Write ads and gather proof 18 of 26 in this group
SOP 121
Write a hook
What this page is for. Use it whenever you write the opening of an ad, a post, an email or any piece of outreach. It gives what a hook is, why it gets most of your time, the two parts every hook has, the verbal and nonverbal kinds, the formats to write it in for variety, and what a strong hook buys you against what a weak one costs.
SOP-121-Write-a-hook.md
1. What a hook is
A hook is whatever gets your audience's attention. All content, ads and outreach have one. It is whatever people see or hear first: the first few seconds of a video, the first thing you hear, the first line or the first image your eyes land on.
Good hooks get people to notice you and pay attention. Bad hooks go unnoticed. Put another way, a good hook makes a sale: it sells the person on paying attention. The reaction you want is oh, this is for me.
So study the hooks other advertisers use, especially the ones aimed at your audience. How wide to aim a hook is on SOP 118 — Write hooks for each level of awareness, section 6.
2. Why the hook gets most of your time
If nobody notices your ad, nobody buys what you sell, and nothing else matters. The whole business hinges on those first few seconds, and the vast majority of business owners ignore them.
The claim made for good hooks. Knowing how to write them, it is said, can multiply the number of people who pay attention to your ads, content or outreach by 5 or 10, and sometimes by 100. So by mastering hooks alone you could multiply your business by 5, 10 or 100, change nothing else, and immediately get that many more leads for the same effort. It is stated flatly that this is no overstatement. What better hooks will do for your own business is not established on this page.
The rule that follows. If you have ten hours to advertise, spend the first eight on the hooks. It is said that the longer the advertising has gone on, the less anything else has been cared about.
The obvious objection — how can you spend hours on something that lasts a few seconds? — is answered with: you have to know how. The rest of this page is how.
The case given for it. An advertisement failed. The only thing changed was its opening sentence, re-recorded, and the new version became a large success. The product, the offer, the price and the place to buy it all stayed the same. The first opening introduced the seller as important. The second opened with a question about the viewer's own life. The lesson drawn: the audience does not care about you. The hook has to make them feel important, not you. Since then, the person in that case spends as much thought on the first sentence as on everything else combined, and spends weeks dialing in the first few sentences of an email, a post, an ad, a webinar or a training.
3. How a hook works: two parts
| Part | What it does |
|---|---|
| The call-out | Gets the prospect to think this is for me. It works verbally and nonverbally |
| The condition for value | Promises value if they consume it. This is the hook proper |
The call-out grabs attention so the promise can be delivered. Picture a loud club: people shouting, music pounding. One sound cuts through all of it and you turn around — your own name. That is known as the cocktail party effect: even with a great deal going on, one thing can still catch and hold your attention. The job of the call-out is to use that effect to cut through the noise. The call-outs themselves, in words and without them, are on SOP 32 and SOP 33.
The condition for value is a promise: consume this and you get value; if you, the person being aimed at, do this, you get this.
- Sometimes the condition is explicit. The pattern is: if [the target] [does the condition] [they get the reward]. A worked example: moms who watch this video will know how to get their kids to behave.
- Sometimes the promise is implicit. A mother shows her child behaving well in the middle of chaos, then turns to the camera and says: look how I did it.
Communication has far more factors than this page claims to understand. The bottom line here is that people will consume something if they judge what it costs them to be smaller than what they get back, and it is the hook that sets up that judgment.
4. Verbal and nonverbal hooks
Taken as widely as possible, a hook is anything that makes someone notice your ad. Hooks fall into two kinds: verbal, meaning words, and nonverbal, meaning visuals and sounds.
Verbal hooks, words that get attention, come in these kinds:
| Kind | What it is |
|---|---|
| Labels | Words your ideal customer identifies with |
| Questions | Yes questions, and open questions |
| Conditionals | A scenario or condition that leads to a result, a lesson or a command |
| Commands | A direct command or suggestion telling the audience to do something |
| Statements | Given by example only |
| Lists or steps | Given by example only |
| Narratives | Stories and anecdotes |
| Exclamations or provocative statements | Strong emotion, such as surprise or sadness |
The examples given for each kind are drawn from the best-performing hooks in content and ads, so they are winners in practice. They do not appear on this page.
