Hook and Promise – The Foundation of Your Effective Marketing Message


Fish-hookIf you’ve ever found it difficult to create an effective sales letter, sales video, or opt-in message here is a new perspective that can help you make them more relevant to your market, increase the value you are offering, and make more sales or get more opt-ins.

Whatever your marketing message is it will be more effective if it is based on a hook and a promise.

A hook is that part of your message that grabs a prospect’s attention and makes them want to continue reading, watching, or listening. It needs to be relevant to their problem and convey a benefit to the prospect. It also needs to appear new. You don’t want your prospect thinking they’ve seen or heard this before.

An example of a hook is something like:

“If you’ve been online for years and never made a dime, there’s a new software that guarantees to build you a six figure income in only 4 months.”

If a prospect has been unable to make money online for the past few years, no matter what they’ve tried, it grabs their attention because it’s aimed at them and their specific problem.

It’s also an offer they would not have seen before because it says the software is new.

If you want another example of a hook take a look at the first sentence of this post. If you’ve read this far you’ve been hooked!

A promise is the part of your message that tells the prospect about the benefit they’ll gain if they continue watching, reading or listening to your message. It should include a specific result they’ll get from continuing to consume your message and also show or imply what their life will be like after you have resolved an urgent problem or fulfilled a deep desire they have.

Using the same example again:

“If you’ve been online for years and never made a dime, there’s a new software that guarantees to build you a six figure income in only 4 months.”

The promise is that the software guarantees to build a six figure income in only 4 months. Notice this is a specific result.

In case you’re wondering, yes there is another example of a promise embedded in the first sentence of this post, although it could be improved by being more specific.

Develop the hook and promise based on what your market wants, not on what you think they want. Once you have these two foundations for your marketing you can make them the focus of your sales message. This will make it more effective.

If you write a sales letter based on a hook and promise before you even begin creating a product or service and use it as a guide for what you create, it will also make what you offer more relevant and of more value to your market.


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