Did the headline of this post intrigue you? According to research about what type of headlines get the most clicks and shares, it should have. That research is compiled in a PR Daily article of interest to any firm that produces client alerts, newsletters, blog posts, or other content for clients and prospective clients.
No need to go overboard—professional service firms don’t need to be Buzzfeed. But when crafting headlines for your content, it may help to remember that these five factors that professional service firms can, in most cases, easily apply to their headline-writing.
Did the headline of this post intrigue you?
1) Surprise
Our brains love novelty. The brain’s pleasure centers are more “turned on” when we experience unpredictable pleasant events, compared with expected pleasant events.
Surprises are more stimulating and will get our attention much more easily than things we already know well—even if we really like those things. We may subconsciously prefer an unpredictable experience over what we think we want.
One example of surprise would be the email subject lines of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Anyone who shared an address with the campaign got messages from Barack Obama with subject lines like “Hey,” “Wow,” or “Join me for dinner?”
2) Specificity
Specific, quantifiable facts—particularly those that evoke mental pictures—are intensely interesting. Figures imply research, which adds to your legitimacy, but all kinds of specificity are good: digits, names, descriptions, titles, examples, projections, results. Being specific also demonstrates that the article will be in depth.
3) Numbers
Numbers manage expectations for us—they tell us exactly what we’re getting into. That might be why a Conductor study found that audiences prefer number headlines to almost any other type.
4) Negatives
In a study of 65,000 headlines, Outbrain compared positive, negative, and no superlative headlines. The study found that headlines with positive superlatives performed 29 percent worse and headlines with negative superlatives performed 30 percent better. The average click-through rate on headlines with negative superlatives was 63 percent higher than positive ones.
5) Questions
Questions are powerful because they pique curiosity. Simply seeing a question mark stimulates your brain. If you already know what you’re going to get from a headline, your curiosity might be over before it can even start.