How to write mind-blowing headlines

80% of the hard work in creating content is thinking of eye-catching headlines. This is because it is the first and possibly only chance you have to attract your audiences attention. A headline sets the tone of what your viewers can expect to read, builds trust and is crucial to the success of your content marketing strategy.

So how can you create the perfect headline?

Consider the length of your headlines

Well, HubSpot did the research and found out exactly what you need to know about headlines, including how long they should be. After all, you don’t want your headline to cut off due to lack of characters and show a word that is less than ideal. One example we saw was:

The original title: How to get your analytics on track
What the customer saw: How to get your anal…
See what we mean?

For future reference, here are the ideal character limits to make sure your headlines are getting seen the way you want them to.

For social: 117 characters or less so you can tweet it
For search engines: 65 characters or less and place the keywords near the front of the headline
For a higher clickthrough rate: 81 – 100 characters
For a higher post-click engagement percentage: 21 – 40 characters.

Choose your headlines based on your goals

After deciding what your content is for and agreeing on the length of a title, you need to consider what you want your headline to do. Do you want it to attract traffic, engage your website visitors or convert leads?

If you want it to attract attention you’ll find including a bracket category such as [Infographic] or [Video] at the end of your headline increases the clickthrough rate by approximately 38%. Including “photo” in the headline will show a 37% increase and the word “who” will show a 22% increase too.

If you are looking to improve your engagement, using the word “amazing” in your headline has shown to increase engagement by up to 262%. Again the word “photo” and adding a bracket category such as [Webinar] will also increase your engagement levels (59% and 14% respectively).

Finally, for converting visitors, the word to include in your headline is “need”. This can show up to a 171% increase on your conversions. The bracket category follows in second place with 112% increase for conversions.

So instead of creating content and throwing it into the internet, you may want to consider these points. If you are looking at targeting all three sections – attract, engagement and conversion – you will need something that can help you organise your content.

CommuniGators lead nurturing campaign is a 3-part email series that allows you to connect to each stage. We’ll take care of the deployment of the emails, all you need to do is think of the content you want to promote. This gives you plenty of time to focus on which headlines to use, and a more reliable way of boosting your content strategy results in each section.

CommuniGator is Iconic Digital’s chosen email partner – we use their platform to deliver email campaigns for our clients, with tracking, results and more. Take a look at their whitepaper on building an overperforming sales team.