Before you invest in headline writing

Most teams know this matters. Fewer have decided who owns it. Before you spend anything on headline writing, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Content is the part of a project most likely to be underestimated and most likely to delay a launch. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• The headline decides whether the rest is read
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

What to watch for

Specific beats clever. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Say what the reader gets. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

What this looks like day to day

Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. Three things worth confirming about headline writing before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• The headline decides whether the rest is read — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.