The 4 U's of headline generation

It all starts with the headline. It is an incredibly important thing that you need to get right in digital marketing, whether you’re doing social media, content marketing, writing articles or blogs for a website. The Headline is a very important feature to get right.

From working with thousands of marketers over their journey, I can tell you that marketers generally don’t put enough work or emphasis into their headlines and this course is all about helping you generate sharper and eye-catching headlines.

Before I start, I want to look into a research about why it is so important. This stat here from convince&convert says 35% of email recipients open emails by reading its subject only. 

I must admit, looking at my email habit, I’m looking through the sender  and I’m also looking at the email headline to know whether or not I’m actually going to open that email.

This headline from Forbes talks about headlines; 59% of you will share this article without even reading it. A lot of people are guilty of that. They actually review the headline and share it. You know what, I can not waste my time reading this, I will just send it to someone else and they can read it for me and maybe we’ll have a chat about it. 

I must admit, I probably have been caught out a couple of times doing that over the journey. Just before we get into any tool or techniques on how to create your headline, we are going to do a little exercise together.I want you to create your own headline and I want you to pretend you’re the marketing manager for a bean bag shop, like a retail. 

You need to generate sales of bean bags, and to do that you’re going to compose a headline for social media post of any description like videos, images, blogs, whatever. Catch and develop interest or intrigue for the bean bags you have to sell. They can be kid bean bags, adult bean bags, bean bags for leisure; It doesn’t matter.

Just think of a headline to sell a bean bag, I’m going to give you one minute, go! 

Keep going, keep on refining that headline. I know it’s very difficult. You probably don’t think about it very often. Hopefully, you’ve got at least one. It doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect. That’s ok, we’re going to be working on it. Alright, that’s about a minute, hands down, or stop typing. 

I’m going to give you a technique or strategy to make that headline even stronger than what it is right now. For some of you I know it is not very strong. 

Here we go, here’s 4 U’s to generate a headline; urgency, usefulness, uniqueness and ultra-specificity. Try and say that fast three times, it’s very difficult. 

Urgency; what we are trying to do is to create a sense of urgency, so lines like, things like “that you need to know”, “you can use today”, “before the end of this week”, “by close of business today”. We are trying to generate a sense of urgency to take action, whether it’s to take or read it, or share it, whatever it is. We are trying to get that sense of urgency to happen. 

The second one is usefulness; what we are looking for is the practical benefit of a potential outcome.” 7 things you need to know before you take your next flight”. “5 things you need to do to avoid whatever”. We are trying to give them some practical benefits.

Step three; we are looking for uniqueness; so funny, weird, sarcastic, or insightful. Some of the tools I’ll show you will take this probably too far, but you might want to write it to a celebrity like Ariana Grande, or Miley Cyrus or something really unusual, something bizarre.”

Basically, it is trying to capture attention to generate a little bit of interest. Try uniqueness.  

Lastly is ultra-specificity; “fashion tips for this summer”, “need to try by Monday 5pm”; you’re being very specific on what they need to look at; “99 things you need to know before you do this”, or whatever it is. 

You’re just being very specific, or “do this before 12:30 each day”; something along these lines to make it very specific. I’ve got a little exercise for you, go back to your headline that you wrote before and I want you to review it out by adding one, two, or three ingredients on this page. Urgency, usefulness, uniqueness or ultra-specificity. 

Go ahead and do that, I’ll give you 30 seconds to review it. You don’t need to use all of them for the over achievers out there, you just need to use at least one. You’ve got about 10 seconds to go, and time’s up. Hopefully your headline got a little better from the exercise you did previously to this exercise, and all we did was look at the 4 U’s.

I encourage you to remember the 4 U’s as we are about to proceed into using some online tools to make this headline generation exercise even better.