In my roughly five years writing for Forbes, most of my posts and videos were consumed by between 1,000 - 10,000 internet-dwelling mammals. One story, however, stood out. It was a piece I wrote about my adopted hometown of St. Louis called "St. Louis Doesn't Suck" - an homage to a city that, in my opinion, does not get its due for a variety of reasons.
The question being: Why did so many people read a story that was perceivably regional in nature? The answer is actually rather simple: The headline.
This is of course nothing new. Headlines, as Mashable's Lauren Indvik capably noted in a story two years ago about The Atlantic, is less about SEO (as once was the case) and more about "spinning" a story to drive its viral potential. It is why when my team develops real-time, humor-driven content for certain brands, we always include a compelling "book cover" - inclusive of both a headline and an image with a bite - for social posting.
"On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy," as content strategist David Ogilvy told Brian Eisenberg, a self-proclaimed "online marketing pioneer," co-founder and chairman emeritus of the Web Analytics Association (now the Digital Analytics Association). "When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar."
All of this speaks to a larger issue for marketers and brands, who now must function as content producers. And that issue is that boring or sanguine is no longer good enough. Even sturdy or stable won't cut it if you have an ROI to contend with - and most of us do. Content, and in particular, the tip of the spear on that content, must have something poignant or funny or alarming or dramatic or sexy that speaks to an audience and drives them to take action and share the fact that they've taken that action.
"...in today's environment of thousands of headlines, subject lines and content titles assaulting readers, more like a dam bursting than a firehose, you need to develop the skills to throw readers a virtual life raft for them to grab hold of," Eisenberg noted when citing an experiment in which he found a 217 percent lift by simply using a more juicy headline with no changes to content whatsoever.
You get it, Mr. or Mrs. CMO, right? If you're investing a few hundred thousand or a few million in campaign and no one pays attention, you are absolutely screwed. Your CEO and CFO will come knockin' throwing around refreshing phrases like "viral video" and you will very soon be hitting up LinkedIn and CareerBuilder in search of gainful employment as a union horseshoe fitter. There is simply very little room for error today.
Just remember the infamous words of actress Bette Davis, "An affair now and then is good for a marriage. It adds spice, stops it from getting boring."
Indeed, and as content goes, that spice of life is not just the new norm, but the new necessity in content marketing today.
tip of the spear / shutterstock