Photo courtesy of Freepik

Your headline is the first, and often the only, impression you make on a prospective reader. Without a compelling headline to entice your prospective readers into reading the rest of the content, your accompanying text is pointless – no matter how good it is.

Instead, your content will simply go unloved, unrecognized, undervalued and neglected until one day it will simply float off into a dark abyss where all content without captivating headlines go to die.

Dramatic, I know.

But it’s true.

On average, only 2 out of 10 people will read beyond your headline. That means that your headline literally has the power to make or break your content. The better than average your headline is, the better your chances are of having a larger audience read your content.

Simple, huh?

Photo courtesy of Andy Rennie (original photo)

The pros know exactly how important creating headlines are, so they often follow the 50/50 rule which is when you spend just as much time on your headline (and the first few words/lines of your copy) as you do on creating your entire piece of content.

Given that most content takes hours, if not weeks to produce, you might be thinking that that’s a lot of time to spend on just a few words. Time that could be better spent on polishing up the rest of your content, maybe?

But think again.

As advertising legend David Ogilvy so succinctly puts it: “When you have written your headline, you have spent 80 cents out of your dollar.” And where else should you spend your time, but on the one area that requires such a huge investment of money?

Doesn’t seem so ridiculous now, does it?

Photo courtesy of Sarah Burke

I’m sure you’ve heard the “fact” that people process images 60,000 times faster than they do text, right? The quote is supposed to highlight the important role images play in human understanding. 

But on further research, the fact just doesn’t hold up. 

In fact, no one knows where it came from! Although, A Difference does a remarkable job at researching it to as close as humanly possible. 

But that’s not to say images aren’t important. In a study by MIT it was concluded that the brain can process an image in 13 milliseconds! Which is rather remarkable when you consider that, with there being 1,000 milliseconds in a second, that would mean that we can process about 76 images per second.

That’s kind of mind boggling, am I right? Even if the 60,000 times faster than text fact isn’t quite accurate, one thing is for sure: we process images really fast. 

No wonder 65% of people are said to be visual learners.            

Photo courtesy of Dru Bloomfield – At Home in Scottsdale(CC Attribution)

This is a guest blog post by Ivan Serrano.

Mobile design is changing the way consumers interact with businesses. People are no longer using a phone book to find the location of a retailer, but instead they’re using their mobile devices!

Mobile technology has made it possible for businesses to create a closer relationship with their target customers. Businesses can use mobile design to help their customers locate their store and receive valuable information regarding product promotions.

When it comes to researching products, 4 out of 5 consumers use their mobile device. If your business is yet to create a design that fits your customers’ browsing needs, it’s time for an update. As you take a look at how mobile design can improve your business, here are four things you should know:

Photo courtesy of bark(CC Attribution)

2014 has been a year of trying, testing and growing. We’ve seen a huge push for quality over quantity, visual media has begun to take center stage, technological innovations have changed the way we do business and big data has revealed more about our customers (and us!) than ever before.

It’s been a big year say the very least, but what does the future have in store for us? Let’s have a look at some of the marketing predictions for 2015.

With the dust of Black Friday and Cyber Monday finally settling down, the data is intriguing. According to the NRF Thanksgiving Weekend Spending Survey conducted by Prosper Insights & Analytics, overall shopper traffic was down on Black Friday by 5.2%, but online sales were up by 20.6%.

That means that people are becoming more interested in spending their money online, and less interested in going out to their local store to beat the crowds.

And it’s on social media that we see a lot of these customers research and recommend gifts.

In fact, this year saw the most social Black Friday ever. According to the social media analytics firm Spredfast, in the 7 days prior to Black Friday there were over 2 million Twitter conversations around the topic – That’s twice as much as last year!

How much these conversations actually lead to conversions, is still an open ended question. But one thing is for sure: Social media is where your customers are talking about their shopping habits, so that’s where you should be too.

While the biggest shopping days may be over with, there’s still plenty of shopping time left coming up to the end of the year holidays, such as Christmas and New Years.  

So here are a few tips on how to get the most of your social media this holiday season.