How You Can Use Audience Research To Write Ad Copy

In my previous post I shared several methods that I use to conduct audience research. While audience research is great, it’s useless unless you apply the insights you capture effectively.

In this post, I’ll outline how I translate some of those insights into ad copy. In the past, I felt like I couldn’t escape writer’s block when trying to write ad copy. My brain works as a giant spreadsheet, so I can struggle a bit with more free form creative tasks.

These frameworks have helped me to crank out headlines and descriptions in what feels like no time at all. At the time of writing this, I actually used this framework to write 224 video ad scripts in about an hour. My hope is that these processes can do the same for you.

Side note; yes you technically could turn to ChatGPT/generative AI to write ad copy for you quickly, but these tools won’t have the insights you’ve gathered from your audience research to create compelling messaging.

As I outline the frameworks and templates I use below, I’ll dive into these processes:

• A quick review of conducting audience research

• Aligning pain points, features, and benefits

• Putting everything together into ad copy

A Review of Audience Research

When using this copywriting framework, audience research is the building block that will allow you to write content quickly. As I outlined in my post linked above, there are several methods you can use to gather customer insights. Some of my favorites are:

• Speaking with actual customers

• Interviewing the brand’s sales or CS team

• Using ChatGPT to summarize customer pain points and reviews

You can also take the ChatGPT method one step further by prompting the tool to summarize negative competitor reviews. This will allow you to quickly identify your target audience’s pain points, and position your brand to capture prospects looking to leave your competitors. The simple framework I use to leverage these pain points to develop copy is outlined next.

Aligning Pain Points, Features, and Benefits

One method that I like to use to start organizing audience research is to:

1. Group similar insights into larger pain points

2. Identify what product/service features solve those pain points

3. Outline the benefit of the product/service to the customer

Instead of explaining what this process looks like, I’ve created an example that can be found in the table below. This example highlights how a creative-as-a-service (CaaS) brand like Superside, Design Pickle, or Penji might align customer pain points to specific features of their service, and the benefits those features provide to customers.

In-house creative expertise is limited, and can't produce a wide range of asset types across images, GIFs, videos, etc...

A team of creative experts with a wide range of expertise can support requests to ensure you can take advantage of any type of media.

You can now experiment on OLV channels like YouTube, or compare performance between static images and videos on social.

Standard creative agencies can have lengthy turnaround times, which require a lengthy planning process that doesn't always suit startups well.

Proven project management systems allow the designers allocated to your projects to deliver first drafts within 1 business day.

You don't have to wait weeks between ideation and implementation. You can develop a robust and flexible creative testing plan.

Pricing with freelancers or agencies can be confusing and expensive.

You're charged a flat monthly fee, regardless of how many projects you request.

Your creative testing isn't constrained by your budget, but only your imagination.

By outlining how the service solves problems for customers, we can create a useful messaging map that can help explain what one of these CaaS brands can do for a client.

Turning Insights Into Ad Copy

At this point in the process, it’s time to put your metaphorical pen to paper. I typically lean on this template (steal it!) to house my messaging map and write ad copy.

You can see in the template example that I’ll start with what messaging type I want to focus on for that particular copy component. For example, if the intention behind a specific ad is to reach a cold audience, then I might want to focus on calling out one of the pain points that frustrates this audience. From here I can quickly turn that pain point into a headline, description, or other copy component across multiple platforms. I’ve already got the foundational content coming from my audience research, so I just need to fit those ideas into specific character limits.

I’ve found that this process streamlines a lot of the heavy duty creative thinking, and allows you to simply plug away making tweaks to verbiage instead of workshopping new concepts. If you’ve collected even a handful of pain points, features, and solutions, you can quickly write more copy than you’ll need. This allows you to build out a large message testing library as well.

Bonus: Writing Video Ad Scripts

As a quick bonus, you can also use the pain points, features, and benefits framework to write out video ad scripts. By mirroring these components across your video hook, value proposition, and call to action, you can write out multiple script components that you can mix and match.

You can see in the same template example that only three hook and three value proposition variations quickly got me to nine different videos. This is the process I followed to write 224 scripts in about an hour.

Wrapping Up

In the end, this is the process that has helped me overcome writer’s block, write quickly, and create messages that resonate with potential customers because they’re rooted in audience research. I hope that you find these tools useful as well!

Have questions, considerations, or critiques? I’d love to hear them! If you’re reading this via email, just hit respond. Otherwise, you can find me on LinkedIn and X (Twitter).