How To Create An Actionable Headline For Your Marketing Campaign

Let me ask you a quick question- What makes you click on an article you see online?

The headline, right?

Only 20% of people who read your headline will check out your entire piece. 

Well, it’s quite obvious that with the fast-paced marketing world, this percentage is going to decline even more. Why? The internet is becoming more saturated because of the excessive addition of content with every passing day. 

So how do you keep up and make your marketing campaign successful?

The first thing that you need to concentrate on is your headline. After all, it’s your headline that will compel people to read your content, right? However, creating attention-grabbing headlines for each piece you write isn’t a piece of cake. 

You need to follow a smart approach in order to create compelling headlines without messing with its meaning. 

In this article, we’ll go through a few steps that you need to take to come up with creative, as well as compelling headlines.

5 Easy Steps for Creating an Actionable Headline

Step 1: Start with an Idea in Mind

To come up with a catchy headline even before writing the piece can be a little tricky. 

Have an idea in mind regarding the topic and create a rough headline that is enough for you to understand the context and proceed with content. 

For example, for this article, I created a rough headline that stated: “Steps To Create Great Headlines.” 

Although the headline is not even a bit compelling, just a reflection of what message I wanted to convey to my readers for my content. 

You can also create a rough headline and then proceed with the next step.

Step 2: Create Some More Headlines

Now that you know what your content is going to be about and you have a vision for it, it’s time to proceed with your piece.

Once you get it done, you must have got many more creative ideas popping up in your mind. And so you need to write all those ideas or headlines on a paper.

Writer about 15-20 headlines that you think can go with your content. Moreover, these headlines won’t get wasted. You can use these headlines later for your future pieces. 

Also, you can use these headlines for other places where your content is going to be mentioned. 

For example, you can use one for your email marketing campaign and one while republishing your content on some other platform.

Step 3: Use Trigger Words or Phrases

Words can make a great difference, especially when used in the right place. 

Whether you need people to rear your content or perform a specific action, it’s the right use of words that are going to help you out. 

Right words can get your audience from ‘what the heck’ to ‘I need to read it.’

But to bridge this gap, you need the right word, aka trigger words. Words can create a sense of curiosity in the audience and then finally make them click your headline. 

However, using trigger words at first can seem difficult, but with the time, you’ll understand what words trigger your target audience the most. 

Some examples of headlines with trigger words are:

• 25 Underutilized Ways To Make Money Online.
• 11 Hacks To Grow Your Email List in a Month.
• How I got 10K followers on Instagram in a month? (And you can do it too!)

You can see that all the headlines mentioned above create a sense of curiosity, which ultimately makes the audience read your content.

Step 4: Check Your Headline Score

One of the most popular tools related to headlines is CoSchedule’s headline analyzer. 

It is a free tool that analyzes your headline and scores it under 100 on its ability to gain social shares, get clicked, and SEO value. 

The tool can be of great help when it comes to finalizing the final headline among all the 15-20 headlines you created.

The tool analyzes your headline on the basis of the following factors:

• Word balance
• Length analysis
• Headline type
• Keywords and sentiment

I personally try to keep a score of more than 70. However, it’s on you to decide what score you want. Here more is better.

Step 5: Test it!

So you’ve successfully completed all the previous levels. Congratulations!

And now comes the last level- testing your headline.

Yes, you can go without the one you finalized without testing it, but I recommend testing it to get the best results. 

Well, now you might think about how someone can test a headline without publishing the content? You can if you’re a WordPress user. WordPress provides users with a few tools that can be used for testing purposes. 

Also, if you’re creating a headline for your newsletter, most of the email marketing software provides users with A/B Testing feature. 

Though which you can check which headline is getting the best open rates. So, as a top Mobile App Development should take these things into account. 

Pro-Tip

You can also spy on your competitors to check what kind of headlines are working the best for their marketing campaign. 

Tools like BuzzSumo can help you in this case. It will provide you with a list of most popular articles or posts from your competition websites. 

To Wrap Up

Be it search engine ranking or click-through rates; headlines are imperative for making your content reach your audience and touch the right chords. 

However, many of the marketers create click baits for getting more click-through rates, but that won’t take you long. 

Search engines are smart enough to analyze how much time does your audience spends on your content. 

At first, you may get a lot of attention because of your compelling headline but doesn’t guarantee they will stick to it for long. 

If search engine bots discover that your visitors are instantly clicking the exit button, they will start to decrease your rankings. 

So the best way to create headlines that get clicked is by writing compelling ones with the right words and analyze them properly. 

In this way, you’ll allow search engines to rank you higher and your audience to read the full piece.