Writing Perfect Marketing Headlines

We won’t bury the headline for this episode—because that’s how important headlines are. Unfortunately, they’re often overlooked and underrated in digital marketing. We’ll help you craft more effective headlines with a few ideas and suggestions.

We don’t want to bury the headline, so that’s exactly what we’re talking about. Whether its a website or an email, we spend ages on design and body copy—only to mail in the headline at the last minute. But often, that should be the first thing we think about and refine.

Headlines are underrated.

• People judge books by their covers. Your headline is your cover.
• People shouldn’t just read news headlines, but too often they do
• This is the first thing people encounter and helps them decide if they should keep going
• Writing good headlines means being able to summarize what you mean.
• Don’t just write headlines by default.

What do we mean by headlines?

• Not necessarily news headlines; although use that same idea.
• Blog post titles
• Email subject lines
• Video & podcast episode titles
• Ad taglines
• Book title (& subject line)

7 Headline writing tips

• Write about 5-6 options.
• There are templates and patterns you can follow.
• Use a tool like Headline Analyzer
• Snip good examples you find in the wild and collect for inspiration
• You get better with practice. Spend as much time as you do on the blog post.
• Use bold words that are action-oriented
• Clarity is better than brevity. You can be longer to include context.