How to Use A.I. to Write Ad Copy (Trained by Your Best Performing Ads)

Writer is now an official Superpath partner! Its A.I. writing platform offers a suite of features to power smarter, faster work. Superpath members can get 20% off enterprise plans—just let them know you came from Superpath. By the way, the following post was written with Writer. 🙂

AdoreMe, a lingerie company, is using Writer's A.I. to help write ad copy for their products. The company has found that by using Writer's A.I., they can create targeted copy for different products and personas automatically. This has helped the company to improve the performance of their ads.

AdoreMe's ads are now more relevant to their target audience and are more likely to convert. The company has also found that they can save time and money by using Writer's A.I. to write their ad copy. They can also generate lots of variations so they can run A/B tests.

Writer's templates make it easy to create copy that fits the character constraints of SMS, email, banners, Instagram ads and more. You give Writer the context, and it'll create as many copy variations as you need. Here's CEO May Habib showing how it's done.

May Habib:

Hi, everyone. I'm May from Writer, an AI writing platform for teams, and we're doing a bunch of tutorial videos for the Super Path community. Excited to dive in for you.

Jimmy Daly: You. Okay, cool. Next up we're going to talk about creating ad copy trained on ads that have performed well in the past, and I'm sure this is not the primary use case, but I feel like a lot of content marketers, they're sort of looked at as the writing folks within the company and sometimes get asked to do tasks that are not exactly within their normal scope of work, like writing ads. I can think of a few times in my own career where I've needed to write an ad for something, and I feel like that's not really my thing. I kind of get it, but it's not really a specialty. Like I said, I know that's probably not the primary use case here, but I could imagine having a little help, especially if we could pull copy based on prior performance would be super, super helpful. So anyways, again, not the primary use case, but, May, would be curious to see exactly how this works, how you're able to pull the stuff, the right inputs in to get those good outputs.

May Habib: Yeah, totally. And I know that's not your ... Demand gen and growth folks aren't your primary audience, Jimmy, but so many people get pulled in partly because they see kind of crappy copy happening on that side of the house, and it all matters. It'll all kill a user journey if they're like, "Ugh, this is generic or sloppy." And so what we've got is the awesome ability to write ads with Writer, and I want to walk you through a couple examples that are really exciting when paired with our API. This can have really incredible outcomes. Let me give you an example.

So Adore Me is a very innovative consumer brand. They compete quite successfully against Victoria's Secret, and Gen Z is a big audience. What they've built with Writer is a really finely tuned engine to basically create ad copy, and what we started with was push notifications and SMS notifications kind of downloaded from their back ends with click through rates and open rates. So we got a sense of what performs well and how do their copywriters write, and we have, because they are such an incredible content organization, this real depth of content history. And so with Writer, they built a template, so everything here on the left is custom to Adore Me, so you don't get this kind of thing out of the box. But these are templates that Adore Me can build very easily with their CSM, so this is a pretty easy to use part of the product.

And so we can do a theme, like let's call it Black Friday, and the product details are, if you go to the Adore Me site, it's going to be a little bit NSF, but we'll do sleep and lounge. That should be easy. Okay, let's do ... I like this, so we're going to do ... Let's see what this is called. It's a PJ set, so we'll go here. We're going to do Cecilia PJ set. This is new because this is seasonal, so I'm going to click yes. The season is winter. Temporality, last call. No, there's not really last call, and it is on sale actually. So, let's see what happens. When you've got massive volume being able to pair a output like this, so check this out. This is a winter must have, right? Free shipping, sale won't last. And this message content, by the way, this is part of their own output format that needs to go into their CMS for this.

Jimmy Daly: Got it.

