Copywriting Mistakes 3 Common Headline Blunders

David Ogilvy said in Ogilvy on Advertising that “80% of an ad’s success or failure was determined by the headline.” John Caples had a similar saying. “If the headline doesn’t induce readership then the body copy might as well be written in Greek.”
Headline writing is both an art and a science. So the advice you give novices or amateur copywriters is different from how ‘the pros’ operate. That said novice and pro alike can benefit from spotting these common blunders in headlines and eliminating them from their own marketing copy.
Mistake 1: Obviously Rehashing Classic Headlines Look, there is nothing wrong with borrowing an idea, but modelling your headline on Caples’ “They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano…” is rite of passage. It is not a way to get great response. Gary Bencivenga commented that he would never use any of Vic Schwab’s 100 Good Headlines from “How to Write a Good Advertisement” these days.
If you are going to swipe that blatantly, swipe ideas from current controls – markets evolve so use what is working now. Stay away from the internet. Free publishing has its downsides. So look at marketing that been backed hard money in the form of media.
Mistake 2: Not Being Relevant to your target market.You are reading this article (I hope) because you want to know how to improve your headlines. Now I could have used an unrelated headline, such as “Sex! Now that I have your attention…” and segued into my headline article. True more people are interested in sex than writing better headlines, but I am not interested in people looking for sex I want a smaller more relevant audience who are interested in improving the response rate of their ads.
Generally it is best to keep your headline relevant so that people who are interested in what your ad is about can find it and read it.
Mistake 3: Not listening to your market. Test and measure. If you aren’t testing then you are in trouble. Testing means that you are also measuring. If you are measuring response you have a fighting chance to uncover what your market really wants. Sound reasonable?
Good copywriters have an intuitive knack for knowing what will and won’t work in their specialised markets. How did they get that way? They saw the results of many, many tests and can guess from there. By the way it is not their job to guess which test strip will work better. That is why there is testing and you are doing it – so that we aren’t guessing we are testing and keeping what works best.