Write hooks for each level of awareness

1. Why ads hit a wall

You start with the smallest audience that converts best. As you scale, you move out to audiences that are progressively larger and convert worse.

For a business that believes it has saturated its market, the view here is that it has not run out of market. It has taken the easy buyers. The wall is the quality of its ads, not the size of the market, and the better the ads, the bigger the audience they will convert. The way you get better ads is to make more of them — far more.

How far up an ad can climb depends on how good the creative is: how strong the hook is, how strong the offer is, and how strong the person delivering it is. The better those three, the colder the traffic the ad can convert, and the further it scales. So the aim is ads that convert the highest share of the largest audience you can reach. Offered as experience rather than as a rule, that takes a process that produces strong ads consistently; that process is SOP 119 — Assemble hook, meat and call to action.

SOP 34 — Front-load the opening seconds, section 5, gives its own account of why advertisements stop scaling.

2. The five levels

The levels come from a copywriter's framework. Audiences run from the bottom (warmest and smallest) to the top (coldest and largest):

Level	What the customer knows
1. Most aware (the bottom)	They know your product and only need to know the deal
2. Product-aware	They know what you sell but are not sure it is right for them
3. Solution-aware	They know the result they want but do not know your product can deliver it
4. Problem-aware	They sense they have a problem but do not know a solution exists
5. Completely unaware (the top)	They do not know they have a problem or a need

The adaptation. Labels are clean and reality is messy: nobody in a real audience has been met who sits neatly on one of these levels. What is known is that the larger the audience you reach, the more varied and the more exceptional your ads have to be. So the stepped model is treated as a continuous one instead, which is said to be more useful to people running a business. The picture used for both versions is a pyramid, drawn as an image.

3. When to write expansion hooks

Get the order right before you write anything for colder levels.

• Once your ads convert, the work is about doing more of what works, and doing it better, far more than doing something new. That choice is SOP 40 — Choose the next growth move.
• But if you do need something new, especially to reach a broader audience, you write expansion hooks.

The situation this is for: you have capped your existing ad capacity and cannot spend more money profitably. You likely need to refresh your creative. If you have done that too, then you may need to widen the audience your hooks are aimed at.

Why widening works: hooks that keep leaning on your offer or your proof convert a small slice of a larger audience very well. To take a bigger slice, meet the audience where they are.

4. The hook each level answers to

Each level has a kind of hook it typically responds to. The templates below are the ones given; the brackets are yours to fill.

Level	The hook is typically	Template	What it is doing
Most aware	Offer driven	50% off your best-selling product for the rest of the month	Aimed at people who already know the business and what it sells. A specific offer with a clear incentive, to get people on the fence to act
Product-aware	Proof driven	Why 10,000 people chose you last month to solve their [problem]	Specific results and breadth of experience, to build credibility fast and to set you apart
Solution-aware	Promise driven	The fastest way to [the result they want], introducing your product	A specific, big outcome, fast. You can make the promise and the timeframe more specific to make it more compelling
Problem-aware	Pain driven	Tired of [the specific problem]? There is a better way	Aimed at people who know they have a problem or a need but not yet the solutions available
Completely unaware	Curiosity driven	The hidden danger in your daily routine that costs you [money, time or health]	Suggests an unknown issue is costing them, to make them curious and lead them toward seeing the problem

What each level knows:

• Most aware: they already know the business and its products or services.
• Product-aware: people who know about the product you sell but do not yet know that you sell it (the other sense is in section 8).
• Solution-aware: they are aware of the problem and know solutions exist, but they may not know your specific product or how it compares. They know the general kinds of solution but have not settled on one. Here you focus the message on introducing solutions.
• Problem-aware: they know they have a problem or a need but are not yet aware of the solutions available. They might be actively searching for a way to solve it, but they do not know the specific products or services that could help.
• Completely unaware: they do not know they have a problem. The hook makes them curious and starts them down the road to seeing the problem, and to thinking about solutions they did not know they needed.

5. Worked examples: a consumer product and a business service

The same five levels, written once for a consumer product (a weight-loss meal-replacement shake) and once for a business service (a marketing agency).

