How One Sentence Can Make or Break Any Advertisement

In this article, I am going to tell you how to eliminate one of the most common mistakes I see when working with clients who are struggling to see a positive return on their marketing.  

Just by refining a single line in your ad, you can transform your marketing budget from an expense into an investment. 

There are a lot of moving parts to an ad however let's focus on the most important part. That without question will determine if your advertising will do what it’s supposed to do; get new clients.  

What is your ad's most important part, and how do you make it work? 

It’s the headline! This fundamental building block is necessary for everything to work. Any other part doesn’t matter If you don’t have a good headline. What your headline says and how it says it are absolutely critical. 

If you come up with the world's greatest ad but give it a mediocre headline. It won’t perform... Now take the inverse If you write a mediocre advertisement but pair it with an exceptional headline, it will perform remarkably well. 

A headline is like the first message in a conversation that compels someone to respond—it should drive curiosity and catch attention, without necessarily needing to be clever or educational.  

It’s also the simplest, making it very easy to overcomplicate. You can make or break any ad based on your headline. It determines if they’re going to read what you wrote. You have a split second to make an impression or they are gone.     

How will I know my headline will work?  

A simple test I learned from the great Dan Kennedy was taking my headlines and asking “Would this headline and offer alone prompt a response?” 

This method checks if your headline can grab attention and get a reaction just by itself. This is a solid checkup that doesn’t require you to be a pro writer.  

Obviously, there are exceptions and it won't work for every product or service. It needs to answer the question. Why should I pay attention? The emphasis should be on the benefit that your clients are looking for. To help with this ask yourself what are you going to feature in the headline. Price? Guarantee? Promise statement?       

Move the plot forward.  

You know the old saying "The elephant in the room"? You want to address that immediately but where most people fail at this is they give away the solution immediately. Keep the cat in the bag or the elephant for this matter. The key here is to create a hook that addresses a desired benefit without necessarily giving away the solutions you offer.   

You want to continually build interest and create a strong urge for the prospect to keep reading. One of the most important parts of my job is survival getting someone to move on from headline all the way downstream to the call to action.      

Hopefully, you got some value out of this article and can implement these tricks into your advertisements. If you still struggle to come up with a good and engaging headline for your ads, feel free to reach out by clicking the button below and I will send you my 10 proven, tested, and repetitively successful headline formulas that you can use in your advertising.

Contact