Bury the Lead, Sometimes

Posted on July 29th, 2008 by Larry Chase

Typically, your headline or subject header features an intriguing proposition or offer. More often than not, that proposition or offer is paid off immediately in the first paragraph of body copy, but not always.

If what you’re offering is really good, you may want to “bury the lead”. This means you place the explanation of the offer further down in the copy so the reader gets a fuller picture of what your product or service or value is all about. In order for this to work, you need a very strong lead offer – strong enough for the reader to read on to find the buried payoff.

In direct mail, you can sometimes go for pages and pages before you get that payoff. In online copy, I notice the distance between the initial offer and the buried payoff is significantly shorter. Maybe this is because people tend to read or skim faster on screen than they do on paper.

If you do try burying the payoff to the lead, just make sure the copy you write leading up to that payoff is directly relevant to the reader’s interest, or else you’ll lose her. LC

The Internet Marketing Tip above originally appeared in Larry Chase's Web Digest For Marketers which you can subscribe to at no charge at www.wdfm.com.