How I Write Ads That Actually Convert

Ladies and gentlemen, here is how I write ads that just fucking work. Because when any of us create any ads and put them online, all we want is for them to just convert some damn people. And so I'm here to tell you it's not that complicated. I'm going to walk you through the exact workflow that I have used to launch and create ads that have generated well over £150 million in revenue across my little lifetime. And so, welcome back. If you don't know, my name is Elliot. Over the last few years, I've written a lot of ads. Now, some of them worked, and they worked amazingly. Lots of them, however, didn't. In fact, the vast majority failed. But throughout my years of writing ads, whether it was in an ad agency, working with some of the biggest clients in the world, in my own agency for five years, or here now at Entrepreneur Circle, I learn a few things. And so the truth is that writing ads used to actually be really hard because you had to brush up on your knowledge of copywriting. You had to learn the tools and tactics of persuasion. You had to read a bunch of copywriting books, as I did many, many years ago, to understand all that goes into creating high converting advertising copy. Words that are so precise they have the power to make someone take action. That is what the ad copy is doing here. And so used to be very hard, but now it is easy, thanks to the wonderful world of artificial intelligence. And so, you bet this workflow is going to run through how I use AI, But I'm going to show you how to do it the right way, okay? Because let's just be real. Even with insanely powerful artificial intelligence that is meant to be coming for us all and taking all of our jobs, most ads that people create are not very good, okay? They're very generic, and they just suck. And the reason is, when you have a powerful tool such as artificial intelligence, and everybody's using it, the vast majority of people are using it in a very generic way. Have you seen the Incredibles? In the first film, the bad guy is a guy called Syndrome, someone who longs so much to have superpowers that he turns venomous and filled with rage and wants to wipe anyone with superpowers off the face of the earth and in fact, invent things to give regular people superpowers. You see, he says a line in that film. He says, if everybody's super, then nobody is. And that is so fucking true. And in the world of AI, when everybody's using artificial intelligence and everyone has these superpowers to write a bunch of ad copy all of a sudden no one is because there's truth in what he is saying. And the truth is, is when everyone is doing the same thing, you cannot expect to get get an extraordinary level of results. So if you default to the same simple tactics, hey, chatgpt wrote me an ad copy about this. Well, guess what my friend, you are going to get the same mediocre results. And that is why when most people use AI, it's not very good because they use it in the same surface level way as everybody else. So I'm going to show you how to go a step deeper because there are prizes to be had for those who go one step deeper. Even more prizes to be had for those who go two steps deeper. And it's all about deeper thinking and doing things that the vast majority of people aren't. And don't worry, it's not that complicated. It's just most people don't think that much. So let's talk about the modern landscape. When it comes to running advertisements and creating advertisements primarily on Meta ads, that is my channel of choice, where we get the best results. And so a lot of things have changed in the modern landscape, okay? We have seen factors such as the most amount of new businesses being started ever in history last year, and that's probably going to continue this year. So more and more other businesses, competitors, are flooding the marketplace, which means people have unprecedented levels of choice. The barrier to entry to advertise has never been lower because with the rise of artificial intelligence, it's been easier than ever to create ads, landing pages, emails, you name it. And so as a result, more and more people are advertising. Heck, the advertising platforms are making it easier and easier as well. But then two key developments that we noted this year. So the first was the launch of Andromeda, the Meta Ads update. I've got another video on my channel where I talk more about this. But the new algorithm which is built with the capabilities to handle all of Meta's new inbuilt AI features when it creates ad copy for you and ad images and all this kind of stuff led to a new reality, a paradigm shift on the platform where now in order to compete, we must have a large volume of creatives that all have different messaging and different visuals. So they all have to be different. We have to have way more for the algorithm to choose from, otherwise it just penalizes you. But the other key element was an increase in direct competition, not in terms of the volume, but in terms of how the Ads were being presented to the user in the marketplace. This was something we observed that when we were on Facebook or Instagram, and when we clicked on an ad that we saw on our feed, the minute we went back to the platform, back to Facebook or Instagram, our next 4, 5, 6 ads in a row were direct or indirect competitors. The ad that we clicked through, you see, it's how the new algorithm was operating. It was taking a signal, an expression of interest, such as a click or a watch of a video, and it was saying, damn, this person's into that stuff. If I don't track the conversion, if I don't see them buy this thing, then guess what, I'm going to show them loads more other options that are similar to this that are solving the same problem, whether that's a direct substitution or something else. And as a result, your ad gets shown next to all of your competitors, literally immediately. So we were seeing people having