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Episode 193 - How to Write a Marketing Hook
1.2k Plays1 year ago
We've been taking a hard look these past few months at how we share content, especially across social media. Basically, we weren't thrilled with the amount of engagement and started to experiment with a few different strategies to increase engagement. And some of those experiments would make for an interesting, if not comical, podcast episode, at some point.
Today's episode, however, focuses on one simple way that we were able to get more engagement on social media while also increasing the amount of referral traffic from our social channels to our website. This episode is all about writing effective hooks. It's one of those simple tweaks that can make a big difference.
As always, links and resources can be found in the show notes. Check ‘em out at https://daveyandkrista.com/write-marketing-hook And if you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review over at Apple Podcasts.
Recommended
Transcript
The Power of Compelling Hooks
00:00:05
Speaker
Yeah, I agree. This is so interesting because it's such a simple tweak. But when we started to really make writing compelling hooks of focus, we saw increased engagement on our social media, higher open and click rates and emails, and more referral traffic from our social media accounts to our website.
Brands at Book Show Introduction
00:00:23
Speaker
Welcome to the Brands at Book Show, where we help creative service-based businesses build their brands and find more clients. I'm your host, Davy Jones.
00:00:32
Speaker
We've been taking a hard look these past few months at how we share content, especially across social media. Basically, we weren't thrilled with the amount of engagement and started to experiment with a few different strategies to increase engagement. And some of those experiments would make for an interesting, if not comical podcast episode at some point. Today's episode, however, focuses on one simple way that we were able to get more engagement on social media while also increasing the amount of referral traffic from our social channels
00:01:01
Speaker
to our website.
Effective Hook Strategies
00:01:02
Speaker
This episode is all about writing effective hooks. It's one of those simple tweaks that can make a big difference. As always, links and resources can be found in the show notes. Check them out at davianchrista.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review over at Apple Podcasts. Now, on to the episode. All right, we are back on this beautiful spring day.
00:01:29
Speaker
Has it warmed up yet, though? It was kind of chilly this morning. Oh, it looks nice out right now. It does look nice. The weather's finally turning here, at least. Well, actually, it was really warm in February, and then it got cold. So it's been a weird year. Yeah, yeah. But it's been mostly, I think, overall pretty warm. I've been very pleased with this past winter and spring. So yeah, this is take five for this episode. We're keeping track, huh?
00:01:52
Speaker
Well, I'm just saying. So, you know, ironically, we are releasing an episode today about working together as a husband and wife team, you know, how we make working together work. Right. And here we are. I mean, just arguments before recording this episode, not about the episode in particular. And during the episode, but hence take five. All right. But it's a nice spring day. Everything's fine. Everything's fine.
00:02:16
Speaker
Also, in case you listen to the last episode and you think it's always perfect, it's not. But it's okay. We should append this episode to that episode. But anyways, I'm feeling pretty good. I just got up from a mid-morning nap not too long ago.
Huberman Lab & Rest Protocol Discussion
00:02:30
Speaker
And in case you're wondering, it's like, well, it just hit 11 a.m. But when we started recording, it was 10 a.m. Yeah, here we are. Gives you some insight into our morning, but I do feel phenomenal. One of my favorite podcasts to listen to is the Huberman Lab podcast, right? So Huberman Lab, it's like fitness, health, longevity, you know, lots of really interesting stuff or stuff that I find interesting. One of the things that Heats talked about on that podcast is something called non-deep sleep rest.
00:02:55
Speaker
Is that protocol? No. Yeah, so there's a protocol for non deep sleep rest. Basically, it's this 10 minute protocol that he has. If you just YouTube, Huberman lab, non deep sleep rest protocol, this will pop up. I've heard you doing it. It sounds like kind of like a guided meditation.
00:03:12
Speaker
Yeah, and I don't understand really the science behind it, but what they say it does is in 10 minutes of this non-deep sleep rest, you can get the benefits of, you know, or the equivalent of one to two hours of restorative sleep. So I gave that a shot this morning and fell asleep about three quarters of the way through. Don't know if that means it works or if you're supposed to fall asleep during it, but I did. And I probably only slept five minutes after it ended, but I feel pretty great.
