According to a Microsoft study, in the last 10 to 15 years the average attention span of a consumer has decreased to eight seconds. That’s less than a goldfish.
This is down four seconds or one-third since 2000, and the study says digital technology is largely to blame.
Smartphones and digital content aren’t going anywhere, though. As a team of journalists who specialize in content marketing, we’ll continue to deal with this challenge.
As people skim their web browser’s home page, Facebook and Twitter timelines, how do we capture attention and minds, and win the hearts and loyalty of consumers? With headlines, of course!
David Ogilvy said, “On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
With content marketing, once we’ve spent that eighty cents, we have to make sure we’ve created headlines that yield not only click-through rates (CTRs), but also engagement and conversion rates.
Outbrain and HubSpot recently published data giving us guidelines in each of these three areas when they examined more then 3.3 million paid link headlines from more than 100,000 publisher sites, from October 2013 through September 2014.
Eight key findings or tips when it comes to headlines:
(1) Keep headline length less than 140 characters for it to be tweetable and under 65 characters if you don’t want search engines to shorten it. CTRs are highest at 81-100 character headlines, but engagement and conversion are highest with 21-40 characters.
(2) Make sure call-to-actions are clear and relatively match the wording of your headline. If the headline prompted the reader to click on your post, don’t confuse them by rewording the call-to-action in the body of content.
(3) To optimize headlines for both social sharing and SEO, think about what search terms your audience might be using and work backwards from there. When SEO is the goal, cleverness or humor should take a backseat to strategic word choice.
(4) Put the most important words early on in your headline. “Content Marketing: How to capture more readers with catchy headlines” would work better than burying “content marketing” later in the headline.
(5) It’s all about bracketed clarifications. (e.g., Headline study [photos], [webinar], [infographic], etc.). Surprisingly the word “template” had highest CTR of all bracketed terms, followed by “quick tip,” “free download,” then “infographic,” in that order. 38% more people click through a headline when they know exactly what lies beneath.
(6) Couple the brackets with the word “amazing” and get 262% more page views per session (engagement).
(7) The third, and growing, goal of content marketing is conversions. That is, getting the reader to take some sort of action, whether that’s signing up for a newsletter or white paper, filling out a form for a quote and salesperson follow-up, or buying something. Couple a bracketed clarification with the word “need” for similar increased results with conversion.
(8) We’re simple creatures, and yet we’re a bit jaded from click-bait and spammy emails — it’s important to set up clear expectations within headlines, then deliver on those promises.
At Shift Key, we make communication capital. We are journalists who know how to create original content, the foundational layer of digital marketing. We understand audience and the information your audience wants – whether you are an agency, brand, company or non-profit. Content is the bedrock of digital marketing. Shift Key creates unique and informative content that feeds marketing activities across a mounting number of channels, generating buzz for brands and leads for products and services.