Sales or sales leads don’t just happen.
Your customers need to have some emotional buy-in to what you are offering.
This sounds quite obvious and really simple, however, so few people get this right in their copywriting.
And the combination of getting the emotional trigger correct, a really well designed and developed landing page and a well qualified traffic source is like money in the bank for your business.
What Are The Most Important Elements on a Web Page?
This list is in no particular order by the way;-
- The visual design of the page – good visual design reduces your bounce rate (the rate at which people “bounce off the site on first seeing it)
- The design for usability of the page – is everything where the site visitor expects it to be – do they have to search for stuff?
- The placement of the most important elements on the page – what are the most important elements? Those that get you sales and leads of course
- The main heading on the page – is it customer focussed? Does it emotionally draw in the site visitor? Does it resonate with their needs?
- The page’s Call To Action – does it stand out from all other content on the page? Does it “draw” in the site visitor?
- The page’s distraction ratio – how many calls to action are there on the page? Do they conflict, confuse the site visitor or distract them from the main CTA?
- The page’s content layout – can the site visitor easily understand the message you are communicating without reading the whole article or does your page look too daunting and hence your superb content remain unread?
The above list looks daunting, however, if you break it down into simple terms it really isn’t so bad.
The main issues you will have – because everyone including OD has these issues – are as follows;-
- Limiting distraction – the need to remove as many irrelevant calls to action or links to other pages from the page as possible
- Crafting your main heading on the page in terms that truly “speak” to the needs of your site visitor
- Getting the call to action to resonate with the site visitor
- Keeping the design simple – less is more
Today we are going to focus on one of these items and that is crafting your main heading.
Get this wrong and you are very unlikely to get acceptable conversions from your page.
Why Is Your Main Headline So Important?
After the “visual” appeal of the page the main headline is the first thing most site visitors will focus on.
The facts suggest that people do read the headlines even if they do skim through the content on the page as most do.
Your main headline is commonly in a larger font size and positioned at the top of the page so it makes logical sense that this is what the average person will read first.
Get it right and they may read (or scan) on…. Get it wrong and you may have just added to your page’s bounce rate.
So How do we Construct a Main Headline that Encourages our Site Visitors to Read On?
Like most things there is no wrong or right way to go about this.
It depends upon your products and services and, more importantly, your prospective clients.
1. You Need to Understand Just Who Is Your Ideal Customer
We have talked previously about profiling your ideal target customer in this article – The Number 1 Thing You Must Know To Drive Your Marketing ROI.
What age are they? What is their demographic? What is their psychographic?
2. What Is Their Problem or Opportunity?
What is their problem or opportunity that your product or service addresses?
Notice I used the word “their”. Unlike a broken relationship it is always about them and never about you.
Firstly you must phrase your headline in words that restate or address their problem.
Let’s look at the headline for this article “The Killer Trigger That Makes For Content Marketing Success“.
My primary audience for this article is the person that is charged with actioning the marketing within a business (often a key recommender for services such as ours within that business).
They have experience with digital marketing and are pro-actively looking to improve their results.
The opportunity for them is to gain further insight into how a Digital Marketing specialist organisation such as Oracle Digital goes about article creation and lead generation.
3. What Angle Do You Take With Your Topic?
Research would tend to suggest that focussing on avoiding loss is the strongest driver to get your audience’s attention in a headline.
Perhaps we could have reworded our title to reflect the research along the lines of “Find Out Why Your Marketing Content Is Not Converting“.
Another trick is to integrate a numbered list into your title. This works very well indeed if you use it sparingly.
So another change to our title could be “The 5 Top Reasons Why Your Marketing Content is Not Converting“.
4. What About On Page SEO?
Ah, an old chestnut this one and one we were discussing in the office this morning as I am writing this article.
Better in these post Google Penguin, Panda and Hummingbird days though to call it on-page optimisation rather than SEO.
If you have done your research and data analysis correctly you should have a reservoir of keyword phrases that you can include in articles that you author.
Data Analysis will determine the importance of the keyword phrases based upon their historic search volumes.
If you are unaware of the importance of research and, specifically, Data Analysis then you should contact us and ask for more information as you could be leaving money in the pockets of your competitors right this minute.
In my opinion the article should NOT be written for the keyword phrase – the article should be written for your audience.
If you have done your Data Analysis correctly you will have access to a raft of keyword phrases that can be used to support the article.
In this case my keyword phrase is “content marketing“.
I have it in my title and it occurs naturally throughout this article.
In fact I have not tried consciously to insert that keyword phrase anywhere within the article and that is as it should be.
An SEO plugin (if you use a WordPress site) such as WordPress SEO by Yoast or All In One SEO Pack will allow you to test your page before publication to help you ensure your main keyword phrase has been used as per their expert guidelines.
Consistent use of your library of main keyword phrases may help you in increasing your site’s authority with Google over the long term and no doubt will gain you some organic traffic, although as I stated above, write the headings and the article for your audience and not specifically for Google.
One Last Thing On Writing Good Headlines and Copy
Before I leave you on this article to go and check out your own content I would like to provide you with access to a resource that will prove exceptionally helpful in this area.
Some of you may have heard about Robert Cialdini and his book – Influence The Psychology of Persuasion.
Dr. Robert B. Cialdini is the President of INFLUENCE AT WORK (IAW) and Arizona State University Regents’ Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University
He is also a New York Times Bestselling Business Author with his seminal work being “Influence The Psychology of Persuasion” – get it here and no this is not a sponsored link.
This is not new age “the universe will deliver” nor is it “intellectual ponderings” (not that I have anything against either of these per se).
It is solid background information that will help you to get into the minds of your clients to create headlines and text that positively influences the outcomes your require in your marketing.
Cialdini introduces the following factors in gaining influence;-
- Reciprocation,
- Consistency,
- Social Proof,
- Liking,
- Authority, and
- Scarcity
These are key items to consider in constructing your headlines in a manner that draws an appropriate response from your audience.
Want to learn more about this sort of information for your online marketing?