00:03:37
Speaker
How do you feel like it compares to a cup of coffee? Probably about the equivalent. With that said, I drink an incredible amount. I have a lot of caffeine each day. You've given your pre-workout to friends and had to warn them before that it might cause shaking because it's so intense. But anyways, enough about that. What we're talking about today is one simple tip for increasing engagement. This is something that we've been talking about
00:04:01
Speaker
recording an episode about for a while now. And I think it's just one of those things, such a simple tweak that you can make to your marketing efforts and have, I think, disproportionately big results, right? So basically, we're talking about how to write a better hook.
00:04:17
Speaker
And how to write something gets people actually to read your stuff. Yeah. And so if you're wondering why you should care about hooks, I guess here's, I'll outline the problem for you. All right. We create a lot of content. All right. And I'm using the Royal We here. All right. Collectively, all of us listeners as well.
00:04:34
Speaker
And I mean content in the widest sense of the word, too. So not just blog posts. My mind typically goes to blog posts. Yours might, too. But maybe you shot a wedding and you have some incredible images to share. Maybe you wrote a blog post, contained just some great advice. You recorded a podcast episode. You made a TikTok video. Yeah, recorded a YouTube video. Whatever it is, you have something to share. The problem seems to be, how do you get people to actually look at it? You know the content's good.
Content Creation vs. Sharing
00:04:58
Speaker
How do you get more eyeballs on that content?
00:05:00
Speaker
And so you believe the way to do that is to write a better hook. That's right. You learn how to write an effective hook. So, you know, I think at the end of the day, we spend 80% of our time creating content or a lot of us, right? And only 20% of our time sharing that content. And I think those numbers should be reversed, right? And of course, those aren't like, you know, the actual statistics necessarily, but just to, you know, paint a picture here.
00:05:25
Speaker
So in reality, I think we should be spending far more time getting that content shared and distributed than we do actually say writing the post. And we've experimented with this recently in our own business. I think like a year or two ago, when we would talk about a new piece of content on Instagram, we would just post like an image, no text on it. And then we tried adding the blog post title, and that maybe got a little bit more engagement, a little bit more saves.
00:05:52
Speaker
And then we realize like, well, instead of just like seeing the blog post title, which sometimes we've chosen a specific title for a post because of search engines and search engine intent. Like what if we get creative and we find a good hook for it. So something that really draws people in and we've noticed a dramatic increase in our engagement. And this is just on Instagram.
00:06:12
Speaker
Yeah, and we noticed this work on Instagram, and then we started thinking, you know, why aren't we doing this kind of across the board everywhere? Right. And, you know, I don't know if you've fallen into this as well, but I think for us, it was just a matter of like, you know, we got in sort of this rote routine of, you know, doing the same thing we'd always done, right? And then all of a sudden, kind of one day woke up to like, hey, our engagement's way down, or our engagement is down compared to what it used to be, you
Defining and Utilizing Hooks
00:06:36
Speaker
know?
00:06:36
Speaker
and trying to sort that out and test different things. And again, you know, I think that there's so much effort that goes into creating content that sometimes the how you're going to distribute it to that gets a little bit overlooked. And so how we started approaching even sharing our content changed a lot with some of these revelations, right?
00:06:55
Speaker
So that's, I think, what we're talking about today. And I think that these tips can be applied to headlines, headings, opening paragraphs of posts, social media captions, even YouTube videos, right? You know, even though you're not writing a hook necessarily for a YouTube video, you might be scripting one. It's something you say, but if you think about a video, right? Anybody who does YouTube, right, and does it well, they'll tell you that the first couple seconds of that video are the most important. Right. Capturing somebody's attention and then giving them a reason to stick around.
00:07:23
Speaker
So I feel like a lot of times you see somebody enter their video, maybe talk, say what they're going to talk about. They'll give you the hook. So like why to watch it. And then they'll say like, stick around for the end and you'll get this extra tip. Yeah. Something like that. Or they just, they just preview their content so that, you know, you, you want to listen to the whole thing, right? So I think learning to write hooks is just a great practice for learning how to create compelling content. So how so?
00:07:50
Speaker
So, you know, one of the ways that that this is sort of changed the way that we create content is I've actually started to come up with content ideas first by writing hooks first. All right. So what I mean, like just stuff that I'd be interesting or I think would be interesting. So I'm writing a bunch of hooks down and I say, oh, that would make a great blog post or a podcast episode or video. Right. And so I'm sort of leading with the hook and then creating the content around that hook.
