The first feat your promotion must achieve is to capture the attention of your potential patients. Regardless whether you promote your practice through print ads, sales letters, flyers, radio commercials, television commercials, signage or websites, your headline, or first words uttered in a commercial, is the most important component of your ads. The way you do this is by pushing the biggest hot buttons your potential patients have. Hot buttons include the fears, frustrations, difficulties, pain, and/or annoyances people possess in regard to selecting and using your services.

 

Writing headlines

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There is much to know about writing headlines. Here is a quick checklist of some of the measures to take and avoid:

 

• Create headlines that push emotional hot buttons.

• Use emotion in your headline to Capture attention. Once you have their attention, present a logical solution.

• Generalities fail to make an impression and are rarely believed. Rather, use specifics like, “7 ways to avoid” or “The 90-second solution to…

• Stay away from puns or trying to be cute. Double meanings create confusion, are seldom hot buttons, fail to capture attention, and do not promise solutions to perceived problems.

• A headline should be clear in its interpretation and be able to stand alone as a meaningful statement. It should paint a picture within the minds of your audience.

• Headlines do not have to be short, as long as each word has a meaningful purpose. Never shorten a headline to sacrifice impact. For example, in the headline, “ Finally, an urgent care center that promises you will see a provider within 10 minutes," if you remove the words finally or promises, you’re cutting emotional words, thus weakening the ad's ability to impact the consumer.

• If you use a photo at the top of your ad or promotion, make sure your headline makes it clear what the photo is supposed to communicate. Photos can take viewers in endless directions. You want your viewers to know exactly what your illustration is supposed to convey so it generates the impact you want. Captions ensure this.

 

Once you have successfully captured their attention, you can only keep it if people believe you are going to provide useful information that will help them solve a problem and make a decision.

 

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These headlines capture attention and make it easy to create copy that will involve the readers, interest them, and get them to take action.