SURVEYING THE HOOK

Sensing that we might be onto something, we went back to Google, but this time we typed “intermittent fasting issues” and it was almost like Google knew through its suggestion tool. The Google suggestion tool is a great way to find the most popular key word searches—search results that could become the root of a great hook.

The top hit was “5 Reasons Intermittent Fasting Could Become a Bad Idea,” an article by celebrity nutritionist and fitness expert JJ Virgin Extremely promising. In that article, we found this little hook: “Is breakfast really the most important meal of the day?” . Getting more excited, we went back to the bar, and this time we typed in “breakfast pros and cons” as shown in Figure 16.10. Once again, Google suggestions assisted us in our search direction. The second hit was an article published by The Health Sciences Academy and titled “When Skipping Breakfast May Actually Be Good for You.” Out of this article we pulled much of the research for what we used for our lead magnet.

We didn’t plagiarize. We didn’t copy. We just simply borrowed the hook much like Ogilvy borrowed from Pierce Arrow for Rolls Royce. But once we figured out that skipping breakfast may actually be good for you, and had some solid research to back up that claim, we immediately knew we had stumbled on a great hook. How did we know?

The hook for Ketogenic Living works because:

It’s curiosity-based and contrarian.

It shatters a conventional myth “held by millions of people that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.

It educates and informs on something new and interesting

It speaks to our avatar’s potential pain point that they never have time to eat breakfast and always feel guilty about it.

If you have a new customer or you’re not particularly familiar with a market or an avatar for your product or service, a Google search to determine your hook isn’t optional—it’s essential. And if you know the market really well, going through the same steps we went through for Ketogenic Living will help you uncover pain points and desires you probably never would’ve thought of on your own. In fact, you’re going to be surprised at how much you find.

SURVEYING THE HOOK

A friend, whom I’ll call Bob, ran a Filipino mail-order bride service targeted at single men. Bob ran advertisements in “obvious” places, like USA Today.

Marketing legend Dan Kennedy asked Bob: “Are there any idiosyncrasies that your customers have in common? Where they hang out? Hobbies? The type of work they do?

Bob didn’t know. So he took a survey and discovered that 40 percent of his buyers were truckers! Bob had never noticed this before, but in hindsight it made sense. The road is a hard and lonely job. Bob could now put ads in trucking magazines and fliers and signs at truck stops. Bob could write new ads in the language of trucking, making his prospects feel immediately at home. His business skyrocketed and his ad cost plummeted.

We had the same experience when we surveyed our Facebook training customers. Almost 40 percent of them were consultants or agencies! It’s amazing what you can discover by simply asking a few questions.

There are about a dozen or more solutions you can use to build and host surveys. For us, we use Survey Monkey, which is free. We have the paid version because it correlates the data a little bit better, but regardless of whether you have a free or paid version of any survey solution software, there’s no doubt about the power of surveying your audience. If you have a list, you should be surveying your audience so you can figure out what their big concerns are, what their big desires are, and what their big pains are.