Headlines are most important thing in an advertisement. It can make or break your advertisement. It doesn’t matter how good your body copy is. If your advertisement’s headline doesn’t sell, then good luck with spending millions on your body copy and it still wouldn’t sell your products or services or attract customers. Why does your headline matter so much? Read along the article so you know everything.
The reason for running advertisement
The reason for running advertisements is let people know some changes you have done, or you want to sell your product or service or make people intrigued about something. These are core reasons for running advertisemets. Now you are running advertisements is because you want more engagement for which you are running advertisements. If you didn’t then you would have just sat there and let thing may be sort it out for you. But you want it quick that is why you are running advertisements.
Fighting for attention
To get better engagements, you write better advertisements. You write better headline, better illustrations, and better body copy. It doesn’t matter how good you write your body copy; people won’t pay attention to it, and you won’t get any engagement if your headline does not catch their attention in a split second.
On average, an average person sees 10,000 advertisements per day. 10,000 ads are lot of ads. And guess what, on how many ads does an average person acts on or takes action? Maybe two or three. He doesn’t take action on all those 10,000 advertisements. Why? Because they didn’t catch his attention on a split second. If you are running an advertisement, it doesn’t matter what sector, what industry you are in, you are competing with other thousands of advertisings. Now you must do something to catch viewers’ attention and make it take action in split second of him noticing your advertisement.
Headline is the savior for your advertisement
Now you might wonder how you do that? How to catch viewers’ attention? You do it from headline. You see, when people see anything, they first read its headline. In newspaper, people first read its headline and if it interesting enough then they will read rest of the article. If headline doesn’t make them curious then they don’t other look at anything else and they have way to turn two pages quickly.
Your headline is like hook of fisherman. It should hook its viewers in first go and make them curious or interested so they will read rest of advertisements. The more they read, more they find out and more they are likely to buy from you then.
For example, if you are selling lights then writing headline like “We will light up your world”, will not sell any of your products. Why? Because headline doesn’t tell customers as what specifically you are selling. People who are looking for lights, they won’t be able to understand what you are trying to sell. Instead try “We sell lights here”. Its basic yet hundred times better than previous one because now customers at least know what you are selling. People who are looking for lights will come to you by reading your headline as they won’t be confused as they were with your previous headline. Advertising has very old history. Let’s see how people used to advertise in 1900s.
This advertising will increase your viewers
Advertisers in past used very different type of advertising. You will think as was it effective? Did they that many viewers, readers? Yes, those advertisements got great readerships. They attracted lot of readers. Sometimes even 500% of original target. So, what were they used to do?
Before that, let me give you one secret headline that I guarantee that will get more readership. And that headline is “SEX”. I guarantee that this headline will give you more attraction for your advertisements from people. I mean why not. It is the thing that all humans enjoy and have desires for it. But it didn’t give you right type of readers.
What kind of advertisements did they run
In 1900s, they did all the experiments about such advertisements. They run such advertisements often to see that does it really work. Advertisements including naked actors, about sex and similar sorts. And let me tell you what, they all did great job. They got so much attention and readerships. Example of such advertisements is given below. Yes, you would definitely pay attention to such advertisements. I mean why not, they include pretty things to look at.
Those advertisements were pretty to look at. But why did they stop such ads? Ads that would get five to ten times, sometimes 20 times more readership than an average ad they would run. They didn’t stop running such advertisements. They still run them but at lesser extent.
What was wrong with such advertisements
Even after they brough five to ten times more readership than an average as they would run? It’s because there was no right readership. It means that advertisements attracted all kind of people. But brands only wanted to attract right type of people who are interested in product and would buy it. They attracted people who are not interested in buying or trying the product.
Running right type of advertisements
So, when did they stop such advertisements? They stopped such ads in 2000s. Yes, readership was high, but it didn’t mean they were getting right people to read or see their ads. Anyone who was interested in looking at such girls were seeing their ads. But what were they selling? They were selling an actual product, not pretty girls. People only saw pretty girls in such advertisements.
For example, they were selling cars. People who were interested in cars are the right eyeballs they want to grab. Not everyone in pretty girls. They only want people who are interested in cars. So makes sense to stop such ads. You can see example of such ads.
Then they actually, made them about cars so its effective to grab right eyeballs.