you would to title an article or book.  An exception to this rule would be if you had a one word headline, such as "NEW!" but most of you won't need to go there.  Also, it's a good idea to put quotes around headlines.  People look at that as a universal sign that someone is talking to them, and it appears as if you are quoting someone.

5.  When writing headlines, every time you start a new project, you need to come with at least 100 headlines before you pick your final choice.  Writing 100 headlines gets you warmed up and lets you try different renditions of things before it goes into your marketing.  Save everything that you write.  You 2nd best headlines can be used as bullets and sub-heads in your ad copy later, so you don't have to re-write when you start getting to the body of the sales piece.