Between Your Headline And Your Hook
Friday, December 19th, 2008Today I want to talk about maintaining the energy between your headline and the start of your marketing message.
Now, if you are familiar with any of the traditional shorthand for crafting a marketing message. It’s AIDA.
I personally believe that AIDA is a bit more simplistic than you should really be focusing on, but especially for beginners and for the development of the general ideas and crafting a sales message, it’s certainly a good place to start.
The first A stands for attention, the I stands for interest, the D stands for desire, and the final a stands for action.
Now, it is commonly assumed that the A for attention refers to your headline. Of course, it also refers to maintaining the interest of the prospective customer throughout the entire letter.
But it is the “ongoing attention” which is commonly referred to as “interest”, and the spark, the sizzle, the thing that gets a person to notice your message in the first place, and is the thing that initially attracts their attention, is commonly referred to as the attention part of AIDA.
So not only does your headline have to attract attention, and preferably contain some aspect of the approach that you are using, which will help in attracting the attention of those people most likely to be responsive to your marketing message, but attention also refers to, in in my opinion, to the first few sentences of your actual sales message.
If the first few sentences do not hook them, if those sentences do not attract their attention, and develop their interest in what you have to say, then they are not going to read any further and whatever attention that your headline is able to attract will simply be lost.
Because the approach that you used in the headline, and the techniques you used to attract their attention in the first place, all that energy will be dissipated if you’re initial sentences for your initial paragraph of your marketing message is weak, or doesn’t follow through in the promise of interest that was generated by your attention-getting headline.
That is why you must be cognizant of the relationship between the headline and the initial sentences of your message and take extra care to make sure that the approach and attention-getting techniques used in the headline are not counteracted or diminished in the first few sentences of your message.
DMU
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