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Heck yes, you need to write better headlines: here’s how and why

By Patrick Gant

Pay more attention to headlines in what you do.

Sure, you might be tempted to say “but I don’t write headlines in my work.”

Oh yes you do.

Ever find yourself needing to send an email but struggle to get readers to respond or to take some kind of action? Do you do analytical work that involves creating in-depth reports? Maybe you’re trying to find a stronger hook for your fundraising letter. Or maybe you’re looking at ways to get better at giving presentations that connect with people.

These are just a few examples where headlines can be valuable. We just don’t often think of them that way.

With email, we call it “coming up with a good subject line.” With reports and presentations, we ask ourselves “how can I cover all these complicated ideas in a way that doesn’t lose the reader?” See my point? Part of a headline’s power is its ability to compress an idea.

Sure, a great headline can attract attention (a practice that was alive and well 2,000 years ago in Rome when the first gazette, Acta Diurna, couched hard news with salacious stories).

But what they really do is give your reader a good reason to keep reading.

David Ogilvy—the true original MadMan of advertising—once said that “on the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”

He wasn’t kidding about that last part. Even in my own work, I spend an inordinate amount of time crafting and refining headlines and subheadings, because it’s “the ticket on the meat” (another Ogilvyism).

Why does it matter so much? Because as I like to regularly remind: people are busy.

We live in a world now where the thing that is most scarce is audience attention.

You have to earn it and keep earning it. With that in mind, here’s what I know about how you can write better headlines that will help you keep earning those readers and find more homes for those ideas you want to share.

Make friends with action verbs
Cut out the fluffy features behind your idea until you’re left with a raw verb that describes what it can do for the reader (e.g., “Do…Grow…Make…Get…Take…Expand…”). It might not seem stylish to use them, but action verbs never get dull and they deliver the goods on answering that one question every reader has: “what’s in it for me to keep reading?”

Be more specific
Boring writing happens when you don’t know where you want the reader to look. As fiction writer Nancy Hale tells us: “The more specific you are, the more universal you are.” That applies to more than just fiction. Headline writing is compressed storytelling. And that’s something you can apply to any business. Find the glowing core in your story.

“How to” is your BFF
Veterans of advertising copy will tell you that you can’t write a bad headline that starts with “how to” (see what I did in the subject line of this email?) Granted, this is more relevant to email subject lines and presentation copy, but never say never when it comes to creating a surprising header even in dense analytical reports. I’ve seen it done.

But say no to link bait
You might think it’s tempting to mimic the linkbait strategies of Buzzfeed and others who peddle McContent (e.g., “You’ll never believe what happened next…” or “Seven ways to do X”). But don’t do it. That’s a race to the bottom and one that’s become so common now that readers are wise to the game. No amount of link baited traffic is going to erase the impression that you’ve snookered your audience into reading something that just wasn’t all that good or memorable. Your best ideas and your readers deserve better than that.

Do the unexpected
“State the opposite, not the obvious.” That’s what Sam Horn says in her book “Pop! Stand Out in Any Crowd.” Sometimes the best way to present an idea is to turn it inside out and say something that goes against conventional wisdom. Often that’s where real insight lives. Longtime CreativeBoost readers know that I’m quite fond of that particular strategy.

Yummy, tasty morsels
Break your ideas up into smaller ones. Assign a subheading to each one. Notice how I do that with by blog posts and newsletter? It’s a great way reward your readers for their attention and to honour their time. The trick is make it look like it’s not work to read things all the way though.

Hey, much like what you just did! See how that happened?

Belief, bias & rules

By Patrick Gant

Back in 2001, when I first set up my writing business, here’s a small sample of what was common advice at the time.

You must have an office in an office park, otherwise you’re not a real business.
You must have a fax machine. And a separate land line. Otherwise people won’t take you seriously.
It’s okay if your website is nothing but static content on cheap hosting. You’re going to do most of your direct marketing in person, through mail or by phone anyway.
You must accept lengthy terms of payment well in excess of 30 days and always by cheque, otherwise you’ll seem difficult to work with.
You need to have in-house staff and have a wide range of services to offer, otherwise you’re just a freelancer.

Belief and bias about a “one right way” to structure and run a business comes from what people think is true, until it’s not.

More often, these notions are a by-product of habit and sometimes even of a self-insulating arrogance about the world. This is how rules (especially unwritten ones) propagate.

Rules are not facts. Rather, they are subject to change by deeper, rarer truths about what your market expects and wants and needs.

You can choose to buy in to the mythologies of others. Or you can make your own.

Either way, the rules that you choose to adopt are going to serve you and your customers best when they show the value of what you do, rather than just adhere to someone else’s idea about how the work needs to get done.

Be real: the importance of authenticity in what you say

By Patrick Gant

Photo: i'll make ya famous by Roof Topper

Photo by Roof Topper on 500px

Organizations of all sizes in both the private and public sectors are working harder than ever today to be more service focussed.

That includes the messages they develop when communicating directly with customers and clients.

It’s rooted in good intentions.

But far too often, people fall short in delivering on what ought to be the underlying promise of good service: being useful and authentic.

“Have you found everything you’re looking for?” I’ll bet you’ve been asked that countless times at the checkout counter at a chain store. I hear that question so often now that I answer “yes” almost like an involuntary reflex…even in cases where, in fact, I haven’t found everything I was looking for.

