One of the most powerful things that you can do when advertising is to test different headlines. There’s an old saying in advertising and that is that the headline is the advert for the advert. In a modern digital marketing world the headline is the advert for the webpage. It’s the advert for the blog post. It’s an advert for the social media post and for the email. Insured headlines are incredibly powerful.
Changing, or testing headlines can often play a significant part in changing the results that you get from your marketing and I have known changing a headline to double, or triple response rates.
On one occasion I was asked by a new client to take a look at an advert that they’ve been using on the back of a glossy magazine.
The magazine went out every month to 30,000 people within the public sector and it was advertising the fantastic waste recycling machine the automated process. The headline they were using was the name of the company which apparently no one has ever heard of because they were a Spanish company who just moved to the UK.
When I asked them why they’ve used the company name they responded – to increase our brand awareness.
The advert was costing them £2,000 per month to run and they had been running it for six months and so in total, so the spend was £12,000 with zero leads.
I suggested to them that they can either focus on brand awareness or only generation and I ask them which they’d like to spend their money on. They responded with lead generation.
I then spent 10 minutes changing the headline and the following month they made £5,000,000 in sales from selling two machines and getting five leads from the advert.
Not a bad return on investment on 10 minutes of my time and changing seven words on a headline. Something to think about?
The truth is that often businesses give up when they are just a few small tweaks away from that pot of gold!
I should’ve charged them a commission, don’t you think?