How to Make Your Videos Unskippable in 3 Seconds

If your video doesn’t hook viewers in the first 3-5 seconds, you’ve lost them. A great hook piques curiosity or offers value right away, prompting users to stay and engage. Videos with strong hooks increase watch time, comments, shares, and likes, leading to better algorithmic promotion and organic reach.

Without a strong hook, your video is just another piece of content that gets lost in the noise. But with the right hook, you can transform fleeting attention into meaningful engagement and action.

The power of three

The three core types of hooks are: Visual, Text, and Verbal. The trick is how you combine these creatively to make your content irresistible. All hooks rely on a psychological phenomenon called the curiosity gap.

“So what exactly is a curiosity gap?”

I’m glad you asked…

The ________ gap?

When you present your audience with a hint of something valuable, interesting, or surprising—but not the full picture—it triggers an innate desire to know more. The mind wants to resolve the uncertainty or ambiguity, so the viewer feels the urge to stick around or click through to find out the missing details.

The curiosity gap plays on the tension between what people know and what they want to know. It’s the gap between the information the viewer has and the information they desire, which creates a sense of curiosity that compels them to seek more to close the gap.

Why It Works:

• Engages Attention: The curiosity gap hooks your audience by creating a question in their mind. People don’t like unanswered questions, so they’ll keep watching, reading, or engaging to satisfy their curiosity.
• Drives Engagement: The curiosity gap can increase click-through rates and watch time because the viewer is seeking resolution or answers.
• Builds Anticipation: By offering just enough information to create curiosity but not fully explaining it, you increase anticipation and keep your audience intrigued.

Example of the Curiosity Gap:

Imagine a video that starts with: “Here’s why your marketing strategy is failing—but no one will tell you.” This statement introduces a problem but doesn’t yet offer the solution, leaving a gap in the viewer’s knowledge. The viewer is then motivated to keep watching to find out the missing piece.

Another example is an article headline like: “You Won’t Believe What This Entrepreneur Did to Double Their Revenue in 30 Days”. It creates a gap by making the reader curious about the how and drives them to click to satisfy that curiosity.

How to Use the Curiosity Gap in Your Content:

1. Start with a Tease: Introduce a problem, a surprising fact, or a benefit, but don’t explain it fully. Leave just enough out to make people wonder.
2. Provide Just Enough Information: Give them a taste but not the full answer, leaving the audience eager to learn more.
3. Deliver on the Promise: Eventually, you need to close the gap. While it’s important to build anticipation, it’s equally crucial to deliver the value you teased, or you risk losing trust.

ALL hooks rely on this curiosity gap, so keeping this in mind, let's quickly outline some of the main types of hooks that you can quickly and easily use in your stories.

1. Visual Hook

A visual hook captures attention through striking imagery, movement, or surprising visuals. This is particularly powerful on platforms like TikTok or Instagram, where users scroll quickly, and you need something visually dynamic to make them pause.

These are some of the main visual hooks that can be easily used with zero budget :-

Transition Hooks

A transition hook is a technique used to smoothly guide viewers from one part of a video to the next while keeping their attention. It often involves a change in scene, tone, or visual element that re-engages the audience, preventing drop-off during slower moments. This can include quick cuts, sound effects, or a teaser about what’s coming next to create a seamless flow and maintain viewer interest throughout the content.

Pope in the Pool

So, what’s Pope in the Pool? It’s a clever trick to sneak in educational or complex content by giving your viewers something fun or intriguing to watch. You lure them in with the entertainment and keep them hooked for the lesson.

Imagine you’re explaining a dry topic, like analytics or logistics. To keep the viewer engaged, you pair that with something visually stimulating—like a quirky prop, fun animation, or a scene change. The key is simple: have two things happening on screen at once—your educational bit and something visually engaging to entertain the audience.

The Catch Cut

Loads of businesses and entrepreneurs are getting millions of views using this ridiculously simple technique and it’s also one of my favourites as a schadenfreude fan.

The Catch Cut is where you take another video of and epic fail - someone falling over or performing an act and continue the end part of the video at the start of your video to create a seamless transition and ‘catch’ your viewers attention.

It’s extremely effective at getting attention and fun to make. What’s great about these types of Visual Hooks is that work for almost any opening you want and give you an official excuse to scroll through funny schadenfreude videos on TikTok during work. Guilty as charged!

The Final Result

This is one of the most popular techniques. The Final Result Hook is all about starting your video with what the audience wants —the dream outcome, by giving a glimpse of the ultimate result at the very start, you create curiosity and keep viewers engaged as they stay to learn how to achieve it.

It could be an room transition, body transformation or for the foodies out there a delicious M&S styled food shot to get the taste buds buzzing - we eat with our eyes after all!

2. Text Hook

A text hook uses on-screen captions or headlines to stop viewers in their tracks. It’s the written equivalent of a clickbait title, but in video form. The right words can tease your audience, spark curiosity, and make them want to stick around for more.

Text hooks have been popularised by social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok, where captions are easy to create and can supplement the visual to create an even stronger hook.

Here are some examples of effective text hooks:

1. "If you're in between ages X and X, this post is for you."
2. "What's one thing that's X to X?"
3. "Top number thing someone with X wants you to know."
4. "X is gonna hate me for talking about this, but..."
5. "Guess the top insert number of insert thing on the planet."
6. "Things you should know about X in insert time frame in your X."

3. Verbal Hook

A verbal hook uses spoken words to capture attention right from the start. This could be a bold statement, a provocative question, or a promise of value.

What you say and how you say it matters. Craft your opening lines to create curiosity or an information gap that viewers are eager to fill.

A great example of a brand using a verbal hook in a social media video comes from Lidl’s Ode to Bakery campaign on TikTok. The campaign opens with a remix of a popular N-Trance song, featuring lyrics inspired by real customer comments, which immediately grabs attention. The video invites viewers to engage with the content by joining a popular TikTok trend, driving conversation and brand love.

This playful, sound-centric approach is a great example of using verbal hooks in a fun and interactive way, making it memorable and relatable for audiences. The campaign achieved over 19.5 million impressions with a 39% view-through rate.

Tip for using it in your content:

Use confident language that implies a common problem or misconception, followed by a promise to reveal the solution. For example,

“Here’s why your marketing emails aren’t getting opened—and the one tweak that can change that.”

This creates instant curiosity and positions you as the expert with the solution.

Conclusion

When it comes to hooks, think of it like preparing a great meal. The visual, text, and verbal hooks are your ingredients—each one adds its own flavour, but it’s the way you combine them that turns a simple dish into something unforgettable.

The story hook is the secret sauce that combines these elements perfectly, elevating your content from everyday fare to something that leaves a lasting impression. It’s not just about serving up attention-grabbers; it’s about crafting an experience that satisfies curiosity and keeps your audience coming back for more.

And that’s how you win, by turning the scroll into engagement, and curiosity into action.

Thanks for reading. If you want level up your video content feel free to drop me an email on [email protected] or add a comment below.