Subheads

Subheads explain the audacious or captivating or controversial claim you just made in your headline above. Subheads, despite their natural subordination, serve several very important jobs on a page of copy.

Firstly, as I just said, having grabbed the reader’s eye with your headline, you have to immediately follow it up with a partial explanation, a slight relieving of the tension that the headline has created. I say a slight relieving because, of course, you still want to keep the reader interested and needing to know more.

Much as a headline’s most important job is to compel the reader to read the subhead, the subhead’s most important job is to compel the reader to engage with the rest of your page – ideally by reading the first bit of body copy that, typically, follows the subhead, but, at the very least it should be enough to send them scrolling and scanning down the page for whatever it is they came looking for (as opposed to bouncing off your page and back to their search results).

This is a crosshead, and yet…

When I say “subhead” I am not only referring to the supporting copy that follows a headline, but also the (usually) equivalently weighted, font-wise, short, attention-grabbing statements that break up the page as you read further.

This issue of nomenclature, of labeling, can be a bit confusing, and I’m sure that there are definitive technical definitions out there somewhere for those who care deeply about these sorts of things.

In an article, they’re called cross heads, in a manual or textbook I suppose they would be called section heads or titles…at any rate, and for the purposes of writing landing page and website copy, I will just call them all subheads. It’s just easier that way.

Speaking of scanning the page

The second important use of subheads is to aid and abet scanners. That is, readers who would rather breeze down your page looking for something particular, or seeing what’s on offer, than reading all of your copy in the order it appears on the page.

The idea – and I definitely got this notion from Joanna Wiebe – is that someone scanning down the page should be able to follow, from your subheads, the general gist of your argument or case, making fairly solid assumptions about what you’re saying in the copy that they are skipping. The subheads should tell a story, together.

My thought, and hope, is that one of the subheads will resonate with a reader more than the others, forcing the scanner to stop and read that section, which, in turn, will compel them to scroll back up and read the rest (once they realize how concisely and interestingly your copy is written).

If you’re using images with each section, they should work in tandem with the subheads and do an equally good job of telling your story to scanners.

Your scanner should be able to recount the high-level elements of the problem(s) your offering solves (and, generally, how it does so), without reading any of the body copy on the page. They should also be able to clearly identify a section that would be of interest to their particular situation – be it a pain they want to relieve or a desire they want to fulfill.

How I write subheads

In short, I write subheads based on the top pain points a product or service solves for its ideal customer. One pain point per subhead, with body copy immediately following that slightly agitates the pain, usually followed by a set of benefits (often employing a classic 3-column table) that speak to, or solve, that specific pain point.

In case you weren’t following along there, I just mapped out the PAS formula for copywriting – famously endorsed by Dan Kennedy as being perhaps the most reliable sales formula there is. It goes like this: Problem – Agitation – Solution. Yes, and it can be used in an overarching, page-level way, or in a micro, section-level way. Or both. (I often like to do both.)

Now, to be clear, I don’t just write the pain points out verbatim. Sometimes I turn them into a question “Having trouble sleeping?” or allude to them with a statement “A good night’s sleep is hard to find” or a statistic “84% of adults have trouble sleeping”. (Please note: that is not a real statistic, I just made it up…but I bet it’s close.)

So where do these pain points come from? Voice of Customer (VoC) research, of course. By talking to and surveying customers, by polling and studying prospects, by trawling through competitor reviews and support team chat logs. Once you’ve seen enough, trends become clear.

The top pain points (that is, those which are most mentioned) emerge, along with the words that people use to describe them. These, then, become the subject for my subheads down the page (or, potentially, the subject lines and focus topics, per email, in an email sequence).

What makes a successful subhead

A successful post-header subhead fills in any immediate questions for clarity that the bold claim made in the headline leaves unanswered. If the header = “That sounds interesting”, then the following subhead = “And is obviously relevant to me”. So, to be successful, it must answer the headline and compel your ideal reader to read more.

A successful down-the-page section subhead draws in particular subsets of readers by being clear in signifying that “this next section talks about this particular pain point or that particular benefit (it can be a benefit sometimes) of the product or service on offer” or, put more simply, “if you care about X then read this bit”.

A successful set of subheads does the same thing, but for every important point – pain or benefit – that comes up in the research. Even exciting features can sometimes warrant a subhead if they are unique enough to your offering, and genuinely exciting TO YOUR READERS (not just to your development or marketing team).

If you have spent any time segmenting your audience, and you know that you have clearly defined groups of people, still within the constraints of your “ideal” customer, who care about a specific aspect of your offering more than anything else, then they each deserve their own subhead. A successful set of subheads will leave no important audience segment unaddressed.

One last thought from me on the topic: I’ve talked about pain points a lot here, and I do find that they make more subheads than anything else in the copy that I write (again, whether included or just alluded to), but important benefits can also work. So can aspirations for your reader’s future self (“Imagine getting 8 hours of sleep every night!”). So can urgency and so can scarcity if you’re introducing an offer or a call to action (with a legit end date or limited stock).

Got thoughts on these thoughts? Let’s connect! Send me a message here.