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Do your headlines identify urgent pain points?

I was talking with one of my coaching clients the other day and the topic of "urgent pain points" came up.

"What the heck are those?" he asked.

Here's what I wrote back to him:

"If you haven’t been to the dentist in two years, it’s important that you make an appointment and go. But it’s not urgent. When you get a blinding toothache, it becomes urgent.

If you weigh too much it’s important that you shed a few pounds. But that’s not urgent. When your doctor tells you your blood pressure is way too high, then it becomes urgent.

When a company knows that its home page isn’t expressing its core value proposition very well, it’s important that they fix it. But not urgent.

When their top salesman calls in and says he lost a major prospect because the prospect read the site, but misunderstood the company’s value proposition...it becomes urgent.

In life and business, nothing becomes urgent until we actually feel the pain or fear."

It's worth looking at a few of your key web pages and thinking about your headlines a bit more carefully.

Let's assume that all of your headlines contain a benefit.

The benefit will touch on a "a pain point".

One way or another, you are offering your reader a way to tackle a need or a pain.

For instance:

"Give your kids a winning advantage with the 22-volume Encylopedia Galactica."

The pain point here is a parent's concern over the quality of their children's education. There's a guilt thing happening here too. Implicit in the headline is the message that if you DON'T give your children a winning advantage you're somehow being a bad parent.

That's not a bad headline. But is there any urgency there?

Not really. As a parent I might think, "Sure, it would help Johnny a lot if we had a really good encyclopedia. I'll check that out some time."

Traditionally, we try to overcome that inertia, or lack of urgency, with some kind of offer – like a percentage discount if the reader buys before a certain date.

But it's a lot more powerful if you can build that urgency into the headline's benefit.

So let's try a variation on the encylopedia headline.

"Are your children ready for their upcoming exams? Give them a winning advantage with the 22-volume Encylopedia Galactica."

Suddenly there is an urgency there. As a parent you start counting down the months or weeks before your child's next exam. Scary...you'd better order the encylopedia right now.

You can take the same approach with most products or services.

Find the benefit that addresses the reader's pain. And then find a way to make that pain urgent.

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