How to Improve Your CTR By Workshopping Headlines

Your content is only as effective as the size of the audience that sees it and relates to it. This is why headline testing tools are revered as the gods of publishing. But what if you also took the time with your team to kickstart the brainstorming process?

When I was heading up Analytics at Federated Media, I led how we tracked, measured, and derived insights from our influencers’ content.

Based on what I learned, here are my suggestions for your company’s internal process for creating awesome headlines and improving your content’s CTR:

Photo by Green Chameleon

The ideal process for creating effective headlines

Optimizing headlines should really happen before and after publishing a piece of content.

Before publishing a post:

1. Each writer or marketer on your team makes a list of options for an article title.
2. Then these options get discussed as a team. For example, have an internal private Facebook group and use Facebook polls where members of the team can vote on which title they think your readership is most likely to click on. Or put options into the draft of the article itself and let team members comment on their preference. At Modular, we have a dedicated Slack channel to workshop headlines. This can get pretty creative or ridiculous, but in the end, is very effective!

After publishing a post:

1. Try them out on your audience will help you narrow down the headline style that works best for your brand. After a piece goes live but before you’ve invested in amplifying it, there are tons of ways to test your headlines. Every company has a preference, but some methods include: tech tools (e.g. Optimizely, Buzzsumo), seeding posts in front of different audiences to figure out which to amplify, or A/B testing different versions of headlines.
2. Continually analyze the results and reports and train your writers to value data-driven decision-making and use these tools themselves. This process will also let you toy around with different types of voice and the overall messaging style of the brand along the way. The best content teams live in data from their posts all day long.

Unfortunately, many companies today skip over step two and go straight to step three, ignoring that it’s more performant (and cost effective) to test and put an amplification budget behind two good headlines than two bad ones.