The LinkedIn Hook That Never Stops Working

Hello hello!

Welcome back to 1, One, 1. This newsletter is the place founders come to learn how to get leads from their social—and I’m so glad you’re a part of it.

If it’s not clear, this is my first edition. I’m excited, nervous, and all of the above. I just want to make sure you love it.

As promised, here’s your 1 winning hook template, 1 post breakdown, and 1 expert content tip for the week:

Winning Hook Template

Chris’ whole hook here is:

Every Marketing Leader wants to answer these 3 burning questions:

1. Where do I invest my next dollar to drive fast, efficient growth?

2. What are my highest performing investments and how much more juice can I squeeze from them?

3. What are my lowest performing investments that I should cut / stop?

I’d even go as far as saying you can make the template: Every [ICP] [trying to accomplish thing] wants to answer these 3 burning questions:

Why Does This Hook Work?

First of all, it directly calls out his ICP—marketing leaders.

He creates a curiosity gap by saying …”wants to answer these 3 burning questions”. The word “burning” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

If the hook was “Every marketing leader wants to answer these 3 questions”, it just wouldn’t hit the same, you know?

More than that, this hook makes his ICP—marketing leaders—feel like they’re being heard. A huge part of winning social content is making sure your ICP knows you get them.

I forgot who said this, but if you can make it so that your ICP is nodding along as you read your post, you’re golden.

If You Want To Steal This

Think of your ICP. What are the most common FAQs they deal with day-to-day, ideally in relation to your product/service.

For example, I sell social content services to founders and B2B marketing teams. 3 common questions in relation to getting leads they ask are:

1. How often do I have to post?

2. How does social content tie to revenue?

3. What am I supposed to post about?

The only catch I have to add here: You must deliver on the hook. If you don’t help them answer those questions in the rest of the post, it’s useless.

Okay, that’s it for the hook template—onto the post breakdown!

Post Breakdown

Today’s winning post is by Bethany Stachenfeld, Co-founder and CEO at Sendspark.

Though I don’t have full social metric access, this post was a clear winner for her. This is the case for a few reasons:

1/ Predictions in general get people talking. The key is you can’t make them plain or boring. They need some spice. It needs to be so that someone, at the very least, will disagree with you.

Don’t say stupid stuff, though. You have to believe what you’re saying. But, ensure not everyone will agree with all of your predictions.

Disagreements = comments. Comments = more reach. More reach = more disagreements. More disagreements = more comments.

2/ Topic <> ICP fit. Bethany largely sells to demand gen and GTM folks trying to get their B2B product or service in the hands of their ICP.

If I was a GTM leader seeing seven GTM predictions for the year on my timeline, of course I’d stop and read. If I were an HR leader, I wouldn’t care.

And that’s the point—this is a post aimed at her ICP, only for her ICP.

3/ Pseudo-Thought Leadership. When you share predictions like this, you get the chance to share veiled thought leadership that doesn’t look intentional or contrived with your reader.

Notice how Bethany makes declarations around signal-based selling, what SDR work will be automated, and more. The formatting of this post—predictions—is a lot more digestible/widely accepted than self-promotional thought-leadership.

It’s a great way to establish yourself as an expert on your topic without being “cringe”.

Content Tip - The Hook-writing Tip That’ll Never Go Out Of Style

If I copy and pasted our entire hook-writing training into this newsletter, it’d be 5,000+ words (but LMK if you want that as a lead magnet).

I did want to share this hook writing tip, though. It worked 5 years ago. It works today. And it’ll work 5 years from now as long as LinkedIn’s still around / the robots don’t take over.

What is it?

The Borrowed Authority Hook

There’s a strong chance you’ve viewed 100+ of these or more—sometimes without knowing.

The idea is that you reference a bigger brand name or person who holds significant credibility/authority and create a curiosity gap off of it.

Here are 3 examples:

→ Ramp is worth $7.5B. They send 25,000 cold emails/month. I got an inside look at their strategy - 3 takeaways from it:

→ OpenAI is worth $150B. I studied their landing page and discovered they were using these 7 conversion hacks:

→ Airbnb MASTERED founder-led content. I broke down their strategy into 3 shockingly simple steps:

The company name holds a lot of weight, and so do the metrics tied to them ($7.5B, 25,000 cold emails/month, $105B, etc.)

Here’s a diagram for your reference:

How Can You Apply This?

1/ Find something or someone (a brand or person) that does something or has achieved something your ICP would give a sh*t about.

Ex: I sell to founders and B2B marketing teams. These archetypes always want to know how other founders/teams are getting users/sign-ups. For me, finding a winning growth strategy employed by a well-known startup is a safe bet.

2/ Write a hook that includes the name, a strong metric tied to the result, and a curiosity-gap creation mechanism to make the reader want to press “see more” on LinkedIn.

Ex: following my last example, this could look something like “ChatGPT has 122.58M weekly users. 5 unconventional ways they grew their user base from 0:”

NOTE: If you don’t actually deliver on the hook, you’re toast. You tried to borrow someone else’s authority, and ended up losing yours. If you write this strong of a hook, you must write a strong post.

WARNING: Do not overuse this. You can tread into “threadboi” and “LinkedInfluencer” territory fast if you overuse these.

1x every 2 weeks (assuming you post 5x/week on LinkedIn) is a fair benchmark, in my opinion.

…but yeah, this thing still rips. We’re a solid 2+ years post-threadboi era on Twitter and I STILL see people printing reach off of it.

Social Stuff I Found For You

📌 Finn Thormeier had a wonderful breakdown on how to get leads from LinkedIn starting from zero.

📌 My 2-year reflections on growing my agency from $0 to $[REDACTED] in revenue.

📌 Adam Robinson shared how to write a viral LinkedIn post.

Last Thing

Thank you for reading. Truly, it means a lot to me that you take the time out of your busy week to do this.

Just wanted to say that my agency, Hat Tip, has availability for more founders like yourself if you want support with content.

See if you’re a fit here.

I’ll be back next week,

Christian