How Headlines Make or Break a Copy

If you ask professional copywriters how to attract eyeballs to your copy, one certain answer would be ‘Work on the headline and make it effective.’ Its amazing to know how a powerful headline can make your job easier by more than 50 percent to sell a copy. Alternatively, a poor headline can destroy your copy within seconds, which is the reason why most copies fail to produce results.

Founder of Ogilvy & Mather and a very prominent copywriter ‘David Ogilvy’, in his quote states “On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” Now can you imagine how crucial headlines are for your copy? As per the quote, four-fifth of the total expense you make on a copy is attributed to the headline, which is quite a stunning fact.

Knowing that its human tendency to read a copy top-to-down, it is quite understandable that readers would start going through your copy only if they find the headline interesting. The term ‘interesting’ here basically connotes “the solution”. If your headline promises to solve a reader’s query or problem, he is bound to read the copy at least once. This is the time your bodycopy comes into picture.

An essential quality in a copywriter must be to understand the reader’s psyche. Questions like:

• Who would be interested in reading my copy?
• What message would my copy communicate?
• Which medium would be used to market the copy?
• How should the tone of the language be set?
• Which are the keywords or key phrases that readers would look for in the copy?

These basic questions will help you know what needs to be included in the copy, following which the task for writing an effective headline would become much simpler.

However, even in spite of finding out answers to the above question, you are unable to write a powerful headline, all your efforts would go in vain as readers would not be able to link the content to the solution they need for their problem.

Remember, prospects are like fishes that are on a constant lookout for bait. Your headline would act as bait only when it is attractive enough for the fishes (prospects) to pounce on.