Take any famous ad, and look at it with your eyes blurry. That’s really how people see your advertisements.
Most people are not paying that much attention.
Those commercials for Dial soap, magazine ads for Ford trucks, Facebook ads for student loans, these are things most normal people don’t spend a huge amount of time looking at.
The primary nature of a headline is to get your viewers sucked into your ad/article in the first place.
The famous copywriter Joseph Sugarman would always say the job of a headline was to act like “A slippery slope” in which the person would be:
- 1st sucked in by the headline
- …. then sucked in by the 2nd line
- ……..then sucked in by the 3rd line
- …………and so forth.
One of the main creators of PayPal, Elon Musk, talks about how the initial idea of PayPal didn’t catch on very well. Every time he would tell someone about it, they wouldn’t get excited.
Great ad headlines are like the flashy displays you see in store windows every day. They’re there to stop you in your tracks, make you picture yourself owning whatever it is they’re selling, and force you to cross the psychological threshold and walk into the store to buy it.
Here are a few tips to help you write ad headlines your prospects simply won’t be able to resist clicking
Ask questions
Leveraging user intent is crucial to increasing conversion rates. One way to do this is by asking the searcher a question with your headline.
Solve prospects’ problems
People don’t want to buy “things” – they want to solve their problems. PPC ad headlines that create the perception that your product or service can help them do that are much more clickable than those that don’t.
Add a little humour
Advertisers often pay close attention to the types of ads their competitors are running. Unfortunately, prospects often don’t – all they see are dozens of ads that all look and sound the same.
Include numbers or statistics
Many users respond well to experiential evidence. Hard data can be a trust signal, and it can plant the seed of trustworthiness in the mind of your prospect. This is why McDonald’s uses its “Billions and billions sold” slogan on its signage.
Use empathy
As well as wanting to solve their problems, people want to know that somebody else understands what they’re going through. This is what makes empathy such a powerful technique in the best ad headlines.
Focus on the benefits
Similarly, to write PPC ad headlines with user intent in mind, remember that people want to know how choosing your product or service will benefit them.
A headline is the only impression you can make on an Internet surfer that can turn them into a potential reader. This is why it is so critical to creating headlines that will grab the attention of the audience you are trying to reach.
With the amount of content being pumped out onto the web, the average Internet surfer will read 80% of headlines, but only 20% of those surfers will read the whole content. Therefore, you should spend just as much time crafting a solid, strategic headline as you do on the content within the piece.
