5 Meta Headline Mistakes That Might Be Costing You £££, And How To Avoid Them

Most meta ads are complete flops, (trust me I’ve spoken to a LOT of small business owners)

Nine times out of ten, the root cause of this flop can be traced back to one area of the ad — the headline

After reviewing hundreds of failed ad campaigns, I saw 5 mistakes in the headline ALONE, that bores customers, loses engagement and results in another dead campaign for the meta ads graveyard.

Today I’ll cover all 5 of them and what to do to make an ad campaign that outperforms 90% of other ads in your industry

1. How to lose someone’s interest in a heartbeat

Being “smart” with your headline is a surefire recipe for disaster

Prime example of this is a headline that read:  “in for a penny…” 

As you read that, you have no clue what the business is, or who the target market is (hint it was a real estate ad)

It’s an “intelligent” headline, because later in the ad they came back and tied it in with “in for a pound.” which was neat.

But guess what? No one made it that far into the ad because it didn’t resonate with anyone at the start and catch their attention.

So lesson one, don’t be vague with your headline, speak to your audience so they know “ah this post is for me!” when they see it, for a real estate ad it could be “thinking of selling?” or “Sell your house in 90 days guaranteed”

2. The Bizarre “Curse” 80% Of Business Owners Have 

This one is probably the biggest one I’ve seen.

Business owners (especially tradespeople unfortunately) just looove going on about how amazing they are.

How they have  “20 years painting homes in <location>” or “10* reputation on google and checkatrade”

NO ONE CARES!!

Your customers only care about themselves and what’s in it for them, so let’s give that to them shall we?

Tell the audience about what this means for them. E.g. The fastest, service with the most attention to detail from our 20 years of experience"

Much more like it

3. How To Bore Your Audience To Death

Yeah, you as a marketer might know what CTR and CPC and what “conversion rate” means – but your average business owner on facebook doesn’t have a clue.

You might as well be speaking Swahili

Use language they understand, instead of conversion rate or any of this nonese, just say: “Bring in more customers from your ads for less cost”

Easy.

4. Going for the sale in the first line

Don’t know what it is about certain business owners, but they’d assume a discount means more customers. 

So you see so many ads with the first line like: “Winter special! Get your X for 20% off!” or “Limited time only! 10% off store wide!”

Discounts have their place. Once the customer knows who you are and they like your brand

So put the discount in your pants and warm these people up to you and your company, then you can pull it out and watch it increase your sales.

5. Ignoring emotional appeal for logic

This one is a bit nuanced, but over 86% of sales are done on emotion, rather than logic.

So leave it with the “The best painter in <location> just look at our reviews.”

Again people don’t care about you, make it about them and what this means for you. (I covered a way tod do this already)

Avoiding one of these in your headline is easy, keeping tabs on all of these plus the tens of other headline mistakes I see out there?

Damn near impossible, especially when you’re as busy as most small business owners are – so why not get someone who’s seen it all come in and write them all for you? This could change the trajectory of your ads forever.

If that sounds good, drop me a message on josh@reddragonmarketing.co.uk and I’d be more than happy to help you out.

Have a good day

Josh