May Habib: And so they get a example that is just super, super straightforward, and this is all based on how they've wanted to tune this model. Then they get three examples that are just a little bit more creative. So we talked about that temperature, so if they want to just go with something and not think about it and not even read it, they'll copy the first one. If they want to go with something, if they have a little bit more time, they'll review the bottom option, so hyper-specific templates. They did this for a big part of their website on product skews and used the API to basically call 6,000 at once into their CMS with a corresponding uplift and click through. So, these are the types of things that we can really do at scale in e-commerce and other kind of high volume places.

Jimmy Daly: Super cool. And so the output here is it's personalized, not just based on the brand, but these are the correct character counts for an SMS or a push?

May Habib: Yes. Oh yeah. Yep, totally.

Jimmy Daly: So from here, you're copying and pasting.

May Habib: Even the amount of emoji use. Yep, exactly. That's the goal is when you do a custom template that we take a 60% to 70% automation rate into an 80-90% automation rate, and then where trust is very high, people are actually automatically doing thousands of entities at once because it's been absolutely vetted.

Jimmy Daly: That's really cool. Really cool. And so like you said, this is custom built, but this is something that any team could build within Writer based on the specifications of their own ads or social or wherever else they're going to be promoting and distributing stuff.

May Habib: Yes, and I want to show you one more on the advertising front. This one is really cool. These folks are a wonderful customer, and we hear a lot of talk in the enterprise about personalization. You may have a great tech stack for personalization, but then when it comes to actually personalized copy, it is a much harder thing. And there are very simple tools that will change, a bit of the tone or one or two words or call marketers product people or product people support people, but real deep personalization still eludes us, and that is what is required to get these personalized funnels that people think about when they talk about personalization. So with Writer, what folks have done is be able to actually create that kind of world.

This is just a very simple example. So let's say I am, and we have a lot of professional services firms as customers and they've got their own customers as customers, so let's say this is target.com. I'm just making stuff up, and the CTA is Shop Now. Let's say we're building banners or something. I think that's what this one is set up for is banner copy and then the audience segment. Now, this is all custom to this particular template, so this doesn't come out of the box, but you can see that we've got luxury college students, parents, budget conscious buyers, retired adults, outdoor enthusiasts. So let's do college students and generate content. So give me an ad that sends people to target.com who are college students. From clothes to school supplies, Target has everything you need for college. Unbeatable prices, et cetera.

Okay, so now let's keep the same input so you have an idea of how Writer can automatically personalize, and let's do outdoor enthusiasts. We'll a little card up here and then we can compare. So still for Target, but right? All about the outdoors, because this is for a totally different audience. So camping or hiking trip from tents and sleeping bags to hiking boots and campfire cookware, and so folks who have multiple audiences get very excited because they can set up a template for one audience and how they want the content to look like, and then automatically get additional riffs of the copy that are more than just your outdoor adventure and a headline. It's a much deeper level of personalization.

Jimmy Daly: And would a customer Deloitte need to train Writer to do that, or by just giving them a detailed persona like outdoor enthusiast, It basically knows, okay, an outdoor enthusiast is this type of person and therefore will use certain type of language.

May Habib: Yeah, exactly. So the latter is done automatically, right? The training that happens is what are the inputs that people are going to have when they are writing or our clients are going to have when they're writing and trying to get content? What are the audience segments that we care about? And then sort of linking that to how the content is generated. That's our secret sauce of just really taking what the very structured input is and the resulting very on point copy.

Jimmy Daly: Yeah, really cool. Okay, well speaking of selling, we're going to talk next about automatic newsletter creation, which for a lot of folks is a key sales channel, so we'll dive into that and we'll see you there.

Okay, cool. There you go. Thank you so much, May, and your team over at Writer for being such a great partner to us at Super Path. You're building an awesome product. We really appreciate you spending time to help us get up and running with it, and frankly, your support is what helps us keep this community free, so we really are grateful for that. For those watching, if you do want to learn more and give Writer a try, go to writer.com. There's a couple of different plans you can choose from. There's also a free tier if you just want to kick the tires. So, writer.com. Thanks so much for watching and thanks so much to the team at Writer for your support. Take care, everybody.

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