How to Write and Test Hooks

In paid social ads, a hook is the attention-grabbing element designed to stop the scroll and captivate your target audience immediately. Creative digital marketing agencies know how to use effective hooks to boost engagement and drive conversions.

The Blues Traveler hit the nail on the head. “The hook brings you back, on that you can rely.” The same cardinal truth applies for when you advertise on TikTok, Meta, or CTV. It’s the reason your audience watches and engages with the video. 

What is a Hook? 

The Hook is the first piece of information your audience receives when viewing an ad creative. It can take a few forms, visual or auditory, but it needs to communicate to your audience what they’re watching and why they should engage with the ad. 

Think of a hook as a headline for a newspaper article. Expecting people to blindly dive into a thick text makes no sense, so the hook should contextualize things and grab their attention as fast as possible. 

A good hook should only take about 3-5 seconds of screen time. Anything more, and you run the risk of exhausting your audience before they even get to the explainer. It should also inform your audience what they’re in for. 

When you look at Facebook ad library, the most successful paid media ads are ones that are educational, aspirational, or entertaining. Your hook should match the tone of whichever angle you’re going for. 

What are the different types of Hooks?

There are many types of hooks a person could use when crafting social media ads, but here at Creative AdBundance, we have a few proven favorites that stop the scroll. 

Text Hooks 

A text hook is probably the simplest, and most easily recognized. Take a look at any high performing YouTube video, and you’ll see strong examples in the thumbnail. Text hooks are headlines that clearly state what your audience is about to watch. 

Video editors can easily insert a text hook at the very beginning of the video. That way, before your UGC creator even speaks, the audience has some context for what they can expect. 

Voice Hooks

There’s a few ways to introduce a voice hook, whether it’s your actor speaking directly to camera, them doing a voiceover, or including that familiar robot voice from TikTok videos. 

A voice hook is a bit more organic, because every video needs an intro. Again, watch any popular content creator online, and they’ll give you a little prelude. Whether they’re letting you know about a lifehack, what this storytime is about, or just setting the scene for what trend they’re participating in, the first line is a voice hook.

There’s an art to writing these to make them sound like an actual user posting the video rather than the tried and true Billy Mays style infomercial that immediately gives away the video as an advertisement. 

Visual Hooks

These are essentially a sight gag (our in-house video production team loves making these), but instead of a punchline, it’s a logline. Think back to our Billy Mays example in the infomercials, where a person, shot in black and white, makes a horrendous mistake and causes a huge mess before a big red X appears over them. 

That’s an incredibly effective visual hook. Right away, it lets the audience know the ad is for them if they’ve ever encountered the same problem. Visual storytelling isn’t easy, but when we look at the annals of internet history like TikTok, YouTube, and Vine (RIP) we can find countless examples of how to get your point across in only a few frames.

What kind of hooks work?

There’s no one size fits all approach when it comes to writing hooks. Fundamentally, to write a strong hook, a brand needs to know their audience.

The most basic way of constructing hooks is to look at them as a problem solution logic puzzle. How does x solve the problem of y, with x being your product/service? From here, we work backwards to develop the hook. 

Say a haircare product makes a person’s hairline thicker and healthier. A Hook could be as direct as “is your hair thinning?” That does inform our audience, and it does set up a problem for the product to solve, but it’s surface level. The real question is how to take it a step further to actually connect with your audience.

This is when we start thinking beyond value props and features, and more about how to establish a connection with the audience. Lots of hair care promises better hair, but how can they impact a person’s life? 

When we get into how thinning hair affects a person’s confidence, or the way they see themselves, that's when we can turn a regular hook into an emotional attention grabbing hook. Speaking to people as people makes more of an impact than speaking to them as consumers. Always keep that humanity in mind. 

What about when they don’t work?

Sometimes, a hook fails to land. That’s normal. We test an AdBundance of hooks to uncover the one that sticks. Even a failed hook is an opportunity to learn something new. 

Say we try our hook about building a person’s confidence with our haircare product falls flat. Now we know that confidence, while key, isn’t the determining factor. So we dig a little deeper. Where is the insecurity coming from? Does thin hair age them? Does it cause gender dysphoria? What is actually going on? 

Once we crack that, sometimes a low performing video becomes a top converter because we change the hook. Sometimes it’s as simple as adding a visual component, like a quick before-and-after transformation. It’s all a matter of finding that right hook for the right audience. 

If you’re now hooked on the idea of what we can do to elevate your hooks and drive even more conversions, drop us a line at creativeadbundance.com/chat.

We’re dying to hear about your brand, and take your paid media creative to the next level.