Making Headlines Work

A well-educated, sophisticated client of mine whose practice serves her own well-educated, sophisticated clients brought up an interesting question about headlines this week. She had learned in an online marketing course that capitalizing every word in a headline — regardless of grammatical correctness — is a good way to get people’s attention, and she wanted to know my opinion.

The answer depends on whose attention you’re trying to get and what impression you want them to have. The headline in question went with a long copy sales page describing an intensive training retreat. The goal of the headline was to get the right people to read it and then to win their respect for, and trust in, my client’s professionalism.

Everyone alive in this century is skeptical of anything that smells like advertising. Headlines in all caps (including articles and prepositions like “a” and “to,” for example) may catch more eyeballs initially but, if the eyeballs belong to, say, a liberal arts major, the brain attached to them is likely to say, “Oh no, another cheesy long copy sales pitch,” and click away to another site.

If you’re selling something to an educated audience, ignoring grammatical conventions in favor of what is flashy or catchy risks insulting their intelligence. And if your product or service is expensive, gimmicky marketing materials will devalue it. Put another way, if you’re charging Nordstrom prices, you don’t use K-Mart merchandising techniques.

My client is all about quality and expertise. And in my admittedly biased opinion as a writer and an English major, her image and her audience deserve flawless grammar.