an unprecedented rate of choice and having to like, directly deal with consumers who are now more educated because they may not have even knew a solution to the problem existed. And then all of a sudden, bang, they see 10 in a row and now they're educated and they're comparing. So these are the sort of subtle shifts that you need to be semi aware of because they have a big impact on the words we're going to write, the ads we're going to create. Because we need to create ads that are going to stand out and perform well under the conditions in which they are displayed. And that is where this all comes in. So understanding the landscape operates like that. There are three core elements that we focus on when creating these ads, and these underpin everything. The first is a deep knowledge of your ideal customer profile. Now that is Marketing 101. You'll hear everyone spouting about ICPs and customer avatars, but it's true. It's so true. Because let me tell you, the best performing ads that I have ever written were not the ones that had the most bombastic, the most outlandish, the most claims in them. No, they were simply the ads that articulated the very specific situations, the problems and the outcomes of the people I was targeting. Because let me tell you, when people think you understand them and you clearly demonstrate that and you articulate what they are thinking in their heads, that is advertising done correctly. That is when it drives people to take action. It's not about the big crazy claims. It's about understanding what's going on in here and being able to truly speak the language. So you have to do that. We have a whole process on that. I'll probably do another video on that one day. But it brings us into number two, radical differentiation. You see, we have to appreciate that now people are seeing more businesses than ever before. And if our business, if they click on our ad, they're going to be shown a bunch of our competitors. We need to give them a damn good reason why we are different. Radical differentiation. You should never stutter when someone asks you, why is your business different? Why would I choose your thing over anyone else's? Basic question 101, but you need to have a damn good answer. Now, for many of you, your own unique inventions might be a thing, but for a lot of other people, it's very simple, because it all comes down to what you do. Your methodology, your mechanism, your experience, how you package it, your frameworks, your tactics, your knowledge, all that kind of stuff. And indeed your experience, because that can be a great differentiator as well. We've got to get clear on that. And this then takes us to point number three, Unshakable trust. You see, gone are the days where we can run an ad spouting a crazy claim and people will believe us. Skepticism is high, trust is low. We have to bake in elements of unshakable trust and ie, proof and evidence in order to support and substantiate any and all claims and promises we make. And this is slept on, even at the ad level. And whenever we bolster this, we see better results. So we understand those three things first before we dive into the rest of this workflow. You see, once we understand those three things, we are now going to go through the AI creation flow because we are going to use AI. It's going to be easy. You can do this in like 15 minutes. But we're going to do it in the right way. And so the AI creation flow is as follows. Number one, we are going to develop and feed the AI some amazing context. Number two, we're then going to use the AI to identify specific angles of the ads that we're going to create. Then it's going to script out the full ads for us. And finally, and very importantly, we can edit the damn thing. So we're not going to just let AI do everything. Step number one, context. So context is important with artificial intelligence. You get out what you put in. And so for additional context for you, the dear viewer, which AI am I using? Currently, I'm using Manus M A N U S. It is Latin for right hand, I think. And we use Manus because it is a beast, okay? And it's a credit based AI system that basically is incentivized to use maximum intelligence to give you good responses. And as a result it can handle loads of context. And I like when I can give massive context because I get better, more specific results. And so the context, we're going to feed the AI what this means, we're going to open up the AI chat and, and we're going to feed it a bunch of information, very specific information, number one, context on your business. What the heck do you do? What products do you offer, what services do you deliver, what do you do? Plain and simple. I like to just give it the website and maybe even some lead magnets and brochures, anything that we might have that just is an overall context of what we offer as a business. So it's very, very clear. Then we're going to feed it our ideal customer profile. Now we use the, we call it the transformational ICP model, which is where we create a physical document that has the entire idle customer profile. It has them before they met our business and after they met our business. And we have the inner workings of their brain in the middle as well. And this enables us to paint a very clear picture as to who this person is both before us and then what their life is like after. So we can get very clear on that transformation, that bridge. But needless to say, we go very deep into that again, there's a whole other video there for another day, but that is really, really key. We then feed it a bunch of trust signals. So specific testimonials, we'll let it add our review sites, we'll give it case studies, we'll tell it all about the awards we've got, specific stats and any other type of trust signal that it can then embed in all of the copy that we are going to create. Finally, we will give it lots of long form content as well. So for example, if we've just done a