The Anatomy of A Viral Hook

When I first started out my educational channel, no one told me what a good hook was.

I know that Mr. Beast’s advice on hooks is that you want to “meet the viewer’s expectation” and “validate the click”.

But… what does that work for education channels too?

Let’s break it down:

The conventional advice in entertainment videos is that in your hook you want to do 3 things

• Validate the click

• Establish Context, and…

• Set expectations for the rest of the video. 

But if you’re making educational videos teaching people how to start a business or how to grow a YouTube channel, this advice doesn’t apply for a couple reasons:

1. There isn’t really context to establish in the video. 99% of the time there isn’t something life or death on the line.

2. It can be difficult to set expectations for the video because the content that you’ll usually talk about is so in depth and complex. 

So the more that I thought about how information on how to write a hook for an entertainment channel doens’t apply to education, the more frustrated I got.

And after working on scripts for 40+ educational channels (names like Davie Fogarty, Jordan Welch, and VidIQ), I’ve came up with these 3 elements that every education video should have in their hook:

• Proof

• Desire

• Value

Proof means proof that you are someone worth listening to. Your proof line is what tells the viewer why you are not just another yapper on the internet. 

So that could be talking about how much you made from your business, or the client results that you’ve gotten.

Desire means telling the viewer that this video will get them their dream outcome.

If you’re teaching your audience how to make money online, the desire you’d mention is that after watching your video, your viewer will learn how to hit their first $10k/month or it could be to buy their dream car. 

And lastly, value, which means what kind of knowledge the viewer will get from watching the video. This is an outline of everything that you will talk about in the video.

Proof, desire, value is the framework that I use to write hooks for all my and my client’s videos.

Hope this helps,

Bryan