How to captivate your audience with extraordinary hooks

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My wife had already fed our dog. Undeterred, the dog sat next to her bowl with an innocent but hungry look on her face. I fell for it and gave her a second meal.

Do you see what I did there?

I used a hook to grab your attention and make you want to read on. If you're reading this, it worked.

Liz Willits defines a hook as the first thing that grabs your audience's attention. It should motivate your audience to read or watch the rest of the content. Liz, chief copywriter and owner of Content Phenom, offers this advice in her talk “Hook Your Audience: How to Grab Attention in a Crowd of Content” at Content Marketing World.

Importance of a good hook

A strong hook is the most important element in copywriting, says expert Joseph Sugarman. “If you can't grab your audience's attention immediately, you've lost them,” he notes.

Liz says without a good hook, the great content you create may never be successful. She explains that there are many different hooks, including:

• Website headline or hero image
• First line (or first few lines) of text
• Video thumbnail
• The first few seconds of a dialogue in a video
• Instagram image

Think about the papers you wrote in school. Your hook functions like a thesis. “Every line of text, every image, every video around your hook or headline should prove your thesis, your hook,” says Liz.

Hooks should be engaging, attention-grabbing and unique. They should also be true. “Bad and unethical hooks are lies. They are manipulative; they exaggerate beyond belief. They don't deliver on their promises. They're all just hot air and they feel gross,” says Liz.

Liz says that while bad hooks may provide short-term benefits, they have long-term consequences, including:

• Ethical challenges (it's just wrong)
• Legal risks
• Reputational damage
• Negative brand association
• Loss of trust
• Loss of commitment

MrBeast uses hooks effectively

Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, knows how important good hooks are. He has one of the most followed channels on YouTube. Ten months ago, MrBeast had 186 million subscribers. In July 2024, there were 289 million.

Liz says MrBeast's hooks start with his video titles. She gives some examples:

• Lamborghini vs. the largest shredder in the world
• Every country in the world is fighting for $250,000!
• From age 1 to 100, you compete for $500,000
• Stranded at sea for 7 days
• I was hunted by the military
• I built the largest Lego tower in the world

I find the titles hair-raising (in a good way). I'm curious to see which country won the $250,000, how MrBeast found his way from sea to land, and what the largest Lego tower looks like.

Liz says MrBeast’s thumbnails are also great hooks:

“They're very interesting, very colorful and stand out on YouTube. He puts a lot of effort into it because he knows (the thumbnail) is an important part of his hook or headline,” Liz says.

The first lines of dialogue are also important. When I see a new selection on my favorite streaming service, I usually decide within the first two minutes whether I want to continue watching. Liz says that MrBeast's first lines are intentional and written in a way that hooks viewers.

Here are two examples:

• “There's an assassin behind me, and if he stabs me with that rubber knife by the end of the day, he'll win a hundred grand.”
• “We are now stranded on a raft in the middle of the ocean. And there is our boat. We have been stranded for seven days now.”

You don't have to copy MrBeast, but Liz says your brand can take ordinary ideas and implement them in extraordinary, unique and engaging ways. Let's look at an example.

Developing a new approach for a SaaS company

Liz worked with Motion, a software company whose product helps users with time management and scheduling. It creates to-do lists to schedule meetings at optimal times and blocks time in your calendar for work. “This helps you stay focused and know exactly what you should be working on next, avoid forgetting deadlines and spend less time in meetings,” Liz explains.

Before coming up with her content hooks, Liz conducted customer research, interviews, user testing, and market research. She discovered why users loved Motion, how they used it, and the value it provided. This research guided her approach to hooks and helped her come up with new and unique copywriting ideas.

The original homepage opened with this headline:

“Not another productivity tool that makes you work more. We help you work less by reducing distractions by 70%.”

The accompanying text pointed out that Motion saves users two hours a day.

Liz's research revealed that competing products were using similar messages, so she reframed these common ideas in a unique and engaging way. Here's what she found:

Headline: A year now has 13 months.

Subheading: Motion increases productivity by 137% with automation and AI that intelligently plan your day, schedule meetings, and create the perfect to-do list.