webinar like we may have done the other day, we can feed it the entire two hour presentation because Menace can handle that. And then it will eat all of that up and understand the really rich, in depth, detailed context from a proper like, you know, two hour presentation. Needless to say, the more context the better. So we don't want to skip them. And there will be a direct correlation between the quality of your outputs and the level of context you put in. Then we get into the world of angles. So I always like to test angles first. You See, angles determine two things. They determine, number one, the efficiency of your ads. That is, what is the cost per lead, the cost per click, the cost per customer. Then number two, they greatly determine who actually comes into your business and becomes a customer. You see, the angles are the different ways in which your thing might appeal to a different type of customer. And as we all know, not all customers are created equally. They are very different. And so we want the angles that not only are efficient from an advertising perspective, but that also yield us the high caliber customers. We don't want any of those nasty, cheap customers that are going to be a pain in the rear. We can avoid that. So to bring this to life with an example, GENIE AI is our software company. It's a sales and marketing system and it does loads of stuff. Now, there are lots of reasons why people would want GENIE AI for someone who missed their bunch of phone calls. Well, we have an AI agent that answers the phone in an amazing way. And so that would be one angle that we go after. Some people know that they do like no lead nurture, or they're sat on a massive list of customers that they haven't reactivated and they don't know what to do. Well, the system would do that. And we can get customers from this little goldmine you've already got. Some people would know that they're doing loads of stuff manually in their business and actually they'd want to automate a bunch of processes. Others want to like actually schedule their social media so it goes out on time and even have an AI that helps them create that. Now, GENIE does all of these things, but these are all individual angles that we would create in our ads and we would go after one individually at a time because each angle is going to yield us a different level of efficiency, that is how much it costs us to get a leader of booked call and also a different type of customer. And we want to find the balance of both because a real example here, we ran loads of ads with the social media planner angle and our efficiency was great. Cost per lead was like super low. But then all the calls that were coming through, they were crazy customers and hardly any of them bought. So the customer acquisition cost was super high. So we had to cancel them, bin them off, and try something else. On the flip side, the ads that focus on the angle of automating your business and streamlining your processes attracted a higher cost per lead and cost per book call, but a significantly lower customer acquisition cost. Because the people that came through were more sophisticated, more advanced business Owners that were more willing to invest in a system like this. Okay, so the angle has a massive, massive impact. So how do we even decide which angles we should pick? So that is a great question. Now, there's two ways to look at this, but the first thing is you want to look at where the most potent sources of angles actually come from. Okay. And so generally there's three here, based on a lot of stuff that I've learned, indeed, from one of my mentors, Jeremy Haynes. I learned a lot of this from him, Absolute G. And so he talks about angles in three ways. You have like, the situation or circumstances of the prospect, the world, the reality in which they are living in. So the things, the beliefs they hold to be true, and the narrative that they tell themselves as to why things are existing in this kind of way. And this is kind of like their current state of operating. And so we have angles that can appeal to why they are where they are. So for example, in my agency days, you might get a customer on a call that's like, I tried ads with another agency and yeah, meta ads, they just don't work. They just don't work because they didn't work for us. And so they hold this belief, this narrative that metarads don't work for them. And that is a great hook that we could tap into and a great angle. We then have the timeless classic, AKA the problems. So these are the problems that the person thinks is holding them back and the problems that they are experiencing at the moment. And so you should all understand a lot of the key problems that your customers have when they come to you. But this is also where you can go a bit deeper because a lot of people think they have a problem, but actually that's not the real problem. There's a deeper issue that you know is the source of the problem. For example, if someone came to me and said, ah, meta ads don't work. I tried this agency and I just completely failed. And I could say, look, the problem is not meta ads. The problem is your landing page absolutely sucks ass. And this is terrible. So we need to fix the landing page first and we can diagnose the real problem using our expertise. That's another type of angle. And then we have outcomes. So outcomes are the end result. Okay? Plain and simple, this is what you are going to get if you use this thing. This is what the, the dream life is going to look like, the transformation when this is all done. And so you can split outcomes into three, because yes, we have the big dream outcome okay. The massive thing everyone wants when they are at the end of the road, they've got the result. They're happy, they're rich, they're wealthy, their relationships are great, whatever it is. Okay? You have the big dream outcome. Now, for most businesses, especially service businesses, there's