Our Secret, Super Easy Method for Effective Copywriting!

Our secret, super easy method for copywriting that’ll make people jealous!

It’s so easy it almost feels like cheating! You’ll be asking yourself: how did I not know about this before? With our little writing/copywriting guide, your social feed is about to get a whole lot more powerful.

What is a hook?

Writing a Facebook status is easy as pie: everyone does it, every day. Often we do it spontaneously, without thinking. That gives us stuff that’s sometimes interesting, but mostly goes unnoticed. These statuses, which we call hooks, are the most consumed type of communication, but also often the most neglected. Being able to write better hooks, or to recognize them, is probably the most important thing you can learn in brand communication. There’s no point starting from a blank page. Only amateurs work without a recipe. Pros have formulas that work every time. As my colleague, marketer and consultant Stéphane Hamel, likes to say: “In marketing, like in football, there are safe plays that work every time!”

Why is having a good hook important?

Your hook is your first point of contact with your audience. For your newsletter, it’s the subject line. For your ad campaign, it’s a tagline. On your website, it’s your mission statement. On Facebook and Twitter, it’s your posts. Hooks are everywhere, and only the clearest ones manage to strike a chord. Realize that most of your relationship with your audience is going to be built through this hook. If someone clicks or reads your email, it’s because of it. Anyone who wants the short version of your message is going to stick to the subject line. People are lazy and don’t want to burn calories for you. If your hook is confusing or boring, it’ll go unnoticed and your post will sink into the black hole of content too dull and complicated to bother with. If your hook is written like an ad, it’ll be treated like an ad. Be intentional with your hooks, and don’t be that person or that brand nobody pays attention to.

STEP 1 – Get ready

First, before you start writing your hooks, you should already have done most of the steps below. If you already know who you are and why you’re communicating, skip to step 2.

• You’ve found a tone of voice or a personality for your brand, whether through a structured process or organically (we also have a system for that 😉);
• You know your audience and how they like to receive communications from you;
• You’ve determined the business objectives that justify your need to communicate;
• You’ve built an editorial calendar aligned with those business objectives, or at least figured out when and why to communicate;
• You may have even built a content funnel, or several;
• You’ve produced great content like photos, videos, articles, links, or other assets. In short, you have something to say, and it’s not just about you.

You’re now ready to write your hooks!

STEP 2 – Determine the purpose, context, and target

We always start at the end: what’s the purpose of your text? Before diving into writing, you need to determine the purpose of your post, the context in which your reader will read it, and how your target audience likes to receive these hooks. You might think the purpose is to sell your product, but that’s rarely the case. In fact, it’s almost never the case.

If you try to sell right away, it’s like proposing marriage on a first date. But a first date is meant to get to know someone and see if you’re interested in a second one.

It’s very rare for a potential customer to click “buy” right after coming across your brilliant hook. So if we’re not selling, what are we doing? The purpose of a hook is more often to get the reader interested enough to click a link to learn more, react, solve a problem, take an action, etc. As for context, remember that a hook is always contextual to the medium, the audience, and everything around it. On Instagram, the hook is secondary and provides an angle for the image. In a newsletter, the subject line’s job is to get the email opened.

STEP 3 – State the obvious

Too often, brands try to be creative and original before being clear. That’s a big mistake. Clarity comes before everything else. If you confuse, you lose. Repeat that phrase like a mantra and tattoo it into your brain: clear > smart. At this step, take your content (what you want to show, communicate, or say) and put it in front of you (metaphorically or literally). Then, state the obvious. Say it plainly, with no originality, no frills. In other words, write the message in the simplest, clearest way possible. Write what you want to communicate to people, one single piece of information, with no artifice or feats of language. Avoid jargon. Don’t try to be smart or creative. Here are a few examples:

• Our product is cheaper than the competition and made locally. Taste-wise, it’s the equivalent.
• We created this hot sauce for tacos.
• Our technology can correct your running posture in 30 days.
• If you spend $40, shipping is free. Normally it’s $50.
• All our products are certified eco-friendly.

