When you create a marketing plan, you want to incorporate your SMART goals. One part of that is measurability. You want to be able to see how well a piece of content is performing.
Last week we discussed how you can use social media to test your B2B headlines. This is a great opportunity to find out what interests your potential customers the most. When you’ve set your blog up to be measurable, it’s simple to test headlines against each other.
You might be thinking, “My readership is very high. I know what headlines my audience is interested in. I don’t need to create different ones!”
If you’re receiving a lot of traffic from your B2B headlines, that’s great. But, you might be missing out on even more potential customers when you don’t test.
What Headlines Should I Test?
If you search the web for, “How to write better headlines” you’ll receive thousands of pages of results. Most of those results will give you a variation of the same information.
I’m not going to repeat what you’ll find in this post. The truth is, the information you find can help, but it’s generic. Many blog posts, articles, opinion pieces, podcasts, videos, etc. about improving a headline are related to a different type of audience than what you’re seeking.
Monetized Blog ≠ Business Audience
When regular people create blogs, they’re usually about their passion, like parenting advice, gardening, or food. Eventually, they hope to make money writing about what they love, or monetizing. They might sell their expertise in the form of coaching or products later.
To reach this type of audience, they have to create a lot of interesting content to appeal to thousands of daily readers. Without thousands of unique visitors a day, they won’t make any money. Most likely, they’re blogging several times a week, if not daily.
As a B2B business, that’s not your target audience. You don’t want leisure readers. You’re not trying to appeal to people who have a hobby or particular lifestyle and want to meet and read about other people with the same.
You run a business, and you have a particular problem you solve with your solution. Your headlines need to reflect that.
The key to writing great B2B headlines is relating to your audience. The regular tips about the structure of a headline all apply to you. But if the content of your headline isn’t related to your audience, they won’t help.
Know Your Reader
The first step to creating powerful B2B headlines is to understand who is reading the post. You’ve already done research on what interests your readers to choose your content. Now, you’ll want to go a little deeper.
Ask yourself what…
- Primary emotion does my product help solve?
- Is the main reason they’re looking for my product?
- Type of language do they use when talking about my solution?
You can find answers to these questions in the places your audience hangs out. If they hold discussions on LinkedIn, join a few groups and participate. If they use forums, hang out there.
When they contact your company, ask a few questions during the initial call and record their answers. If one person is seeking out new CRM software because the old one is too slow, someone else probably is as well.
Once you know more about the reason your audience is reading your blog, you can create headlines that will interest them.
Informative
When you’re crafting headlines for a business audience, resist the urge to make clever, but obscure, headlines. An alternative headline for this post could be: 1920s Musical That Can Help You. I’m referring to Newsies, a musical about the newspaper boys in the early 20th century.
While it’s an interesting headline, you don’t know what the topic of my post is. It’s generic, and doesn’t state how the contents will help you. If someone is searching for a post about headlines, they’ll see your title, see it doesn’t relate to post titles, and move on. Your headline needs to give some type of hint about its contents.
In a few words, you need to quickly tell your reader about the contents of the blog post. Something as simple as “3 Steps to Protecting Your Hotel Guest’s Data”.
As a reader, I’m going to assume this company does something with data security. They most likely have a product designed specifically for hotels. The blog will have 3 steps I can take, probably immediately, to protect that data.
In a few words I have a lot of information.
To craft great B2B headlines, you need to know your audience, their problems, their emotions, and their language. Once you know them, then you can start testing different approaches to their problems.
Are you ready to start to start crafting your own content marketing plan with better headlines? Discuss your goals and possible approaches in a free, 20-minute call.