Page 181 - 100 Great Copywriting Ideas: From Leading Companies Around the World (100 Great Ideas)

84 YET ANOTHER HEADLINE
IDEA—USE “NOW”

Forgive me for returning to headlines again, but given how much
effort we all spend trying to come up with good ones, and how
important they are, I assumed you wouldn’t mind. It’s true that
appealing to your reader’s self-interest is always going to be the
most powerful foundation for a headline. But you can ramp up the
curiosity factor, and the urgency, by implying that this is not just
beneficial to the reader, but also new.

People like new things. New products, new ideas, new friends. So
why not trade on this very positive motivation to add some luster to
your copywriting?

The idea

From a health and safety consultancy
As a copywriter, I’m always looking for something unique about the
product I’m promoting. You can always find an angle, but when it’s a
one-off, your job is just that bit easier. So when I was asked to write a
mailshot to promote a new management report, I asked the client my
standard question, “Is there anything this report does that no other
report does?” The answer was, “Yes, it’s the first report of its kind to
provide comparable health and safety benchmarking data for every
company on the FTSE 100” (that’s an index of the 100 biggest companies
by market capitalization listed on the London Stock Exchange).

The headline pretty much wrote itself:

Now, for the first time, reliable health & safety benchmarking
data from Britain’s biggest companies . . .

172 • 100 GREAT COPYWRITING IDEAS