What you just wrote is what you want to put out there, get heard, and get understood. Congratulations! Determining your message is 50% of the work. In a pinch, most of these statements are acceptable, though very boring. So let’s move on to the next step.

STEP 4 – Make it interesting

The goal is to strike a chord and highlight one of the elements of your message by giving it an angle, a point of view, a perspective on the subject. Your job is to help the reader see things a different way. You’re responsible for putting the message into context for them. This is also the step where you bring your personality forward. Are you a coffee geek? A pro at dry humor? Focused on kindness? If you have a well-developed brand guide, it should be easy to color your message with an original personality that doesn’t go unnoticed. Finally, at this step, you need to present your message not as if you were the hero of the customer’s story, but as an ally offering them a solution so they can move forward on the journey where they’re the hero. To pull this off, you need to write a hook that’s short, interesting, and sparks curiosity. In short, tell a story in a few lines. That short piece of text is what’s called copy, and the art of writing that copy is called copywriting. To get started, go back to the simple messages you already wrote. Keep your target audience in mind and how to talk to them, then your brand personality, the context, and so on. That’s a lot to juggle, but if it were simple and easy, everyone could do it easily. The trick is to write more than you need. Boring hooks, funny ones, absurd ones, outrageous ones, and so on. Use several formulas, mix and match, and try as many possibilities as you can. Writing copy, as they say, is iterative work. Then sort through them, test your copy, and keep the best one. If you can simplify and clarify, do it. Need help or examples? Good news: this topic has been covered and studied extensively, and there are dozens of proven formulas that work every time. If you type “copywriting formula” into Google, you’ll find dozens of articles on the subject.

STEP 5 – The check

Ideally, you let your creative work sit for a few hours, or even a day, or a week. With a fresh mind, you can go back and look at your work with new eyes. The idea here is to put on a different hat: your audience’s. You need to borrow their point of view to test your hooks. You can also have more than one person read them and react. Once you’ve found the right words, you need to build your post. You could have written the most beautiful thing in the world, but if it looks bad or comes across poorly on Facebook, all that great work goes to waste. Think you’ve found the perfect hook? You might be the only one who thinks so. We all react differently to different things. So the next step is to test 5 or 6 different pieces of copy with different images. That’s not always possible, since often you need to publish simple content on a specific date. However, when it comes to ads, there’s no excuse: test as many variables as possible, evaluate the results, and try to find a winning text and image combo.

5 classic formulas

Experienced copywriters don’t always need formulas. Experience in the craft lets them find several angles quickly. If you need a crutch or a bit of help, there are several classic formulas out there. Here are 5 of the most popular.

1. Before, after, and the bridge between the two

Before: the world as it is right now, with your problem. After: the world with your problem solved. The bridge: how to get there. Variant: there’s also a Problem, Solution, Call to action version.

2. There’s a problem, we stir the problem, we solve the problem

Identify a problem. Stir the problem (by making it worse, pointing out its consequences, etc.). Solve the problem with a solution. Variant: after stirring the problem, you can discredit other solutions before presenting your own.

3. Attention – Interest – Desire – Action (AIDA)

Attention: hook your audience. Interest: give them new information that will strike a chord. Desire: showcase a benefit of your solution and proof that it works. Action: call-to-action.

4. The 5 objections

• I don’t have time.
• I don’t have enough money.
• It won’t work for me.
• I don’t believe you.
• I don’t need it.

Most of the obstacles your audience faces can be sorted into these 5 objections. So why not deconstruct them head-on?

5. PPPP

Problem: a picture of an ideal future that seems out of reach, but that grabs attention and interest. Promise: the solution that makes that ideal achievable. Proof: proof of failure without this solution, and success with it. Push (call to action): call to action.

Which method excites you the most? Feeling ready to write some powerful hooks?

– Need help developing your brand personality? Write to us, we’ll sort you out. Also worth reading: What I post is really good, so why isn’t it getting any likes? What is content marketing?