00:08:16
Speaker
And are you creating these based on existing content or just like topics that you like to write about or that you teach about? Like how do you even start coming up with that?
00:08:26
Speaker
Yeah, that's great. So, you know, whenever I'm trying to brainstorm content ideas, a lot of times there's, I mean, I'm always interested in something, right? And so I might just start writing down ideas, you know, not necessarily having preexisting content on that idea, but I have found that when I'm coming up with hooks for our content, so anytime we create a piece of content now, we try to come up with at least 10 hooks, right? And so as I'm writing those ideas, sometimes I'll come up with a great hook that was meant to be for that episode or that blog post or whatever,
00:08:54
Speaker
And as I'm coming up with that, I realized, well, that doesn't quite fit, but that would make its own great piece of content, right? So it's just a great, it's just an easy way to come up with more content ideas as well. Okay, so I feel like we've kind of outlined a few different ways that hooks can be used, like emails, social media, sales pages. Before we like get more into hooks, can you define what a hook actually is? Because I feel like we've had a few different definitions vaguely floating out, out there.
00:09:24
Speaker
And maybe we should, maybe we should have started with this. People listening and they're like, I still don't understand what a hook is. So how I'm defining the hook, you know, my working definition is a hook is a statement that grabs someone's attention,
Hook Writing Principles
00:09:36
Speaker
right? A hook is a statement that grabs someone's attention. Now, depending on, you know, I think in different settings, a hook is going to mean maybe slightly different things. So for instance, if you were a student in school and you're, and you're
00:09:47
Speaker
learning about writing a hook, it's probably that first sentence of an essay, right? But still, again, I think this definition works. A hook is a statement that grabs someone's attention. If you're a copywriter or you're working with a copywriter, they might define hook as sort of the big idea of a given page or post or whatnot.
00:10:05
Speaker
But at the end of the day, I think a good hook, it's a statement that grabs someone's attention. So we talked a lot about this on podcast, but one of the most important questions a marketer can be asking is what's the next step? Whether it's email, ad campaign, whatever, you know, a hook is really what makes the next step possible, right? It's what initially grabs someone's attention and hopefully draws them in. So if somebody sees your post on Instagram and you have a good hook, the goal is to get them to click off Instagram and read the next blog post so it keeps them moving
00:10:35
Speaker
Yeah, so basically like if you're writing a social media caption, right? You should have a, or you're creating a social media post. There should be some sort of hook there. And we're going to get into the principles of writing a hook here in a minute. But basically you want to open a loop, right? You want to catch somebody's attention somehow and draw them in.
00:10:55
Speaker
Okay. All right. And if you want them to take another step, so you're trying to get them from Instagram, maybe to complete some sort of action, maybe to listen to a podcast episode or to read a blog post, you need to open that loop in a way that encourages them to actually, you know, click a link and go off that platform elsewhere. Right. But the hook is really what draws them in. Do you feel like there's a difference between a hook and something like clickbait?
00:11:19
Speaker
Yeah. You know, I think that's a good question too, because there's a lot of ways to catch people's attention that aren't great. Right. So, you know, I think hooks help people get to the next step. I think if I had to come up with a distinction between a hook and clickbait is clickbait is something that intentionally mislead somebody. All right. So it's something that's purely or merely to get somebody's grab somebody's attention, but it's unrelated to the content in which you're sending them or to the is unrelated to the place in which you're sending them.
00:11:49
Speaker
Whereas a hook, it's simply drawing people deeper into your content.
00:11:57
Speaker
Absolutely. So here's how I've outlined this. I think I have three principles for writing a good hook that I want to talk about. And then I have, you know, sort of five frameworks or, you know, maybe more practical strategies for writing your next hook. Okay. All right. So let's go through those three ideas first. The first one is to elicit an emotional response. So basically we want to, you know, peak somebody's curiosity. We want to get people fired up. We want to use humor to kind of break a pattern, right? Mm-hmm.
00:12:25
Speaker
We want to elicit some sort of emotional response. The second thing that we want to do is we want to make it personal. And I think that this is something that we constantly have to go back and look at our titles and ask ourselves, am I speaking broadly here to just everyone?
00:12:43
Speaker
or am I making this personal for someone? This is why things like client avatars and knowing who you're speaking to is so important.
