How to create
Hook Messages

March 15, 2013

The challenge is essential and exciting: how to highlight your product and make impact on visitors that they would stay on your website after a few seconds. Asking myself this question for several projects, I studied a lot of hook messages from leading companies and noticed 3 main approaches. Here are some tips that have been very useful to me and that can also help you.

A hook message to introduce your products.

These are short sentences, 5-7 words (except prepositions and linking words), which introduce your product. Each one describes what the product does, which problems it solves and who it is made for.

To find your hook or baseline, you can work on three approaches:

  1. Explain what your product does and for whom.
    • Email marketing software for designers and their clients. Campaign Monitor
    • Free Online Contact Manager Software for SMB. Zoho CRM
    • Social Tools for Businesses. OneDesk
  2. Make a promise to the customer that highlights a benefit of your product.
    • Making collaboration productive and enjoyable for people every day. 37 Signals
    • Organize anything, together. Trello
    • Find a place to stay. Airbnb
  3. Describe the most outstanding feature of your product.

Here are 3 examples of many we thought for FreskPage:

  1. What it does for whom: Landing Pages for Web & Mobile Apps.
  2. Promise: Create Landing Pages for your Apps in minutes.
  3. Feature: Beautiful Landing Pages in minutes.

We originally liked and prefered the third summary. To find which one would generate more leads, we tested these three on a two weeks basis and we measured that the first summary generates most leads. Our first intuition was not the "best" one finally.

Make impact is the key.

Take a few minutes to brainstorm your hooks and discuss it with a friend or colleague who understands / knows your market. And you will see one of your choices will be obvious compared to others. Remember that create impact in order to be inviting for visitors is the key.

Once you’ve found your hook / baseline, you should put it highly visible and impactful in the header of your homepage. You can also consider using it as a tagline. This hook allows you to tell anyone in 3 seconds what your product is, or at least why your product is so great that people will want to check it out. Be inviting.

And all of this within 5 to 7 words … It seems that simplicity is not simple!

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