quite a journey to actually getting the dream outcome. So you also want to talk about milestones. What are the significant milestones that they hit on the way to achieving the dream outcome? Because this is all about making that dream outcome seem more achievable. Okay. And show them that we understand the journey or the road to getting there. And then finally, you can also think about what are the. What are the little tiny wins? The tiny wins that once you start using this, you notice immediately, okay, that again, are just little steps on the way to achieving the milestones on the way to achieving the big dream. And we break down what can be a massive, highly out of reach, sometimes dream outcome for someone into milestones and steps where we therefore make it more believable, and so on and so forth. So these are where we get the most potent types of angles. Because again, angles are not about crazy promises. They're about showing you understand the prospect deeply and this helps you get into those zones. So we're going to take our artificial intelligence like Magnus, we're going to feed it all that context. We're going to give it all of our angles and we are going to have some, have some great fun that equals a smiley face because we're now on our way to getting some tremendous outputs. And so again, I normally ask AI, hey bro, can you please identify a bunch of situational problem based and outcome based angles for my ICP using all the customers and context that you've got and then it will go away. And do that. Pro tip, we also identify angles based on real life customer conversations. So whether that is sales calls with prospects, or if it's just actual customer service or customer success calls where we're chatting with customers, we feed them into AI, get it to analyze them and get it to identify the angles, the things that are making them light up. Because that can really help you get these things nailed in the customer's own words. Boom. Okay, so hey bro, please turn these angles into scripts. That is what you need to ask AI. Once you fed it all that stuff. Back in the day, there was a bit of a need to provide AI with a bunch of copywriting frameworks. And that actually is still a thing inside my secret vault, which is very secret. I do have a bunch of legendary prompt frameworks that generate ad copies in really specific styles that are proven to work across industries. And so you can do that, but you can keep it simple, okay? You really don't need to. And actually, if you give it that level of context, you identify those angles first, then say, hey, man, I need these ads to have a killer hook, a good body, and a call to action at the end. The 1, 2, 3, simple add structure. What is the hook? What is the body? What is the call to action? The hook is plain and simple. It's normally it's like the angle when we're focused on the angle, but we want it to be super compelling. The body is then very simple. We normally have some kind of proof in here and maybe some kind of story, or maybe we're then just embellishing the angle. But again, we let AI do a lot of the heavy lifting here. And then the call to action is dead simple. Do not fall into the trap of trying to sell your whole entire thing in the ad. Remember, you're only trying to sell the next step. So your ad does not need to be complex, it does not need to be that long, it does not need that much explaining. If it is, then you are over complicating it, my friend. Hook, body, call to action, and tools like maintenance will do a bloody good job because and only because we have fed them the right level of context and done the work, asking them to discover the angles first. Boom. Then we get to the stage that most people skip. Skip this at your peril, my friends. But you want to actually edit it, okay? Because AI stuff whilst it is good and whilst we, when we follow this framework, it yields some fantastic outputs. It's still AI okay? And most people can kind of tell, and so we edit it. I'm a big believer in the 1080, 10 framework, which is that we did the first 10% of the work by giving AI all the context and by developing the angles. AI then did the 80% by producing all the ad copy scripts for us. Now we must finish it up, we must polish and we must edit and we must humanize it. Now, there's two ways you can do this. Number one, if you rely on actually reading ads from a teleprompter, then you can actually sit there and edit it. And there's nothing wrong with that. What I like to do, having read and filmed a lot of ads in my time, I feel quite comfortable to take a script and then start filming it and kind of freeball it a little bit, improvise it use what the AI has created as a structure and then I speak it in my own language. I change the words I use, how I would structure the sentences in my natural flowing way if you will. And I add my own twist. And therefore I don't have to sit and edit, I just have to add my twist. So I'm actually doing it. But that still counts. If you just robotically read it, then it's going to clearly not sound like you. So don't skip that. And then post these ads asap, film them and test them. I'm a big fan of minimum viable product ads, which means we'll get some tested. We'll film them in a very simple setup in the studio, or we'll grab my phone, I'll go for a little walk and do some selfie style videos. There's another video on my channel about those and we test them quickly because the hard fact of life is that at plus percent of your ads will be a big fat stinking failure. Meaning they will not make you any money. But that's okay. That is the way of advertising my friends, because we will get 20% that do that do work and then we can double down on making those better and greater. So there you go. That is my ad copy and script workflow which enables me to create ads that just flipping work. I hope you found this useful. Drop a comment, subscribe and I'll see you in the next video. Peace.