The Five Rules for Writing Irresistible Headlines

If your B2B digital marketing strategy includes content marketing (and it almost certainly should), you need to do what you can to get people to read what you publish. It’s tempting to put all your effort into the body copy of your blog posts, leaving the headline as an afterthought. However, you shouldn’t forget that headlines are the gateway to accessing your content and can affect open rates considerably. Your headline should intrigue readers enough to want to see more.

Think of your headline as a call to action. While over 80% of people will read a headline, only 20% will go on to read the content. If you’re ever going to hit the conversion rates you desire and fully maximise your investment in content marketing, avoid settling for “good enough” headlines that run the risk of failing to attract clicks.

What is it that sets a good headline apart from the rest? Let’s look at some tips to follow when it comes to consistently producing compelling headlines for content marketing that gets readers to look deeper.

1. Start With a Strong Adjective

How do you want readers to feel when they read your headline? Do you want to generate excitement? A sense of urgency? Curiousity? Do you want your readers to be angry or sympathetic?

Strong adjectives combined with a noun are an excellent way to accomplish the goals you came up with when planning your content.

Start your process by writing out a basic headline. Let’s say you’re writing a piece for a marketing strategy designed to showcase the benefits of stocking a new nutrition drink to gym owners.

New Nutrition Drink Could Boost Workouts

It’s accurate, but does little to engage the reader. We can modify this basic headline to do more to attract the business owners who might stock this drink for their clientele.

New Nutrition Drink Helps to Power Gym Workouts

Using contextual targeting through a more specific keyword in our title helps attract readers from a more specific customer segment. Now we’re attracting the attention of gym owners who may be on the lookout for something to help clients get through a session.

Our updated headline also promotes the idea behind the content without revealing all the details. We could make things even more enticing by upping the emotional quotient. Let’s try adding a stronger adjective at the beginning while keeping the spirit of the headline.

Exciting New Nutrition Drink Helps Power More Efficient Gym Workouts

We could keep tweaking this, but you get the idea. Our headline now addresses gym owners who provide fitness services and want to help clients gain more from their workouts. The emotional encouragement gets readers curious and prods them to dive deeper to learn more about the product.

However, adjectives will only do so much to help your headlines attract readers. A truly powerful headline will also demonstrate how they’ll benefit by investing time into reading your content.

2. Show Readers How They’ll Benefit

What’s in it for your readers? That’s what you need to keep in mind as you brainstorm headline formulas.

Understanding your market or audience is key to being able to speak directly to their needs. Think about who you’re writing for and create audience personae for each of the B2B segments you’re speaking to. Next, get ultra specific about what they should gain from your post, for example:

• Providing a solution to a problem

• Showing them how to make their life easier

• Answer a specific question

• Demonstrate how they can achieve a positive result

The easiest way to do that is to answer the essential W’s (and the H) when writing your headline:

• Who — are you writing for?

• What — issue are you trying to resolve?

• Where — is the reader located?

• When — does the reader need the answer?

• Why — is your article the right solution?

• How — will you help or inform the reader?

This wil help you to focus as you work to come up with more appealing headlines that connect to readers. Consumer segmentation helps you generate the phrasing that fits your marketing communications strategy and draw clicks from relevant B2B customers. Putting that kind of effort into your headline could make all the difference.

3. Add Numbers or Data

There’s a reason you see so many headlines with some form of number in the title. Headlines with numbers simply get more clicks. Numbers help to organise and quantify things for your reader. They define the amount of value they will get from reading your content.

You don’t have to go overboard. Go with a figure that’s large enough to cover your topic and that will be appealing to your audience's needs.For example, we deliberately let you know we would give you five different ways to improve your headline writing skills because we've assumed that you are a busy individual who appreciates actionable knowledge. Five represents a manageable number of easily scannable tips for you to take away and apply to your work today, without being overwhelming or too time consuming.

Numbers also help the writer by giving a piece a natural structure. It gives you a path to follow from start to finish, especially in articles where you’re looking to deliver a lot of information. That helps you avoid the trap of writing long blocks of text that lose the reader’s interest and causes them to bail without absorbing the meat of the content.

Let’s look at an example of how numbers make a difference in a headline when it comes to making the value of a product or service clear to readers.

Save £500 Each Month With These 5 Nifty Budgeting Tricks

By putting a monetary value in the title, we’re communicating a tangible benefit to our audience if they take the time to read the content. As above, quantifying the number of tips helps to simplify the proposition.

The number you use should showcase the highest level of benefit to your readers. Keep in mind that we’re hard-wired since childhood to equate bigger numbers with a higher value.

In this example, who wouldn't want to save more money?

So how could we boost the value appeal to readers while still staying true to the spirit of our content?

Save £6,000 Each Year With These 5 Nifty Budget Tricks

The only thing we did was multiply the value of what readers would gain per month by 12 to cover a year. That allows us to use a bigger number value of £6,000 in our headline, which jumps out more to the audience than £500 did.

4. Add Valuable Target Keywords

Our first three tips spoke about creating appealing headlines to engage our potential readers. Here, we’re more concerned about boosting the SEO value of our headlines so our content appears higher in the search results.

Using target keywords helps attract B2B customers searching for what you’re offering. Keyword research should be one of the first things you do before writing a single word of your content. They are important indicators of what matters to your target audience and tells you what those people are thinking of when it comes to a specific topic.

The more you understand your audience, the easier it should be for you to find the right keyword phrases. You don’t necessarily have to go for the most popular keywords. Niche keyword phrases offer less competition that could pay off over time.

There’s a delicate balancing act for creators when it comes to creating appealing headlines that are also optimised for search engines. You want them to fit nicely into alluring headlines that read naturally to audiences and do well in web searches.

Invest in a keyword tool that allows you to find popular keyword phrases with less competition. You should also study the keywords used by competitors to strengthen your position in that marketplace.

Ideally, your headline should be between 55 and 70 characters so they're not truncated on the search engine results page, and include at least one target keyword. You can optimise your headlines further by placing your keywords near the start and end of your headline so they are the first and last thing your reader sees when scanning their search results.

5. Don’t Lie to Your Audience

Be careful about falling into the headline trap of prioritising cleverness or catchiness over authenticity and accuracy. Your headlines make a promise to the audience that your content should honour. Delivering on your titles builds trust and helps establish loyalty from your target B2B customer base.

We could easily modify our previous example about the nutrition drink into the following:

ASTONISHING Miracle Nutrition Drink Gets You Bigger Muscles in 20 Minutes!

Look, we’ve got our strong adjectives, told people what we’re promoting, and added a number! So why wouldn’t we want to use this title?

Because no nutrition drink gives you big muscles in 20 minutes! Engaging in clickbait tactics only sets your reader up for a big letdown when they realise you’re not going to deliver on your title.

Keep the customer's experience in mind when coming up with headlines. No one likes to feel like they’ve been tricked.

It could get to the point where potential B2B partners begin actively avoiding headlines generated by your brand. You also run the risk of getting penalised by search engines and getting lower rankings. Building customer loyalty starts with being honest. It’s possible to create great headlines that don’t leave your readers feeling deceived.

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