Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

It turns out longer is better—at least when it comes to writing headlines for branded content.

 

Branded content technology provider Polar analyzed a bunch of data provided by premium publishers, such as Oath and Gannett, to see how variation in headlines affected key performance indicators (KPIs).

 

It found that branded content headlines between 90 and 99 characters achieved a clickthrough rate (CTR) of 0.43%, higher than headlines with fewer characters.

 

The “more is better” theory also held true for the number of words included in a headline. Polar reported that headlines with 16 words garnered a CTR of 0.33%. By comparison, pithy headlines of just four words recorded an average CTR of less than half that, at just 0.14%.

 

Some other tips Polar gleaned from its work? Numbers and special characters also resulted in a bump in CTRs. So feel free to figure out how to squeeze an ampersand in there....

WhichTestWon encourages readers to guess which version of a page or ad performed better before they reveal the answer, and often the readers (mostly conversion optimizers) are quite evenly split. This time, 90% guessed that adding a small line of text to an ecommerce product page would increase sales. And, they were right.

So, despite the fact that almost all of these web marketers knew that the small change would help, very few websites actually use this approach.

So what was the powerful line of text?...

If you’ve looked at enough SaaS websites, you’ve probably noticed a bit of a theme: home pages designed to act as landing pages.

They have minimal top navigation. Or in some cases, they have none at all. Their intent is to get their visitors to take a very specific action – usually sign up for a free trial of a service.

For conversion purposes, they can be a dream come true. Having a page that funnels people directly from offer to customer means less steps in the website journey process for them to get lost.

At least, that’s what they’re designed to do – making them a desirable option for any business that wants it’s visitors to take one action on the page....

Headlines are more important now than they've ever been. According to research by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 51 percent of all U.S. online readers identified a compelling headline as the reason why they clicked on a given story.

The quality of the article's source was only responsible for motivating 37 percent of people to click. What that means for you, as a content marketer, is that the strength of your headline is responsible for whether or not the rest of your article gets read. You could have a landmark piece of research written in eloquent, captivating style, but without a strong headline to bring someone in, it won't matter.

These seven headline qualities will help you craft the great titles necessary to attract that initial traffic...

One crucial way to get more people to read your blog posts is by writing effective titles and headlines. But we know that's easier said than done -- which is why we teamed up with Market Domination Media to create the infographic below. Check it out to learn which words drive people to click on your content, engage with it, and convert into leads and customer. You'll also learn which title length is best for social, for search, for clickthrough rate, and for best post-click engagement....

The English language is old. Like, really old.

It’s old enough that its speakers use a good many idiomatic sayings that were thought up decades or even centuries ago, and that use words people don’t really say much anymore.

That can turn into a problem when those out-of-date words sound like other, much more common words. Especially if the sound-alike word makes a certain sort of sense in the context. Here’s the thing, though: It’s still wrong, even if it seems right....