One 2-minute (often unconventional) podcast marketing idea every weekday to help serious podcasters punch above their weight and create a ridiculously profitable show as a small but mighty solopreneur, creator, or marketing team.
✊ Hook Stacking IV: Weaving Hooks Into Your Content
1,219 WORDS | READ TIME: 4.6 MIN Hi friends and happy Easter Monday! I hope you had a great long weekend. I’m back in action after taking a week off to spend with my Mom, who’s visiting Kelly and me in Barcelona. Today, we’re building on our Hook Stacking series which continues to grow and expand with each new installment. The more I write about it, the more I realize that this concept is one of the most important to understand and implement in all of podcast marketing and that most podcast growth issues can be traced back not to a lack of exposure, but a lack of strong, obvious hooks. If you’ve missed the previous installments of the series, you can find them here. Let's dig into it with the first of two installments on Content-Oriented Hooks. Content-Oriented HooksEarning the play is the hardest part of podcast marketing. But once that new listener clicks play, you now face the second hardest task required for growth: Getting them to not only listen through their first episode, but impress them enough to come back for a second. If you’ve imbued your show with a number of strong external hooks, you’ve likely earned the benefit of the doubt and bought yourself some time and attention for your show to prove itself. But be warned. All the external hooks in the world can be quickly undermined by content that doesn’t immediately grab the listener, affirm their decision to click play on the episode, and begin delivering on the promise of both the show and the episode. And while the ultimate value of your show hinges on the quality of your content itself—your teaching, stories, jokes, etc—the way you present that content matters. A lot. That’s where Content-Oriented Hooks come in. These hooks are structural devices that your content can be mapped onto your content—both in pre/post-production—to improve your listener retention. As with all previous hooks we’ve discussed, the more content-oriented hooks you employ, the more attractive your show will be, and the more first-time listeners you’ll convert to subscribers.
Opening MinuteThe first minute is perhaps the most crucial minute of every episode. At this stage, new listeners are at best cautiously optimistic... at worst, outright skeptical of your show. In both cases, they’re assessing the show, looking for information that either affirms their decision to click play or suggests that their time might be better spent elsewhere. The data proves this out. Within the first minute, most shows will lose 10-25% of their overall episode listenership, generally the highest drop-off point in any episode besides the closing credits. In short, the first minute matters immensely for winning over new listeners. As such, you should spend a significant amount of your post-production time and energy dialling it in for each episode. This, of course, is the exact opposite of what most shows do, opting instead to slap a pull-quote from somewhere in the episode—one that generally lacks context, tension, and stakes—at the start of the episode. So what should you do instead? Let's start by looking at what your first minute should achieve. A great first minute of a podcast episode should:
In some rare cases, a single carefully selected clip from the episode can achieve all of these requirements. A better option is to build a mini-narrative by splicing together multiple clips from throughout the episode. Perhaps the best option, however, is to do away with the clips altogether and script and narrate an intro that succinctly checks all the boxes. Which brings us to the next hook. Intro/SetupBuilding on your first minute, your episode intro or setup should more fully flesh out and set the stage for the rest of the episode. Your intro might last anywhere from 30 seconds to a few minutes, and by the end of it, your listener should:
This might sound a lot to achieve in a short amount of time. But by following a simple framework, creating what I call Contextual Hooks that check all these boxes is easier than you think. Here’s the blueprint for how to do it. First Question (Interview Shows)The first question is a powerful signal—to both your audience and your guests—about the trajectory of the episode. Unfortunately, 99% of interview shows start with some variation of the worst possible first question: “Tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do, and how you got to where you are today?” There’s often a time and place for this episode, but it’s not as the first question of an interview. In fact, the guest's backstory is generally best to save for the back half of the interview well after the majority of the value of the episode has been delivered. Ideally, you’ve summarized everything a listener needs to know to consider the guest credible (if not outright intriguing) in the intro, which then frees you up to make better use of your first question. We’ll dig into what makes for a great first question in an upcoming article, but for now, consider the following criteria:
Note that the bar is so incredibly low for great first questions that you don’t need to check all of the above boxes to immediately stand out from almost every other show on your topic. When in doubt, an easy hack is to simply skip the guest intro question and start with your second question instead. I'll be back with three more Content Hooks later this week to close out this section of what's becoming a seriously substantial guide on Hook Stacking. Once again, you can find the entire guide here. And if you've been following along with all of the installments so far, let me know what you've found most interesting or what you still have questions on.
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Scrappy Podcasting
Jeremy Enns
One 2-minute (often unconventional) podcast marketing idea every weekday to help serious podcasters punch above their weight and create a ridiculously profitable show as a small but mighty solopreneur, creator, or marketing team.
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