Words That Work: Sales & Marketing Success For Coaches/Consultants
Oct 7, 2026 · 10 min · 8 segments
You spend time writing social media posts and emails, but what if people stop reading after the first line? A better hook can help you get their attention and keep them reading. In this episode…
Karen HammondHost
Tasha SmithHost
And so when I first started doing marketing for our company, I was working with my coach named Heather, and she helped me with learning how to write really good hooks.
In fact, what she had me do is every time I would write an email or a social media post, there was a website that I would go to.
So I would put in the first line, and it would pop up a score on a scale of one to 10.
And so my hooks, you know, starting out would be four, six, right? And every time I did this, I got better and better until I really started to understand what it was that made a good hook.
And so I thought that it would be really helpful for you to go through this today.
And what's really important about this is if, you know, we're spending all of this time doing marketing for our business, so we're writing posts, we're writing emails, and if someone is bored in the first line, they're just gonna stop reading it, and we've essentially wasted all of that time.
So what I think is interesting about hooks is that this is actually a way that we naturally tend to communicate.
Call me." [laughs] I would've called her either way, right? If her, if she sent me a boring text.
And what she didn't start with was, "So I went to dinner with Beth tonight, and we had blah, blah, blah for dinner, and then the waiter came, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." She started with the drama, with the feeling, with the most interesting part, and we actually tend to do this a lot in our natural communication with people.
So if you've ever said something to a friend like, "Oh, my gosh, you'll never guess who I ran into today," or, "You're not gonna believe what I did today," or, "Oh, my gosh, the most embarrassing thing happened today," we tend to communicate like that.
And that is, um, something that we've learned how to do in verbal communication but not in written communication.
So for some reason, when we're writing emails or social media posts, we think that we need to start at the beginning of the story, and the beginning of the story is usually not the most interesting part.
And so what I'm gonna actually do is just go ahead and pull up this document that I put together for you, and we're gonna walk through it.
And so when I first started doing marketing for our company, I was working with my coach named Heather, and she helped me with learning how to write really good hooks.
In fact, what she had me do is every time I would write an email or a social media post, there was a website that I would go to.
So I would put in the first line, and it would pop up a score on a scale of one to 10.
And so my hooks, you know, starting out would be four, six, right? And every time I did this, I got better and better until I really started to understand what it was that made a good hook.
And so I thought that it would be really helpful for you to go through this today.
And what's really important about this is if, you know, we're spending all of this time doing marketing for our business, so we're writing posts, we're writing emails, and if someone is bored in the first line, they're just gonna stop reading it, and we've essentially wasted all of that time.
So what I think is interesting about hooks is that this is actually a way that we naturally tend to communicate.
Call me." [laughs] I would've called her either way, right? If her, if she sent me a boring text.
And what she didn't start with was, "So I went to dinner with Beth tonight, and we had blah, blah, blah for dinner, and then the waiter came, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." She started with the drama, with the feeling, with the most interesting part, and we actually tend to do this a lot in our natural communication with people.
So if you've ever said something to a friend like, "Oh, my gosh, you'll never guess who I ran into today," or, "You're not gonna believe what I did today," or, "Oh, my gosh, the most embarrassing thing happened today," we tend to communicate like that.
And that is, um, something that we've learned how to do in verbal communication but not in written communication.
So for some reason, when we're writing emails or social media posts, we think that we need to start at the beginning of the story, and the beginning of the story is usually not the most interesting part.
And so what I'm gonna actually do is just go ahead and pull up this document that I put together for you, and we're gonna walk through it.
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