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What’s your hook? How to capture your audience's attention

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December 17, 2020 | 5 min read

How to capture your audience’s attention

How to capture your audience’s attention

How do you grab attention with your content? The recipe for successful and compelling content is simple, it’s emotion.

Forging emotional connections with your audience can not only increase sales of your products and services but it can build brand loyalty over time.

As mentioned in our blog about building audience insight, understanding your customer behaviour will help you to produce meaningful content which taps into a mindset, need or emotion.

What is your emotional hook?

A captivating piece of content grabs your audience’s attention and keeps them emotionally invested. Below are six emotional hooks to help guide you to produce valuable content that pulls your audience to consume, share and take valuable actions.

Storytelling

Struggle, journey, personal challenge and growth; just some of the emotions storytelling can help you tap into. The hook lies in wanting to know what happens next and creating points of empathy with your audience.

Telling stories can appear in different formats; a video about your business and how it started to, a case study about a customer or following a hero figure who represents your ideal customer.

Comedy

Getting your message across doesn’t have to be serious all the time. Humour is a great way to create instant connection with your audience.

Comedy can help keep your brand fresh and versatile. When used appropriately it can make your brand more memorable and stand out from the crowd.

Fear of missing out

The fear of missing out – FOMO marketing, refers to messaging which creates a need or sense of urgency to take advantage of deals and opportunities before they are gone. It is the opposite of evergreen content.

This hook is quite literally a psychological prompt to your audience to act so they are not left behind. FOMO content is most prevalent among the millennial audience but is also used more subtly in shorter copy such as email subject lines, webinar invites and short-lived ephemeral content on social media.

Empowerment

This relies heavily on audience insight but by tapping into your audience’s goals, desires or concerns you can represent your customers as real people and your brand as there to support them.

The hook is based in encouraging people to feel freedom and strength to make decisions. Messaging can be goal orientated, encouraging and reassuring.

Community

All people want to feel accepted and seen. Content marketing has a sense of responsibility to make you feel a sense of belonging.

The hook is to make your brand represent a lifestyle and value instead of just a name. There is a social and emotional component to brands who consider people to be part of something special, to be part of their brand identity.

Unanswered questions

So many pieces of content start with a question, just like this blog, because people want to know the answer and so they click. The format is simple, ask a question and use the body of your content to answer it.

The hook is of course the answer, since people tend to be interested if they are searching for or asking the content in the first place.

What’s the hook in 2020?
All this emotion and nowhere to go

Of course, the biggest attention grabber in 2020 has been Covid which has consumed audiences of all products, so in the same way a multitude of brands have tried to tap into how audiences have been feeling, from being cooped up at home, to getting fit, baking and home schooling.

Vodafone was one of the first brands to leverage the situation successfully with their ‘Keeping the UK connected’ campaign. It was simple, but more importantly it leant on a topic that had already grabbed people’s attention and resonated with them on an emotional level, based on insight.

They reacted quickly to remain relevant and tapped into emotion

They adapted as our situation changed

If you're looking for more content marketing insight check out our blog series here.

If you are struggling with your content strategy and would like to talk to us about how we can help, reach out by emailing hello@somethingbig.co.uk

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