With your position calculated in the previous step, you know who to target on which problem and how you help solve it. In this step, you’ll use this information to craft your headline message to get their attention. In the next step, you’ll expand on this message with value principles that retain their attention and engage them further.

If you’re not sure what to decide for this step, use your best guess and move on. Your perspective will develop and you can always update previous answers as you go, so don’t feel too constrained by what you’ve already written either.

Standing out to your ideal client means out-competing the other 9,999 messages they’re exposed to daily, and you’ll probably have a couple of seconds to do it. Don’t waste an opportunity with a message that’s more complex than it needs to be. An effective message gets the attention of your ideal client, and interest them enough to read the next thing; not tell the entire story. Relevance, brevity, and language are the three elements of an effective headline message.

Your audience will want a good reason to choose you over your competition – or take action at all – so your headline message will need to include a benefit that’s relevant for them. Insights on your ideal client’s aspirations and problems, and where they overlap with your unique expertise, should drive this decision. While it can be tempting to list features here, an aspirational benefit is proven to usually work better, so save the features list for later in this framework.

Your headline message should be written to work independently – as well as get your audience to stick around to read the next piece of information – because a large percentage of readers won’t read any further. To ensure the exposure you get is not wasted, your message should encourage action. Framing your benefit in active language including verbs and imperatives is proven to prompt more action.