Is the headline on a landing page a copy choice or a product choice?
I used to give the headline over to the person who was good with words. But now I am starting to realize that this approach was wrong.
A few weeks ago, I was helping my friend create a landing page for a meal planner called PantryPal. The original headline said "Eat smarter, live better". This phrase sounded great but said absolutely nothing. Asking what the product actually did, we found out that the answer is rather simple: it creates three dinner options based on the food you already have in your kitchen. And when we came up with this description, we got the headline in no time and realized that the product cannot handle leftovers at all. One sentence on one page pointed out the gap in our product roadmap.
This is why nowadays I consider a headline to be a product decision dressed in copywriting clothes. If you are unable to tell the value proposition of your product in just one sentence, something is definitely wrong further upstream.
One useful tool for determining this is reading out the headline to someone who has never heard of the app before and getting him to repeat it. He would be much more straightforward than us.
What method do you use to test if the headline conveys the features of the product? Have you ever felt the need to change the product after rewriting its headline?
Replies
Agree it is a product choice, and for me it also turned out to be an audience choice. The words people search for in my category are the generic ones, "ai song generator" is by far the most searched, while gift phrases like "birthday song" are barely searched at all. But the generic words brought mostly young users making a song for themselves, and every one of my first paying users was 35 or older and came for an occasion. So the headline is not only what the product does, it decides who walks in. To your test I would add a second question: would the person who pays recognise themselves in it?