Using AI for Ad Copywriting, Scripts And Headlines
This is Part 3 in our series on AI for Advertising. AI isn't just about generating ideas; it can also generate ad headlines and descriptions, and with a little human guidance and editing, the output can be as good as copy written by a seasoned pro.
It's a serious time-saver and a great way to beat the blank page. But the key is to create great prompts and share customer insight and other guidance to the AI, because if you don’t guide it closely - it will spit out copy that ‘sounds like Chat GPT’ instead of great copy that resonates with your customer.
Teach your AI About Your Brand Voice and Messaging
When using AI to generate ad copy or create video scripts, it's crucial to ensure that the output aligns with your brand, so you need to teach your AI about your tone of voice, customer profiles and USPs.
Create a prompt (that you can later reuse) that provides clear guidelines and examples to the AI tools you're using, and always review the generated content to ensure it's on-brand before publishing.
Better still - you can create a custom GPT where you train your GPT on everything it needs to know about your brand - in order to help it product on-brand copy that speaks to your unique personas and in your tone of voice.
Treat your AI like a marketing assistant - educate it about your brand and also direct it as to which marketing frameworks and processes to follow when creating your content.
1. Leveraging AI for Video scripts
One of the most challenging aspects of video ad creation is coming up with a compelling script. But with AI tools you can generate engaging video ad scripts in a matter of minutes.
Prompt your AI by feeding it with successful video scripts from ads you like or ads you have developed in the past and ask it to generate scripts that are optimized for your specific product or service.
Tools like Magic Brief allow you to scrape the script of ads you like, so this can also speed up gathering the inputs to give to your AI.
Make sure your prompt is filled with information about your brand and target audience, the ad angles, tone of voice and underlying desires you have developed earlier (see above)
2. Creating Powerful AD Headlines
Give your AI tool all the important information, angles, offer and target customer and it can come up with a large number of headline options that you can edit to test on your ads.
Input Clear Prompts: Provide the AI with detailed prompts about your product, target audience, and campaign goals.
Generate Multiple Options: Allow the AI to generate a variety of headlines to choose from.
Give it a word count, a style and of course your copywriting guidelines. Note sometimes it ignores word count so you need to manually check this.
Give it examples of the best-performing headlines and instruct it to ‘read and pay close attention to tone of voice’
3. Crafting Performance-Focused Ad Copy
AI can quickly generate and test a wide range of ideas so you can experiment with different approaches to see what works best for your audience, without spending hours brainstorming and writing copy from scratch.
AI tools can identify the benefits and features that matter most to your target audience. Prompt your AI to generate benefit-focused ad copy that speaks directly to the needs and desires of specific customer segments.
Feed your AI with examples of copy that has worked in the past or copy that is compelling from other ads you have come across.
A great step before you ask AI to generate copy - is to feed it with information about your target personas. If you haven’t developed these yet, or are still working on them - AI can also be a great help in fine-tuning those personas. Once you have developed them, they can become part of your future prompts to help the AI create copy that works for your audience.
Example Prompt:
“For ChatGPT 4 users: Please use this website to gain an understanding about my product: [INSERT LINK]
For ChatGPT 3.5 users: [insert most important information of your product/sales page here]
[Insert information about your target personas, their emotional drivers and desires, and any other relevant information]
Please write me 2 ad copy variations using short sentences and concise easy-to -understand language.
Here are examples of high-converting ads
[INSERT YOUR EXAMPLES]”
Balancing AI-Generated and Human-Created Ads
While AI can be incredibly effective at generating ad copy at scale, it's important not to rely on it entirely. There's still a place for human creativity and strategic thinking in your ad copy.
Consider using AI to handle the more repetitive and data-driven aspects of ad creation, like generating multiple variations for testing or personalizing ads based on user data.
But leave room for your marketing team to come up with big-picture creative concepts and strategies that can take your campaigns to the next level. AI is great at pulling from established ideas and concepts, so let it do what is good at, leaving your human team to come up with the truly unique and original ideas.
It's a tool, and like any tool, it's only as good as the person wielding it. That's where you come in. By combining your marketing savvy with the insights and automation that AI provides, you can create ads that don't just perform well, but absolutely smash your goals.
You will still need someone with a keen sense of tone (probably a copywriter or creative director type) to make the call as to whether AI-generated copy is actually good and worth using. It will almost always need a human touch for tweaking
