“I don’t care about links.”
When Rand Fishkin said that in a SparkToro webinar late last year, I did one of these:
🤯
But he wasn’t blowing smoke. Today, 60 percent of Google searches are zero click (meaning searchers get what they want right on the SERP). More than 44 percent are brand-specific.
But still – not caring about links? Rand Fishkin?
This is the guy who made a name for himself as the cofounder of Moz (then SEOMoz) in the early 2000s. The guy whose analysis of Google algorithms drove decades of link-building.
But…
If he no longer cares about links, you can probably stop caring about them, too.
So what does Rand Fishkin say we should care about as we try to connect our products and services with the people who need them?
Attention.
The formula is simple, if not easy to implement: figure out where your audience is paying attention, and show up there.
Which is great, as far as it goes. But what do you do once you have your audience’s attention?
Because really, winning attention is only half the battle.
Once you have it, you have to do something that will make it more likely that your audience will buy from you.
You have to build trust.
In this post, I’ll dive into how to do that and why this approach will yield better outcomes than the SEO playbook from a decade ago.
Why Attention? Why Not Links?
For deep dives on the attention component, there's no better resource than the SparkToro blog (this piece and this piece are particularly good). I won’t go into the technical specifics because they’re covered in detail in the links above.
But a simpler answer is that attention is the precursor to anything else you want to do in marketing: whether you’re trying to educate, persuade, or sell, you first need their attention.
As marketers, we need to start thinking of attention – not a click – as the first conversion.
The language of attention already hints at this: we pay attention. Our audiences have limited reserves of attention. If we want a shot at engaging with these audiences, we must first show ourselves worthy of their limited attention budget.
In the world of B2B tech, where only five percent of your customer base is actively shopping for what you sell, winning attention is huge. At any moment, you (and your content) are competing not only with your competitors’ content but with all of your prospects’ work tasks AND all of Netflix, Instagram, Threads, and so on.
That doesn’t magically change when they’re ready to buy.
In fact, about 80 percent of B2B buyers start with a list of vendors, then research other options. In 90 percent of cases, they buy from someone on the original list.
So, again: the time to win attention is now. How do you do that? Hook, deliver, repeat.
How to Win Attention: Hook, Deliver, Repeat
The formula for capturing attention and building trust is relatively simple:
- Hook: Draw someone in with a compelling promise of what's to come – aka get their attention.
- Deliver: Deliver on your promise – aka build trust.
- Repeat: Do it again and again and again to train your audience that you are a trustworthy source.
What's hard is doing this consistently.
When you fail to hook, you’re not starting with something interesting enough to grab attention in a busy world.
When you hook but don’t deliver on what you promise, you train your audience that you can’t be trusted (aka you become clickbait).
And finally, when you hook and deliver but don’t repeat, your audience will be briefly impressed but will then forget about you in a world of infinite content.
The good news is that the hook, deliver, repeat framework is basically just an exercise in packaging, in the same way that SEO is. With SEO, you try to get the search engines to notice the content and serve it up on SERPs.
With zero-click content, we’re going straight to the source (our audience).
This is the conceptual framework. Now let’s get practical.
How to Write Hooks That Grab Attention
At a conference last month, SparkToro’s Amanda Natividad offered her guidelines for writing hooks. They’re brilliant and you can learn them directly from her in the Content Marketing 201 class she teaches.
Briefly, she outlines seven ways to “hook” your audience:
- Novelty
- Something counterintuitive
- Something counternarrative
- Belief reinforcement
- Controversy
- Fear
- Ego
To create a hook for an idea or a piece of content, mentally walk yourself through the whole thing. Consider various points of entry – often, starting at the “beginning” is not the hookiest way in.
Instead, think about the essence of what your content communicates: what are the most important ideas inside? What are your audience’s most pressing concerns? Where do these two things meet?
That intersection is where you’ll find your hook.
The good news is that you see hooks in action all the time, and not only on social media. Read synopses of your favorite books, movies, or TV shows. Listen to the preview of a popular podcast, then listen to the full episode.
Start tuning into hooks, and you’ll get a feel for how to create them and win your audience’s attention.
Then you can start thinking about what you do when you have that attention. Because that part is even more important.
How to Deliver on the Promise of Hooks to Build Trust
Once you have someone’s attention, you’ve got an opportunity to build trust. Trust is the second conversion.
To win it, you have to at the very least deliver on the promise of your hook.
This means you must craft a hook that is honest and not misleading.
For example, if you run Clyde Peeling’s Reptiland, a reptiles-only living museum in Central Pennsylvania, you should not hype up an exhibit on dinosaurs at every turn only to have people go to the exhibit and find… birds.
With a plaque explaining that today’s birds probably evolved from dinosaurs.
(Yes, this happened to me 20 years ago, and yes, I am still bitter.)
One broken promise, and you’ll lose your audience’s trust forever.
From a content creation perspective, this means you should either know your hook from the start or go back and update your piece once you find your hook to make sure the piece delivers.
As far as the substance of your content, there are four ways to build trust in the B2B tech space:
- Demonstrate your authority. Share your original thoughts and informed opinions to show you’re an expert in your field.
- Build credibility for your brand. Share customer success stories. Share case studies. Get into details about product performance. Make it clear that your company does what it says it does.
- Boost your community. Engage with your peers, partners, investors, and customers. Shout them out for doing great things.
- Highlight your momentum. Share news about product development, research, new hires, money raised, awards, recognition, etc.
Now. Let’s go a step further. Let’s talk about what happens when you’ve delivered well on many promises over time and built trust with your ideal audience.
How to Sustain Attention: Become the Hook
The more someone trusts you, the less important your hook becomes.
Think about your favorite newsletter: it doesn’t matter what the hook (subject line) is; when it hits your inbox, you read it (obviously, SparkToro’s is one for me).
Or your favorite person on social: maybe you log on specifically to see their latest updates (looking at you, Alex Falcone).
If you establish that you always have something relevant to offer, the people for whom it is relevant will always want to see it.
This isn’t to say you can stop using hooks – it’s never a bad idea to grow your audience, and hooks will help you do that.
But once you’ve built a following, you’ve got a little more wiggle room to play with different formats. You can say “bear with me.”
You still have to deliver value. But you can do it in a style that works best for your voice and your core audience.
Know Your Audience & Give Them Something Worth Their Time
Last night at dinner, I couldn’t get my four-year-old to stop playing under the table.
Then I tried a new approach. I said, “Wow. This spilled salt kind of looks like a train.”
He almost hit his head, he came up so fast.
And because the child sees trains in everything, he enthusiastically agreed with me about the salt and proceeded to eat three bites of baked potato (honestly pretty good for him).
The train was the hook. The line of salt grains was the fulfillment of the promise. The real trick, of course, was the four-plus years I’ve been building trust with this kid.
The bottom line: having something valuable to offer your core audience is not enough to get them to pay attention. To give them what they need (as the adage goes), you have to give them what they want. Maybe what they don’t even know they want.
To win someone’s business, you must first win their attention. Then their trust. Then, you hand them over to sales.
