HOW TO FIND THE RIGHT HOOK

By now, you probably have a fairly good understanding of what a hook is, and you may be starting to formulate ideas for improved hooks or initial hooks for your product or service. If you are, you’re on the right track. Knowing what a hook is, is important, but it is far more important to know how to find the right hook. Even if you’ve identified what you think is a good hook for your product or service, you can always refine it just a little bit more by getting clear on the following points in the section. 

IDENTIFY YOUR AVATAR

First and foremost, to write a good hook for your product or service, you must first identify your avatar. For established businesses, this is fairly straightforward and can be answered in one question: Who are my customers?

Once you’ve answered that question, your next job is to figure out what they want the most. What are their pain points, what are their fears? Write all of them down. Then identify an easy-to-implement solution that you provide in your product portfolio that will immediately solve that problem or fulfill that desire.

Ask yourself this question: What is the solution my products or services can create for them? Remember, if your initial offer to cold traffic is going to be a lead magnet or a low-priced offer that leads them ultimately to your full-priced product, the solution for a front-end hook shouldn’t be your entire product (remember our house flipping example in the first section of this chapter). Sounds simple, but how do you do it?

We also ask ourselves an alternate question, which is: “who is our most valuable customer?” Your most valuable customer is your ideal customer, and in most cases, it’s your best customer. If you’ve been in business for any length of time, you know that not all customers are the same. For some of our agency customers we’ve had to change and edit our hooks over time to target the ideal avatar, not just “the avatar.” Both the customer and we realized that the best customers are people that we actually pay more to acquire. They become the best customers because they spend far more as buyers as well as generate the most amount of referrals.

In one case, one of our agency customers at our company did a huge meta-analysis of all their leads and customers to determine customer service requirements based on the lifetime value of each customer respectively. They found out that their leads who had not become customers were occupying so much time from their customer service staff that we decided to change our entire acquisition strategy. They decided to no longer give away any free information in the form of video tutorials for lead magnets but instead to focus on just producing buyers. They subsequently scaled their business back by nearly threefold in revenue while decreasing customer service requests nearly two-thirds. In fact, the drop-off in customer service requests was so much that they actually had to lay off staff as a result.

Is that an avatar? Yes, in my opinion, it is because it’s a qualified buyer and not just merely “a lead.” Their avatar became the one who buys vs. the one who just wants freebies.

That sounds straightforward enough but perhaps in your business there are sub-avatars within your ideal customer. There can be so many different ways to sub-segment your avatars, and if you’ve got solutions for each one of those segments you probably need different hooks to pull them in.

For example, in the “learn how to play the guitar” niche, “how to play guitar” only speaks to the broader guitar niche, which is the reason why that hook probably isn’t a tremendously great one. But if your avatar is males who play guitar between the ages of 25 and 65, chances are pretty good that you’ve got guys who do solos, guys who play blues, guys who play slide guitar, acoustic guitar players, and on and on and on. As you can see, there are multiple sub avatars within your overall avatar. This one is fairly complex with potentially hundreds of different variations.

The reason why this is so important is that a hook has to be highly specific. The more specific your hook is to your audience, the better. You’re going to have a very hard time selling your “Learn to play like Eddie Van Halen” guitar product to someone who wants to learn how to play classical guitar. But put a “Learn to play Eddie Van Halen’s Top 10 Guitar Licks” hook in front of guitarist who loves to play hard rock guitar, then you probably have a pretty good hook.