Strategies for Creating Hooks
00:12:51
Speaker
You want to make it personal. Why should specific client avatar care? Why should a specific person care? As our assistant Kayla said yesterday, you want to speak to an audience of one. I think that makes for a much better hook.
00:13:08
Speaker
Anything else on that that I should add? So each hook should do both of those things plus your third tip. Yes. And then the third thing is draw people in. You basically want to keep it punchy and then keep people moving through the process, right? Like a comedian, right? When it lead with the punch line. So you want to make sure that as you draw people in, you use some sort of transition line, like here's why or swipe for more, right? Or click to see, right? But when you,
00:13:38
Speaker
It should open a loop and draw people in, but it shouldn't also, it shouldn't deliver everything, right? Right. Okay. So those are really, I think, the three principles of writing a good hook, eliciting some sort of emotional response, making it personal, and drawing people in, right? One thing I want to say about eliciting an emotional response, that is not to manipulate emotions, all right?
00:13:59
Speaker
One of the things that might be helpful here is Maslow's hierarchy of needs. So understanding kind of what category it fits in for people. Is it a physiological need? Is it a safety need? Do people want to belong to something? Is it something for the reputation? Is it something that they want to be? So I think if you don't know what Maslow's hierarchy of needs is, look that up. I think it's a helpful framework to understand, especially for writing copy.
00:14:27
Speaker
Right. I think that if you get into some of the frameworks that might give people a better reference for how to write a hook. How to write a hook. Yeah, for sure. Okay. So a few things to think about, you know, as you're writing a hook or a few maybe different ways that you can write a hook. One is to make a controversial statement. All right. So, you know, for instance, we had a post and it was don't set a budget for 2023, do this instead. Right. And we posted this like at the beginning of the year.
00:14:51
Speaker
Yeah. And so this is something that's like, it's such an interesting tactic because it is actually a pet peeve of mine when people open with, all right, this is going to be controversial, but, and then they insert something that's actually not controversial, you know, which is basically the tactic itself. Yeah. So, you know, I think recently, I can't remember, I think it was a photographer and she posted, I know this is controversial, but you shouldn't be spending hours editing your photos.
00:15:19
Speaker
And I'm like, but is it controversial? I don't think anybody's sitting there like, oh, I need to be spending hours editing my photos. But just by saying that something's going to be controversial or by saying something that could be sort of controversial, like not setting a budget for 2023, what we were not saying was, hey, going to 2023 with no plan for your money. But people might stop and say, okay, well, why shouldn't I do that? Yeah, especially because everybody else on the internet around that time was saying, you should set a budget for this year.
00:15:47
Speaker
Yeah, talking about that upcoming year and why you should set a budget.
00:15:52
Speaker
We are promoting a podcast episode we had done with Shana Skidmore. Which is a great one, by the way. It's a great one. And she just has a different plan. And so we were promoting that. Yeah. The second thing that you can do is ask a provocative question. All right. And so I guess this is pretty similar to making a controversial statement, you know, but, you know, what's the best platform for SEO? You know, there's a lot of arguments out there about that. Or, you know, I guess, are the robots taking over, you know, and talking about,
00:16:18
Speaker
Chat GPT. Yeah, chat GPT and AI. And these are just a couple examples of, you know, from different social media posts, you know, by asking a provocative question, again, it opens that loop and people want it closed. People want to understand, okay, well, you know, what do you mean by that? Or, you know, what should I do about that? How should I think about that? Or maybe people have, maybe people think they know what you're going to say, right? And so they kind of come ready to argue and engage with your post.
00:16:46
Speaker
Three, break the pattern. So suddenly change a common sane or belief. Maybe you don't need a nap or you don't need coffee. You need this sleep, I can't remember all the, an acronym, but do this sleep thing instead.
00:17:02
Speaker
Yeah, just making a small adjustment maybe to a common phrase. So as people are reading it, you know, again, it's kind of what they expect, but then they stop and say, oh, you know, that's funny or that's what you're, you know, whatever, right? But again, hopefully leads to you being able to share, you know, whatever you believe around a given topic.
Examples & Experimentation
00:17:20
Speaker
The fourth one.
