Names matter. People can love your content and your delivery, but if your title doesn’t “click” with your target audience, they will never even find out about your cool content and delivery, because they won’t make it through the door in the first place.

As they say, if you’re going to make rabbit stew, first you have to catch the rabbit!

Our rebranding efforts for Accidental Trainer have us thinking about the importance of titles for the people we serve too. After all the effort participants in our workshops put into reworking their content and delivery, it would be more than a little discouraging to discover the title of the session failed to attract an audience to appreciate it.

So what makes a title effective at catching the interest of the people you want in your workshops? Or, if they have no choice but to come, how could your title signal that your offering is considerably better than business as usual?

Well, if the title of this blog post caught your attention, then our intent of provoking curiosity was successful. What do rabbits have to do with Accidental Trainer’s mission of helping experts get what they know out of their head so others can apply it?

If the focus of this post were slightly different, we could have used a specific number (“Six ways to write titles that draw an audience”), since people seem to like learning a defined number of things.

We could have used a “how to” (“How to write presentation titles that change the world”) or tips and tricks (“Tips and tricks to attract a huge audience with your workshop title alone”). Promising specific solutions to specific challenges faced by your audience is far more enticing than merely stating your topic (“Writing Effective Titles”).

Another method could have been to frame the title as a question (“Why does it matter what I call my presentation?”). Or make it a warning (“Why your workshop title might send your audience screaming in the opposite direction”).

These techniques all start with the target audience’s perspective rather than the presenter’s. They speak to specific challenges, promise specific benefits or, at the very least, evoke specific ideas that your target audience is not expecting in connection with their interests.

Starting by thinking from the perspective of the people you want to influence should sound familiar, of course. To paraphrase something you just might have heard a time or two in one of our workshops, what do you want your people to DO when they see your title?