The ideal length, focus, and keywords for your marketing messages

This study breaks down the key takeaways and insights that we developed based on analysis of website messages from 600 companies across a variety of industries. 

The goal was to find relationships that exist between the format of a company’s marketing messages and their success.

1. Headline

What is a headline: This is the biggest, boldest statement at the top of the page. In general, this is meant to capture the core benefit or value proposition for the customer

2. Subheading

What is a subheading / subheadline: This is the statement below the headline. It’s typically a little bit longer and provides additional supporting details on the features and benefits covered in the headline

The purpose of this research was to look for correlations between a company’s messaging and their success. 

This is a tricky element as there are lots of potential measurements of success. You could look at revenue, growth, user base, or many other metrics.

The problem is, that data isn’t available for every business. In addition, when you look across industries, business types, and company maturity, those factors are tough to equalize. 

Instead we looked to the people.

The website Product Hunt (producthunt.com) is an awesome online resource for discovering new businesses. On the site, the community is presented with new products and services every day. The users can then “upvote” a company whose offering they like.

There’s no strict definition of what an upvote means, but it’s an indication that the person likes the offering in some way. 

Upvotes provide a consistent measure to compare businesses regardless of industry, size, or revenue. 

The ability to get upvotes is largely dependent on whether the company is able to engage an audience with what they created. 

That’s what marketing is all about.

One of the most important and powerful aspects of your messaging revolves around not just what you’re saying about your business but how you position it to the reader.

The main distinction we examined was whether companies presented their headline, aka. Their core value proposition, as a benefit statement or a description/feature focused statement. 

The reason benefit statements are powerful is that they immediately put customers in the mindset of the value they’ll receive. It helps them to envision a better life. It’s designed to create an emotional connection.

When you focus on basic descriptions and features, you rely on the customer to do the heavy lifting. They have to first understand what you’re offering and then also imagine how it benefits them.

That’s not to say that a descriptive headline can’t work. There may be certain products or certain audiences who respond better to that style. There are no absolutes.

There’s been quite a bit of research done on optimal headline lengths over the years, but most of it centers around blog articles and social content. Our focus is on website messaging, but the principles are largely the same. 

The bottom line is that you need to convey the value proposition of whatever you’re offering in a clear, engaging way.

We also looked at the average number of headline characters and saw consistent values across the board. 

On the surface, the groups aren’t drastically different. When we look at the distribution of headlines across all the lengths, the shapes for High Votes and Low Votes are very similar 

But we do see different peaks; High Vote Companies (dark blue) peak at 6 words, Low Vote Companies (orange) peak at 4 words.

Here’s a selection of the most frequently used words from our Top Vote group. 

(% is of all words used in the headlines):

A subheading or subheadline works as a complement to your headline. They can help fill in some of the details of your offering and provide supporting info on the features your customers will most care about.

If you’ve written a benefit-focused headline, The subheadline can be your opportunity to describe what your offering does. 

With the subheadlines we see a consistent trend towards longer messages as we move from the highest vote group down to the lowest.

The standard deviations are also fairly high across the board, so we know that these values are much more spread out than with the headlines. 

The High Vote Companies (dark blue) have a more condensed grouping (57% coeff of variation) around word count compared to the Low Vote Companies (orange) (66% coeff of variation).

There may be a correlation where lower vote companies have fewer resources available and in turn fewer folks available to help craft their messaging.

But small and large companies are both prone to ramble in subheadlines at time.

Subheading examples that are too long:

Smaller Company:

Tapiriik synchronizes your fitness activities between Garmin Connect, Runkeeper, Strava, TrainingPeaks, SportTracks.mobi, Endomondo, RideWithGPS, TrainAsONE, TrainerRoad, Motivato, Velo Hero, Epson RUNSENSE, Dropbox, Smashrun, BeginnerTriathlete, Pulsstory, Singletracker, Aerobia, and SETIO (your heart rate, cadence, power, and temperature data syncs too).

Massive Corporation:

Inspired by the evolving composition of breast milk, the BabyNes Nutrition System is designed to be in sync with your baby’s changing nutritional needs. With month based precise formula capsules tailored to your baby’s development from 0-36 months, it’s our closest formula to breast milk. The formula capsules work exclusively with the BabyNes machine to deliver hygienic, lump free formula, and a happy bottle feeding experience for babies and parents.

Here’s a sampling of high frequency words from the Top Vote group’s subheadlines 

(% is of all words used in the subheadlines):

A Call To Action is more straightforward than a headline or subheadline. Companies of all shapes and sizes stick to a pretty consistent formula of around 3 words with a focus on strong action verbs.

The character counts follow the same trend decreasing slightly with the Lowest Vote companies.

One interesting note is that we see the Top Vote group (dark blue) with a peak word count of 3 as we’d expect, but the Low Vote group (orange) actually peaks at 2. 

This represents an opportunity because shorter, 2 word CTAs, tend to follow more generic patterns.

Here’s a sampling of high frequency words from the Top Vote group’s calls to action 

(% is of all words used in the calls to action):

There you go! That’s the summary of our study. 

As with any research, this study isn’t perfect and it’s certainly not definitive. This study should simply act as another data point in your toolbox to help inform decisions about your marketing and messaging.