All effective digital marketing comes down to one very simple thing:
Does your content have a Hook Point?
A Hook Point is the unique idea that is presented to the reader, listener, viewer, or potential customer in the first 3 seconds of your content. Hook Points are so incredibly important (and I’ve helped celebrities like Rihanna and Taylor Swift, and companies like MindValley and MTV come up with their own), that it’s the only thing my consulting firm focuses on—and I teach people how to create their own Hook Points in a video training here.
The way I explain it to people is, a Hook Point could be an intriguing question. It could be an interesting insight. It could be a startling statistic. It could be a radical opinion. A back-door business strategy. The point is, the first 3 seconds of your content needs to reveal to the person what they’re about to watch, listen, read, or consume—and more importantly, whether or not it matters to them.
But the secret to creating effective Hook Points is not just to appeal to someone’s logic.
It’s to appeal to their emotions.
As I write about in my book, Hook Point, we are bombarded with more than 60,000,000,000 messages on our digital platforms each day. Whether it’s a text, push notification, an email, an advertisement, or a social media post, our brains have had to adjust to processing larger amounts of content than ever before.
Which means, in order to “stand out,” you need to present the person you are trying to reach with something different.
The only problem is, at this point, what is “different?”
That’s what creating a Hook Point is all about—and here are 3 proven Hook Points I have found that work.
Hook Point #1: A unique phrase, thought, title, or piece of copy (problem/solution/benefit).
“Zero to a Million Followers in 30 Days” was the main Hook Point I initially used to scale my personal brand and business.
(And what a lot of people don’t know is that building this massive social following was for that exact purpose—to have a strong Hook Point to leverage for larger opportunities.)
I set out to build a million followers in 30 days because I knew that the Hook Point would capture attention so that I could provide value to others. I was never trying to become an influencer or celebrity—I just wanted to entice people to listen to the larger story that I had to tell.
The more your unique phrase, thought, title, or combination of problem/solution/benefit can tell a story people haven’t heard before AND is emotionally appealing (who wouldn’t want to reach a million followers?), the more likely people will pay attention to it.
Hook Point #2: A concept or idea expressed through a visual format (image or video).
Many great Hook Points get people to think differently, which is why subverting expectations with your Hook Points is a good tactic for capturing people’s attention.
One way to do so is to take commonly held beliefs or phrases and flip them on their heads. For example, in a successful social video, my team and I created the Hook Point:
“WARNING!!! Safety is Dangerous.”
This challenged the commonly held belief that playing it safe was a good approach to life—instead, it encouraged people to take risks and fight for their dreams.
Hook Point #3: A product or service that is different from what this type of audience member is used to seeing.
There’s a secret to this Hook Point, and I learned it from one of the best sales copywriters on the planet, Craig Clemens.
His formula for coming up with a unique Hook Point for a product, service, or company, comes down to a simple If/Then statement. You want to point out your prospects’ problems or needs after the IF, and use your product as the solution to their problems after the THEN.
For example, if you have a product that could help improve a person’s dating life, you could use this formula:
“IF you are looking to increase the number of dates you get with attractive, high-quality, smart women/men who have it together, THEN this is going to be the most important thing you’ll ever read.”
Once you learn what Hook Points are and how to use and create them yourself, you’ll notice them everywhere. So if this is a skill you’d like help learning how to master, I encourage you to check out the Hook Point training I’ve put together over here.
