Is Your Headline Creative Enough?

When you only have at best a couple seconds to catch and keep someone’s attention on your Website, a good Home page headline is critical. What’s yours?

If it’s “Welcome to Our Site” you are definitely missing out. The best headlines identify the target market, promise a benefit they really want, and create enough curiosity to convince them to keep reading.

You don’t need or want to get creative with this. Because you don’t want prospects to have to think about your headline. You want them to understand right away how you can help them solve a problem, fill a want or achieve a goal.

Here’s a winner that’s anything but creative: “Corns gone in 5 days or your money back.”

In fact, it’s often best to use a proven headline as a template but change it to suit your products or services.

Take the well known headline selling piano lessons “They all laughed when I sat down at the piano…But when I started to play.” This could be tweaked for my Asian Cooking School client to “They all laughed when I invited them over for an authentic Thai feast…Then they tasted the food!”

How to Deliver an Effective Marketing Message

Get your message heard

Why is it so difficult for marketers to get their message to stand out? Although the marketplace is already overcrowded and is continuing to grow, it is possible for messages to be heard.

More SmallBusinessNewz Videos

As the above video points out, many marketers are focusing on the wrong thing. They are continuously trying to understand the consumer, which is a hard job. Instead, they should dedicate their time to understanding the consumer’s needs and how they can fulfill the task that the consumer wants completed.

Many marketers segment their target market into customer groups such as small businesses, moms, and homeowners. By doing this, they are taking the focus off of meeting needs, which could lead to failure. As a result, the marketing message blends in with all the other messages and is not heard.

Legendary Harvard Business School marketing professor Theodore Levitt once said, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!”

This same idea is true today. To have effective messaging, marketers need to take a knowledgeable approach. For this, they need to conduct research on sales and behaviors to see what prompts the customer to act. Not only does this information provide insights into the customer’s needs, it also allows marketers to better accommodate them.

An effective message should also build brand equity. Most of the tried and true brands that we all recognize today didn’t rise in popularity because they had fancy marketing messages. On the contrary, their messages simply stated what they could do.

While creativity plays an active role in messaging, marketers need to be careful since the message could be easily drowned out by too much creativity. A message should be simple and give consumers direction. Both these elements in turn build equity in the brand.

If you dwell on the crowded marketplace and all the competition it includes, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. If you instead, think about the specific needs that you are trying to meet and how it will create new opportunities, then you are on the right track for creating an effective marketing message.

More Businesses Hiring Workers

Recovery continues at slow pace

More businesses are hiring new employees than they are cutting jobs, according to a new survey from the National Association of Business Economics (NABE).

The percentage of firms increasing payrolls rose 31 percent in July, a significant increase compared to a year ago when only 6 percent were seeing hiring gains. The percentage of firms cutting jobs continued to move lower, from 36 percent a year ago to 14 percent this July.  The share of respondents expecting their firms to add employees over the coming six months rose to 39%, the highest level of hiring intentions since January 2008.

Expectations for economic growth in 2010 remained positive, though expectations declined slightly from the previous quarter. All NABE panelists again indicated business decisions are being made based on expectations for positive economic growth in 2010 (as measured by real GDP); however, only 20% of survey respondents believe real GDP will expand by more than 3% compared with 24% of survey respondents who expected that rate of growth in April. Sixty-seven percent of respondents still believe the economy will expand by more than 2.0% in 2010.

“NABE’s July 2010 Industry Survey confirms that the U.S. recovery continued through the second quarter, although at a slower pace than earlier in the year,” said William Strauss, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

“Industry demand increased for a fourth consecutive quarter, although at a slower pace. Price and cost pressures were contained, allowing profits to edge higher. The labor market continued to improve, with increases in current hiring and a rise in the percentage of firms planning to add workers over the next six months. Capital spending remained stable over the past year. Credit and debt issues in Europe will likely negatively impact just over a third of the surveyed firms over the next three months.”