Your customers already wrote your headline
The best headline you’ll ever write may be sitting in a stranger’s review. Go copy it.
Staring at a blank page, trying to sound persuasive? Your customers are already describing the problem better than you can, in public, for free. You just have to go read them.
Joanna Wiebe of Copyhackers needed a headline for a rehab center. Instead of brainstorming, she spent two or three hours reading more than 500 Amazon reviews of books about addiction, copying readers’ exact words into tables. One reviewer’s line stood out and became the new headline: “If you think you need rehab, you do.” Tested against the control, “Your Addiction Ends Here,” it got over 400% more clicks on the main button and over 20% more form submissions on the next page.
Do the same. Find reviews of whatever your customers use today: competitor apps, books, forum threads. Copy phrases word for word, especially the complaints. When the same pain shows up five times in different words, pick the most vivid version and test it.
The example
- Instead of
- “Streamline your bookkeeping with powerful automation”
- Try
- “Stop dreading the shoebox of receipts every April”
Before you flush
Open 20 reviews of a competitor or a book in your space and copy five exact phrases that describe the pain into a doc.