Atlanta's Marketing Center

Grab Attention with a Strong Headline

Small businesses and practices just don’t have the budgets that the bigger companies do. The big companies have marketing departments with graphic designers and media planners & buyers and can frankly afford it if some of their advertising “misses”. Small companies don’t have that kind of luxury. 

To balance the playing field, small businesses must be smart about advertising. The best advice that I can give is no matter what the advertising medium…print advertising, website, direct mail pieces, etc., use a strong headline to grab the readers’ attention.

There is definitely an art to headline writing, and when done correctly, can produce results that the big guys experience. Without a strong headline, you blend in with everyone else and will be missed. 

I just finished browsing through a local newspaper. 95% of the small business ads in there use the old technique of stating or listing what the business does in hopes that the  reader will make the connection themselves. While there might be some response depending upon competitors and a couple other factors, I’m quite sure that they won’t get the demand they’re looking for. A good headline would do that for them.  

Remember to grab the reader’s attention with a strong headline and you’ll be more than halfway home.

Growin' like a 'shroom

Has your company grown like a mushroom?

You know...perhaps it has grown through referrals and you might have been tied up in all the responsibilities and tasks of running the business.  By being so customer service focused, it's easy then to get caught up with adding numerous features to your offering in an attempt to appeal to the broadest possible audience.  Give the customers what they want, right?

John Jantsch, of Duct Tape Marketing fame, calls that "featuritis" or "feature-creep".  It's when so many features of your service are added that the offering isn't perceived as doing any one thing particularly well.  The problem then is that your customers won't consider you to be offering anything different from the next guy.

What would happen if you defined your offering as you do your company and stuck to your guns in terms of what the offer was?  That is, choose two or three things your company or product delivered and you communicated those things over and over again.  My guess is that your target market would soon get the point and the value would go up.
If you've been "growin' like a 'shroom" then you might have experience a case of featuritis.  And that's no fun.  My recommendation is to get back to the basics...redefine who you are, you offering, and stick to your guns when communicating to prospect and customers.