Nonverbal hooks are noises and visuals. Back at the party: a dropped tray of dishes gets everyone's attention, and so does a knife tapped against a champagne glass. They work for different reasons — one signals an embarrassing disaster, the other important news — but in either case everyone wants to know what happens next. If the platform allows it, good advertisers use verbal and nonverbal hooks together.
5. Write it in more than one format
For variety, write the same hook in several formats. One example, for a chiropractor, in each:
- Conditions: a chiropractor is told that this video will bring them more leads.
- Labels: chiropractors are addressed by name and offered a gift.
- Questions: a choice between struggling for patients for life and fixing it in 6 weeks.
- Commands: watch this if you want more patients.
- Statements: the rules the top 1% of chiropractic clinics follow.
- Lists or steps: 11 ways chiropractors win more patients without paid ads.
- Stories: a sudden moment when the phone starts ringing nonstop.
Set against the verbal kinds in section 4, this list has no exclamations, and it calls narratives stories. See section 7.
6. What a strong hook buys and a weak one costs
The first impression is the strongest one with every person, and every customer. It is either a tailwind or a headwind. The hook is that first impression, and for most businesses it is underwhelming.
When you nail your hooks, you:
- win more clicks across content, ads and outbound, and with them more revenue;
- get better clicks on them, which brings even more revenue;
- get more and better customers for the same spend, which lowers what it costs to get each one and brings more revenue, more profit, or both;
- open markets that mediocre hooks could not reach profitably;
- reach new levels of scale, because colder traffic still converts.
When your hooks are weak, you:
- waste money on ads that don't work;
- spend more to get worse customers, and make less;
- struggle to scale past a certain spend;
- struggle to get as many leads as your impressions suggest you should;
- get worse customers, who are less likely to buy;
- get capped in all your advertising, because you cannot expand.
7. What this page does not decide for you
- Whether exclamations belong in the variety pass. They appear as a kind of verbal hook in section 4, but not in the list of formats for variety in section 5, which gives no reason. Not established on this page.
- Which kind works best. The best hooks were sorted into categories and charted as shares of a pie. What those shares are is not established on this page.
- How long a hook is, beyond the first few seconds, first line or first image. One process example caps a hook taken from top performers at a sentence or two, or three to five seconds; that limit is given for collecting hooks, and this page gives no other figure for a hook's length.
8. The checklist
| Question | The answer |
|---|---|
| What a hook is | Whatever gets attention first: the first seconds, line, sound or image |
| What a good hook sells | Paying attention |
| The reaction you want | This is for me |
| How much of ten hours goes on hooks | The first eight |
| Good hooks contain | Some way to catch attention (the call-out), and some implication of value if they consume it |
| When the value is stated | Sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly |
| The two kinds | Verbal (words) and nonverbal (visuals and sounds) |
| Use both | If the platform allows it |
| Formats for variety | Conditions, labels, questions, commands, statements, lists or steps, stories |
| What better hooks will do for your business | Not established on this page |
9. What this page does not cover
Where to find hooks that have already won is SOP 119 — Assemble hook, meat and call to action, section 3. Splitting hook effort across proven, adjacent and new ideas, and the number of hooks to record for each kind of content, are SOP 122 — Split hook effort seventy, twenty, ten. Hooks by level of awareness are SOP 118. Headlines are SOP 21, and the first seconds of a video are SOP 34 — Front-load the opening seconds.
Targeting and ad budgets are not covered on this page.
Terms defined on this page
- Call-out
- The opening of an ad or hook whose one job is to make the right person think 'this is for me'. It can work with words or without them.
- Condition for value
- The part of a hook that promises value for paying attention. Sometimes it is spelled out (if you do this, you get that); sometimes it is only implied.
- Hook
- Whatever grabs the audience's attention first: the opening seconds, first line, sound or image. It gives a reason to keep watching and gets most of the preparation time: of ten hours on an ad, the first eight.
- Label (call-out)
- A word or phrase that puts people in a group by feature, trait, title or place. It works best when ideal customers identify with it; a label they would not use about themselves collects nobody.
- Nonverbal hooks
- Sounds and visuals that grab attention, like a dropped tray or a knife tapped on a glass. Strong advertisers pair them with verbal hooks where the platform allows.
- Verbal hooks
- Words that grab attention: labels, questions, conditionals, commands, statements, lists or steps, stories, and exclamations or provocative claims.