Marketing / Content Marketing

Grab your readers’ attention with effective marketing headlines

Laura Dolan

Updated: Sep 20, 2022 · 3 min read

Toolkit for download in this article

headlines that catch attention

Headlines that catch the attention of customers can enhance your email marketing, improve your landing page conversion rates, and boost metrics on your blog posts.

This is your chance to make a great first impression if the customer is just getting familiar with your brand via your website, landing pages, blog posts, and emails. You have to write something that entices them to come back for more.

It all starts with a headline that reflects robust content. Here are some attention-grabbing headline tips.

Put your whole story into one sentence

This is essentially what your headline is, a summary of what’s to come. Reducing your entire article into one sentence should be easy if you wrote a cohesive piece. If not, then maybe the rest of your article needs some reworking and condensing.

Don’t ever settle for a mediocre title and don’t be afraid to troubleshoot. Writing the perfect headline is rarely a one-and-done type of task. It can take as many times as you need to yield the most ideal summary of your article while packing a punch, compelling your audience to read beyond the title.

Keywords are key

Another thing that will help you is a keyword resource such as the Google AdWords Keyword Planner Tool. Find the top performing words in your article and generate the perfect title out of those, further optimizing your piece and ranking higher in an organic search.

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Strength in numbers

Numbers are very attractive in a headline. Statistically, odd numbers fewer than 10 or top 10 lists perform better in terms of SEO. Numbers in headlines can apply to emails, blog posts, or any other type of marketing.

If your content includes a list, steps or tips, definitely consider adding a number to your title reflecting that quantity.

Attention-grabbing headlines examples with lists include:

Show, don’t tell

What we mean by this is, there’s no shortage of adjectives that you can use to describe what your audience can expect just by reading your headline. Here are some adjectives conducive for marketing headlines:

  • beautiful
  • best
  • brilliant
  • epic
  • essential
  • excellent
  • fantastic
  • free
  • gorgeous
  • great
  • horrific
  • horrifying
  • important
  • killer
  • lousy
  • mind-blowing
  • most
  • persuasive
  • simple
  • successful
  • ultimate
  • useful
  • valuable

Attention-grabbing headlines examples with adjectives include:

Short and sweet

When writing your headline, less is always more. Google recommends 70 characters or fewer. Or if you prefer to think of it in terms of word count, 10 to 12 seem to perform the best.

For the record, the title of this article has 8 words and 64 characters. Sometimes you have to prioritize word count over character count. Will more words get the point across or fewer characters?

SEO experts say try to shoot for titles that have between 8 and 14 words.

Refresh your pages

Writing a marketing headline doesn’t just have to be applied to future content. Take this opportunity to refresh some preexisting articles on your site with some new titles and even headers and see if they perform any better.

A/B testing is also a great strategy to see what works and what doesn’t. Try it on some email subject lines and see which ones experience a better open rate.

Keeping these attention-grabbing headline tips in mind, you may see improvement in the performance of your content.

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