00:17:21
Speaker
dropping people into the middle of a story. Yeah, and this is one of my favorites. I think like if you've ever watched a TV show, right? This is an example of I think what good storytellers do is they drop you in the middle and then you sort of figure it out along the way. And again, it's all about opening that loop. When you're dropped in the middle of action, you wanna see how that action resolves itself. And so you might have a social media post that goes something like,
00:17:46
Speaker
XYZ happened at a wedding. I don't know. And the bride walked out. You'll never believe what happens next. I don't know. Obviously that's like maybe way more dramatic than what you would actually include, right? But by dropping people in the middle of the story, I think again, you're capturing their attention and they want to understand how that story resolves itself.
00:18:07
Speaker
One of the things that I'll mention here is this is a good tactic for maybe something like a social media post, not always a good tactic for something like a sales page. Because at the very outset of something like a sales page or a services page, people need to know what it is that they're in for on that page. They need to know the what right up front.
00:18:28
Speaker
They don't need all the details about the what, but they kind of need, and then you can move into maybe dropping somebody in the middle of a story. And then fifth, making a promise. We did one recently that was use this code to start ranking on Google today.
00:18:44
Speaker
That's right. And obviously there is no magic code to start ranking on Google today. But it was an opportunity to share some content that we created around SEO for people who were looking just for quick fixes. And so we wrote this post about I think common misperceptions about SEO or things that we wish people knew about SEO.
00:19:02
Speaker
And one of them is that it's not like you plug in the right code and pull the right levers in the back of your website and then all of a sudden you're ranking number one on Google for a specific search. There's more that goes into it than that and there aren't really quick fixes.
00:19:18
Speaker
I mean, sometimes there are, sometimes you have all the pieces in place and really it is like you accidentally set the page to no index, right? But in general, there's no quick fixes. And that's what we were trying to convey in that post. Now, of the examples that we just included, and we'll try to link to some of these examples in the show notes if you want to check them out so you can just specifically see examples of what we're talking about.
00:19:40
Speaker
You'll notice that a lot of these examples, they utilize combinations of these principles. And they're all, I think, pretty similar at the end of the day. Like making a controversial statement and asking a provocative question, both, you're basically trying to get people fired up about something.
00:19:56
Speaker
I think it's worth reiterating kind of as we wrap up this episode as well that it's not about manipulating emotions. You know, it's not about, you know, I don't know, just, you know, yelling fire or, you know, or whatever, but it is trying to, you know, break the normal pattern of things.
00:20:17
Speaker
Yeah, and I would think that most people would be best served by mixing up the kinds of hooks that they're doing because your audience might get used to seeing the same kind of hook every time and then just realize what you're doing. Yeah, and this is one of those things where even sometimes we'll come up with what we think is a really good hook.
00:20:37
Speaker
and it just doesn't fly. I get the engagement that we thought it would get. But one of the interesting things about doing this is that you don't actually have to change the content. You can just experiment changing the hook. If it's a matter of getting people to content, I think a lot of times it's like we can experiment with different hooks and see if that kind of fixes that issue before having to go back and feel like, oh, I need to create another blog post and maybe that blog post will do better.
00:21:04
Speaker
So when you're sharing stuff across social media especially or creating video about content you've created, you can change, it's like on YouTube, before re-recording a video, try just changing the thumbnail. So you can test some of those different things to catch somebody's attention and test your content that way instead of actually going through the whole process of changing up the content.
00:21:27
Speaker
So anyways, I hope that's helpful. Again, just in terms of how it works within our system, we, like I said, we're spending a lot more time taking a look at the piece of content, so like an episode like this, and then sitting down and trying to come up with 10 hooks for the episode at the very least. I think the more you come up with, the more likely you're gonna stumble on something that you think is good.
00:21:47
Speaker
And, you know, don't be surprised if you do that to actually come up with ideas for other related content that you can create that maybe that hook doesn't quite fit the content you've just created. And so I found it really to be helpful as we plan content for the future as well. So I hope this episode is helpful for you too.
Listener Engagement & Closing Remarks
00:22:05
Speaker
As always, if you have questions about our content, feel free to send us a DM on Instagram. That's probably one of the best ways to get in touch with us at Davy and Krista. And you can always send us an email as well. Yeah, thanks for joining us, guys.
00:22:20
Speaker
Thanks for tuning into the Brands That Book Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing and leaving a review in iTunes. For show notes and other resources, head on over to dvandchrista.com.