I’ll bet you’ve done the same thing.

What’s worse is when you instead say “no” and it quickly becomes apparent that the person who cheerfully asked you that question in the first place hasn’t a clue what to do when someone indicates they actually have not found all that they were looking for.

Efforts at being useful stop being meaningful when they’re perceived as something that people have to do rather than want to do.

Too often, businesses get too caught up trying to turn good service into a process: a series of methodical steps that everyone is expected to follow on every transaction.

There are two problems with that approach. First, processes are designed to give you identical results every time. Sure, we all like to see consistent good service, but the real test of that kind of promise takes place when things aren’t working the way they should.

What do you do when that customer hasn’t found what they were looking for, or something in your transaction hasn’t gone the way that it should? Your next step there matters far more than adhering to any kind of process.

If all you have to rely on is a batch of template messages, your customers or clients will tune into this faster than you’ll ever anticipate.

They will become conditioned to ignore what you’re saying.

The second problem is that processes strip away the kind of sincerity that you ought to be building with your clients and customers.

People like to be made to feel special.

They like it when you notice things before you even have to ask. And they’re far more likely to respond in kind when you demonstrate with actions that service is something you work hard at providing, rather than just repeating something that you’ve been told to say.

There’s no substitute for being real.

What John Coltrane can teach you about building your audience

By Patrick Gant

John Coltrane

No, don’t do that. Don’t run away.

Don’t let it scare you that I just name-dropped one of the giants of jazz.

Or that Coltrane’s music seemed complicated.

This post isn’t going to preach jazz to you. And the jazz police aren’t going to show up and arrest me for having the gall to use America’s finest art form as a platform to illustrate an important point about the power of audience building.

There’s valuable insight in here even if jazz isn’t your thing.

As a reader of thinkit creative, you could be here looking for advice on search-engine optimized writing for the web to generate online traffic and convert readers into buyers. Maybe you’re a writer looking to build a base of readers. Or perhaps you’re a professional speaker or you own a design studio and you’re looking to take your business to the next level of profitability.

Odds are good that you’re in the idea business. And that means your success hinges on finding and building an audience.

John Coltrane can help you with that.

Discipline

Even this giant of music started without an audience.

As a young musician, John Coltrane loved how saxophonist Charlie Parker wasn’t afraid to be playful with his music.

He emulated what he heard. Not as a cheap cut-and-paster of style.

Rather, his drive to decode Parker and other influential players became part of young Coltrane’s relentless practicing. Biographies on the man often quote fellow musicians who knew him early on, saying they’d never seen anyone put in the hours the way Coltrane did.

Out of the hours came the admirers. From the admirers came the listeners. And then the big breaks, like when he was invited to tour with the first time. Then the audience took hold and the Coltrane legend grew. It’s hard to imagine any of that happening in Trane’s career without the roots of discipline being as strong as they were.

Intuition

“Jazz…is a social music operating in a commercial context,” says Ben Ratliff of The New York Times in his book Coltrane: The Story of a Sound. “You give the audience what you think it wants. At the same time, you improvise, and try to bring out the part of you that is the least like anyone else.”

Groundbreaking ideas rarely find their audience quickly. It starts with thinking deeply about your audience and having as much of an understanding of what they want as what they might also be open to. Research will help you, but only up to a certain point.

Intuition goes well beyond calculating a market penetration or measuring the size of an audience. There’s a deeper art. And you only get to exercise that by trying and by experimenting based on a mix of what you know is true and on a hunch you have about what might be true.

Taste

Coltrane learned the hard way early on that masterful technique alone doesn’t win many ears. In fact, more than one audience in his career booed him for doing just that. He learned that ideas—especially the big ideas—have to be presented in a way that are pleasing to others. Often that means taking the time to package your ideas attractively.

One of Coltrane’s great achievements in the American songbook is what he did with his interpretation of the Rogers and Hammerstein classic show tune, My Favorite Things. The music says more than I can say in paragraphs about that. So have a listen.

Platform

To find and build an audience, your idea or your message needs a platform. My Favorite Things was a platform for Coltrane that helped him bring big-headed jazz to a wider audience. So what’s your platform? It can be a blog, an ebook, a series of newsletter articles, or a presentation (to name just a few examples). Invest the time to design that platform properly. Hire a good designer who can help you build something that people will enjoy using. That’s the front door. It’s how you’re going to invite your audience in so that they’ll stick around and see what else you have to say.

Mastery of any creative skill only comes from finding good influences and by putting in the hours to hone your skills. Work to emulate. This is how you learn how great ideas are constructed. Only then can your own voice emerge. Take chances and find ways to build entranceways for people to access even your edgy ideas with relative ease.

What you can learn from Budweiser’s Super Bowl ad

By Patrick Gant

In case you haven’t seen it yet, Budweiser’s Super Bowl ad—slated to run only on the Canadian broadcast of the main event—has gone viral in a big way online.

Here’s the setup.

Two amateur Canadian hockey teams think they’ve been invited to be part of a documentary. Instead they’re treated to a mega flash-mob and get to live out what every kid who plays hockey (or any sport, really) dreams of.

It closes with “Good times are waiting. Why not grab some buds.”

A lot of people have liked it on Facebook, tweeted it and +1’d it on Google+.

You don’t have to enjoy beer or hockey to connect with the message behind the ad. [Read more…]