RESEARCHING THE HOOK

In this section, I’m going to share with you the most practical ways we’ve effectively found the perfect hook for our own and our customer’s Facebook ad campaigns. Yes, it’s time-consuming and no it’s not glamorous, but if you’re not doing this for your own or for a customer’s business, it’s going to be very challenging for you to find a great hook without it.

There are four basic ways to do research in order to “hack the hook.” They are as follows:

1.Google

2.Surveys

3.Interviews

4.Facebook

GOOGLE THE HOOK

As previously discussed, when it came for David Ogilvy to do the research to eventually create what is known to be the greatest advertising hook of all time, namely: “At 60 miles the loudest noise in this new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock,” Ogilvy did his research, starting with the owner’s manual. Next time you get into your car, look in glove box and see if the car manual is still in there. You’ll soon realize that the owner’s manual for any make or model is pretty thick and incredibly boring. But dull research is oftentimes just what’s needed to discover a great hook.

 that research paid off handsomely. Ogilvy and Mather were able to keep the Mercedes-Benz advertising account for over 20 years, filling his agency’s covers with millions of dollars in revenue. And it all started because he did his research. An example of one of his ads i with the hook “You give up things when you buy the Mercedes-Benz 230S. Things like rattles, rust, and shabby workmanship.”

If you haven’t gotten the point by now, it’s clear that Ogilvy didn’t skimp out on his research, which means there’s no reason why you should either. Unlike Ogilvy, you don’t have to go to the local library or fly to Stuttgart, Germany to figure out your hook. That’s because now you have Google. Your research starts with a simple Google search although I wouldn’t mind flying to Germany on Mercedes-Benz’s dime.

For our brand Ketogenic Living, our hook started with a simple Google search, as well. To be fair, we had some experience with intermittent fasting so we weren’t going into this completely naïve. If you’re a consultant for an agency, you may need to start this with an even simpler Google search like the primary keyword for the customer’s product. If you’re doing this research for your own business, our Google search behavior will probably more closely mimic yours.

To start, we typed in “intermittent fasting questions” , and Google pulled up about 500,000 results in 0.74 seconds. Immediately, all with the number of searches for this keyword phrase, there seemed to be some interest in the topic, which is always a good sign.

We then clicked on the FAQ article by expert and The New York Times best-selling author John Romaniello. Within that article, we discovered the first question: “Fasting for 16/24/36 Hours Seems Hard; Like, Weawwy Hard—Will I Die?” . It seems that there’s some contrarian thought on the topic, with the perception that fasting doesn’t seem like it’s all that healthy.