Don't Waste A Dime on the Wrong Headline!If the headline's no good, the rest gets ignored. Make your headlines powerful and newsworthy. Make your headline stand out from the pack in all your promotion and advertising. (Shel Horowitz's Frugal Marketing Tip, May, 1999) One of the great copywriting mistakes business owners make is to think the customer cares about you or your company or your product. They care about how whatever it is you're offering can help them achieve a goal or solve a problem. Compare the attention-getting headline above with this weak one: How to Write Press Release Headlines That Get Results It's true whether you're talking about ads or Internet postings or press releases or any other kind of medium that uses (or could use) a headline. Here's a concrete and self-serving example: If you want to learn ten different factors to make sure your copywriting attracts attention, maintains interest, creates desire, and builds toward action on the part of the reader/viewer/ visitor—in other words, if you want to learn how to make all your advertising and promotional material do more work and achieve more sales results for the same or less money—you should read the chapter on copywriting in my book, Marketing Without Megabucks: How to Sell Anything on a Shoestring. Now wasn't that more of an interest tickler than if I'd said, "Buy my book, Marketing Without Megabucks: How to Sell Anything on a Shoestring, to learn copywriting secrets." What do you care about secrets? If I can turn those secrets into profits, then you've got a reason to be interested. The same holds true of any kind of copywriting, but the rules are different in different media. In this tip, we'll focus on press releases. Benefits by themselves are not enough. It has to be a benefit for the targeted reader/visitor. In an apparently noncommercial setting such as an Internet discussion group or a press release going out to major print media, anyone who shrilly cries, BUY MY WIDGET! will either be ignored or booted off the podium. Yet the same person could turn around and say, "In response to the problem you're having with hydraulics, you might want to investigate My Widget, which is designed to address this exact problem. You can read more about it at http://www_______" Such an approach would probably be welcomed—if it's on a list of industrial process control people! Wouldn't be warmly received on a list of Internet marketers, because the audience, the mission, is wrong. In press releases, the further challenge, in addition to identifying both the right audience and the strongest benefits, is to avoid sounding either too salesy or too boring. About half my clients are publishers, and many of them are amazed that my headlines almost never start "New Book Tells..." That's because publishing a book is NOT news! It happens 50,000 times a year just in the US. For those of you not in the book industry, bear with me. I'm going to use publishing promotion as an example, and the same principles hold true in any business. Here are some press release headlines I've written for books—obviously their tone differs depending on the audience. Note that only one of them even uses the word "book", and it's the last word of a 20-word headline: No-Drug, Non-Surgical M.D. Recommended Saline Treatment Holds Out Hope for 35 Million Suffering Americans with Chronic Sinus Infections It's 10 O'Clock-Do You Know Where Your Credit History Is? Understanding VAT can be the Difference Between Success and Failure for Companies Doing Business in Europe Success in the BUSINESS End of Massage and Bodywork: A New Resource Helps Take Away the Gamble Do-It-Yourself Funerals Let Families Part With Loved Ones in Their Own Way Family Members who Care for Alzheimer's and Dementia Patients Will Learn Practical Tools and Strategies from This Important New Book Norman Rockwell Retrospective Aids Vermont Tour Planning For Those who Mourn The Death of a Spouse: Help and Consolation The Romance Game: Rules You Won't Find in "The Rules" Training "Heretic" Says Even Busy People Can Achieve Drug-Free, No-Bull Bodybuilding Success—In Just Two 60-90-Minute Workouts Per Week Similarly, if you're opening a new website or brick-and-mortar retail outlet, that you've opened is not a news angle, though it might get you a small squib. That you can solve the problem of ad tracking by town isn't even good enough. That your website enables an advertiser to select with pinpoint accuracy a banner that displays exactly to those on a certain block in Los Angeles, through a technology that definitively identifies the location of the originating telephone—and thus allows the advertiser to display a message offering 2 for 1 pizza just to those residents—that's the core! If it's a brick-and-mortar store, the angle might be convenience: a local outlet for a product that's only been available by catalog, and now the customer can touch and taste it before ordering. Over and over again, I see so much marketing wasted, so many dollars poured down the drain! They target the wrong audience, with wimpy copy focused on "aren't we great" instead of "this is how I can help you achieve your goal," use the wrong media, or put out a message that doesn't work in the medium. It's really sad—if you're going to pour so much money down the toilet, why not just give it to a world hunger organization and let it feed starving children. By the way, this issue marks the beginning of our third year! A 25th issue feels like a milestone. Discuss your next marketing project with the affordable master of Low-Cost, High Return Marketing, internationally known copywriter Shel Horowitz, 413-586-2388. Shel's website, http://www.frugalfun.com, features over 500 pages of free money-saving advice. Thank you reading this back issue of Shel Horowitz's Monthly Frugal Marketing Tips, published every month since May, 1997; please click here to view the complete archives, grouped by subject. Shel is an internationally known copywriter and marketing consultant, author of Grassroots Marketing Getting Noticed in a Noisy World, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First and several other books, and creator of the Frugal Marketing web site. Please click here to contact Shel.
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