Level	Consumer example	Business example
Most aware	A new formula with 25% more protein and the same taste	Social media management at 20% off for new clients
Product-aware	Why 9 out of 10 users reached their goal weight within 3 months	How the agency raised return on investment by 150% for 5 different industries
Solution-aware	Lose 15 pounds in 30 days with a meal-replacement system described as scientifically proven	Double your online sales in 6 months with data-driven marketing
Problem-aware	Frustrated with crash diets that don't last? There is a sustainable way to lose weight	Is your website making sales? You might be missing some crucial elements
Completely unaware	The hidden hormonal imbalance said to make 1 in 3 Americans gain weight	The unexpected way your business loses $1000s each month in revenue it never collects

The figures in these examples belong to the examples. They are not results anyone reported.

6. The widest hooks

Memes, and content that works like a meme, attract the largest share of an audience. If you aim at a narrower group than everyone, that group has its own memes, specific to its culture, and you can advertise with those in much the same way. A meme that is relevant to a specific audience pulls like a flame pulls a moth, and it multiplies how many people see the ad. The advice is to consider testing them.

How wide to aim in general: make a hook specific enough to reach the right people, and broad enough to reach as many of them as you can.

7. Frameworks, not a recipe

Treat the table above as a set of frameworks, not a formula. The cases below show why.

• An offer to everyone. You may see a national ad that leads with an offer to the whole country. That works only because the whole country already knows the product, and the brand has already spent heavily to make sure everyone knows who it is. With a known product and a known brand, it only has to make an offer. A business nobody has heard of, with a product people need educating about, that led with an offer to a national audience would be doing the nearest thing to setting money on fire.
• Curiosity that converts the warm audience too. At the other extreme, you might see broad content that sparks curiosity and still gets a very warm audience to buy — the way a film trailer converts a wide audience and its existing fans at once.

So none of this is fixed. It is another set of tools for when you write your batch of hooks.

8. What this page does not decide for you

• What product-aware means. Read one way, it means customers who know what you sell but are not sure it is right for them; read another, people who know about the product you sell but do not yet know that you sell it. Read the first way, the proof hook speaks to people who already know your product. Read the second way, it speaks to people who know the kind of product but not that you sell it. This page does not settle which reading is right.
• How many hooks go in each level. No rule is set here; one paid-ads team's practice follows. Its ads run probably around 70 percent middle and bottom against 30 percent colder, and it says it needs more for colder audiences. On organic content it sets no fixed share per platform: platforms such as TikTok, X and Threads carry a lot of its colder pieces, and on a long-video platform most clips on its clips channel sit in the middle and bottom, where its main channel also leans.
• How to tell which level a given audience sits at. Not established on this page.

9. The procedure

1. Work out which level, or levels, of awareness you are aiming at. For paid ads, one practice here usually starts at the bottom, with people ready to act now, and works up.
2. Go through your own past winners.
3. Write fifty or so hooks. Either divide them into buckets that hit each level of awareness, or aim the majority of them broader than the hooks you run now.
4. Check the spread. When 90% of the hooks sit in the most-aware bucket, move some out into the other levels to reach a bigger slice.
5. When in doubt, aim a little broader. The warm audience still responds, and you pull in some of the colder audience as well.
6. Move on to the meat of the ad (SOP 120 — Use the five ad meat formats) and put the pieces together with SOP 119.

10. The checklist

Question	The answer
Why ads stop scaling	The ads are not good enough for colder audiences; the market is not used up
How you get better ads	Make more of them, far more
What decides how cold an ad can go	How strong the hook, the offer and the person delivering it are
The five levels, warmest first	Most aware, product-aware, solution-aware, problem-aware, completely unaware
The five levels, coldest first	Completely unaware, problem-aware, solution-aware, product-aware, most aware
When to write expansion hooks	After you have capped spend and refreshing creative has not helped; then you may need them
The hook each level typically takes	Offer, proof, promise, pain, curiosity
The widest hooks	Memes, including a narrower group's own memes; consider testing them
How many hooks in a batch	Fifty or so
How many in each level	No rule here; one team's paid ads run about 70 percent middle and bottom, 30 colder
The spread warning	90% in most aware means spread them out
When in doubt	Go a little broader
What product-aware means	This page does not settle which reading is right

11. What this page does not cover

Where the hooks come from, and how hooks, meat and calls to action are put together each week, are SOP 119. The formats for the body of the ad are SOP 120. The anatomy of a single hook is SOP 121 — Write a hook, and the seventy-twenty-ten split of hook effort is SOP 122 — Split hook effort seventy, twenty, ten. Calling out the audience is SOP 32 and SOP 33.

Advertising rules on health and income claims are not covered on this page.