In my work helping organizations and businesses with their marketing campaigns and materials, one thing that comes up again and again is that people don’t always understand how to arrange the words, ideas, photos, etc. in a way to really draw in the prospective customers. My advice is usually to ask them to look over everything they have written or come up with and pick out the strongest, most interesting, most exciting thing they have…and put that at the beginning.
Many prospects will not even get any farther into your marketing materials or your web site than the very beginning. Whatever you have in your opening lines or header, or on your home page has to send a strong message and entice individuals to get to know your business better. For some reason, people often save the “best for last” when it comes to their marketing materials—that just is not a good idea since all that good language, images, or whatever often gets buried and never even seen.
Many years ago, when I had my journalism training, they used to teach us to put all the basics of who, what, when, why, where, and how in the opening paragraph to an article. I know that isn’t necessarily the way it is done any longer (I do get mighty frustrated when I read my local newspaper and get 3 paragraphs into an article and still don’t know what it’s about—I generally abandon it and don’t read any further since I’m a traditionalist). I apply some of these same techniques to marketing materials—get the good stuff out there first, draw people in further if you can, but if you can’t, they will at least have a good idea of what you are about just from reading the opening lines.
Also: Watch Out for Double Messages in Your Marketing
Using Attention “Grabbers”