CONTENT THERAPY

In praise of subheadings

I have to praise you like I should.

Welcome to Content Therapy, a Better Marketing column on anything and everything content.

If part, or indeed, all of your role is dedicated to editing stuff, you’ll know that it’s always a disappointment to receive drafts that look a bit like this:

Long, continuous spools of unbroken prose. Urgh.

In other words, as editors, we can soon find ourselves facing sorting the equivalent of this, out:

Extra time now has to be spent working out what the overall piece is about before we are left to decide where any H2s etc might be best placed. We, as editors, bear the brunt of turning a poor reading experience into something more wonderful; by suffering this content in its raw state first.

Maybe the raw material is a brilliant piece of content in need of a just light touch edit. Maybe it’s got a great, irresistible hook deeply buried…