Let’s be real — no one wants to click on an ad they know nothing about, right?
That’s why what you’re promoting or advertising should be immediately obvious to your audience. Whether it’s an offer, a sale, or a lead generation form, there needs to be one key message. This is what brings in those higher CTRs and conversion rates and lower CPCs. Unfortunately, it’s not enough to write content and hope it sticks. Writing great copy takes a bit of prep work, which is why we recommend you consider these factors before letting your creative juices run wild:
- Who is your audience? What are their needs?
- What emotions do you want your copy to evoke?
- What tone and style are you going for?
- What action do you want your audience to take?
Here, we’ll dive into each aspect individually and break down key ways to solidify your messaging — before you even sit down to write it.
Your Audience & Their Needs
There are a lot of different copywriting tactics you can use for your ads, but before even deciding which ones to use, you need to determine who is going to see your ad. For example, will it be young professionals? Mothers with young children? Football coaches? Once you’ve decided on an audience, consider what they might be looking for in an ad and how your product or service can fill that void. How would they describe their problem? How would they describe their pain points? What emotions do they experience when thinking about their problems? How does your product or service solve those problems and/or make them feel better?
You can also look at this from a more analytical perspective: What types of content work best for different audiences? But let’s talk specifically about different age groups.
It’s no surprise that different age demographics will gravitate toward different types of content — and at different rates. Take, for example, a company selling high-end home appliances. It’s not likely that anyone between the ages of 13 and 24 would be the prime target audience. So, to help steer you in the right direction, we analyzed our wide dataset of ads to see which types of content resonate with different age groups based on the average click-through-rate.
Entertainment Content
First, we have entertainment content, which includes everything from shopping and sports to celebrities and music.
As we can see here, as the demographic got older, the average CTR for entertainment verticals went up. We would typically think of the younger demographics being the ones to best gravitate toward fluffier content like this, but here, we see the opposite. Older generations yielded higher CTRs, especially when we look at 18-24 compared to 55-65+. This could be due to the fact that older generations tend to consume a more diverse set of content compared to younger demos.
But how would ad copy look different for the younger age groups compared to older ones? Here, we give an example of some ad copy for an article: Top 20 Cities to Visit in Europe. First, we specified our target audience as being a college student, ages 13-25. The second set of copy is geared toward recent retirees, ages 45-65+. Let’s take a look at how these two sets differ.
Ages 13-25
Ages 45-65+
It’s interesting to note that the copy for the older demographic is much shorter and to-the-point, whereas, the copy for the younger demo includes a lot more added value to try to pique their interests.
News + Business Content
Now, let’s move onto news and business content, covering topics such as finance, real estate, education, politics, and more.
With this type of content, we have a very similar trend. Older demographics were still the ones to produce higher CTRs. However, it’s also interesting to note that the average CTRs were overall lower across the board for news content compared to entertainment topics.
But this doesn’t mean you only have to target people on the older end of things. Here, we can see that all age groups click on entertainment topics at a higher rate than business or news content, but it matters in context of your needs. Use these findings as a way to better understand just how your target audience will engage with your content — depending on which category it falls in.
What Emotions Do You Want to Evoke?
Now that we know who you are targeting, it’s time to think about how you want to target them. And this brings us to emotions. People are more likely to click on ad copy that makes them feel something. An emotional response isn’t necessarily emotionally charged—it could simply be curiosity, or it could be a mix of emotions. You can target your ads based on what emotional responses you want viewers to have.
Top Performing Emotions in Ad Copy
Of course, some emotions work better than others. Let’s get into some of the strong emotions that you could use in your copy. We took data from nearly 200K ads to see which emotions yielded higher CTRs. Below, we have three of the higher performing emotions based on its average CTR.
And what do these emotions look like in action? Let’s take a look at some examples of ad copy that evoke these feelings.
Curiosity
Headline: What’s next when your apology isn’t accepted?
Ad Copy: Start with introspection and research of the dispute.
Attention
Headline: U.S. see escalating climate change impacts, EPA report finds
Ad Copy: This is a big deal.
Excitement
Headline: 7 clothing items I bought on Amazon that everybody asks me about
Ad Copy: Stylish pieces at an affordable price? Yes please!
What Verbiage Do You Want To Use?
Here’s where tone and style really comes into play. Emotions play a strong part of your unique tone and style, but at the end of the day, it all comes down to specific word choice. Using keywords in your ad copy is an effective way to get noticed, but there are a few things you need to keep in mind. These key words and phrases also need to be placed strategically for each audience you’re trying to capture.
Top Performing Keywords / Phrases
And what keywords are worth sprinkling into your marketing copy? Using the same dataset, we took a look at which specific words had some of the highest average CTRs.
And of course, we have to see the different ways that you can incorporate these words into your copy.
- It’s all about looking good and feeling good.
- Which one of these weird trends will you try this year?
- A look at some of the most luxurious homes on the market.
- Here’s all that you need to know.
- It all comes down to what’s best for the league.
- Inflation is the only thing that can burst this bubble: When is all of this going to pop?
How To Get Your Customer To Act
Hint: It’s with CTAs. Once your customer gets further down the funnel, it gets more challenging to encourage them to convert or make a purchase. But with the right CTA, that challenge becomes a bit less daunting. Strong call-to-actions work well in social ads, landing pages, pop up banners, and more. However, it’s not enough to just have a CTA, you need to have a strong, clear CTA. Plus, CTAs can also incorporate some of the emotions and keywords that we discussed above.
Top Performing CTAs
So now let’s get into some of the best CTAs to use across the board. While some call-to-actions will work better for different audiences and content types, there are of course a few tried-and-true CTAs that can work for a wide variety of needs.
Bring It All Together With Anyword
So you’ve laid the groundwork. You know who your audience is, what emotions they resonate with, and the verbiage you want to use to attract them to your product or business. Now what?
Now it’s time to pen to paper (or fingers to keys) and create some content! Even with all of this prep work, writing effective, strong marketing copy is still easier said than done. It takes a lot of time, effort, and guesswork. Or does it? That’s where Anyword can help. Anyword’s AI Copywriting Platform not only lets its users create a wide variety of content, but also provides exclusive audience and performance insights.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves and bring it back to the copy itself.
Anyword’s Ad Copy Capabilities
Anyword’s platform uses industry-leading technology to create high-quality marketing content. We’re talking ad copy, social posts, landing page copy, product descriptions, emails, and more! And how do you incorporate all of the prep work you did before starting to create your content?
Anyword’s tool lets you input keywords to be included in your generated content and also provides a range of different tones of voice, copywriting formulas, and custom templates for you to choose from. This allows you to really fine-tune your content for your specific needs.
But let’s not forget about your target audience. With this AI platform, you can also create customer personas. This allows you to create copy with your specific customer base in mind by defining their age range, gender, and any pain points they may have.
Anyword’s Predictive Analytics for Ad Copy
A lot of marketers send their copy out into the world, not knowing exactly how it will perform. Not anymore.
Along with each copy variation generated by Anyword comes a unique Predictive Performance Score. These “grades” give you an indication of how well that piece of copy would perform and convert for your specific audience. This means that you can feel even more confident in the content you’re selecting — before you even go live with it.
And to sweeten the deal even more, these scores also have their own “Score Panel,” which comes with a whole slew of insights. This panel shows you both age and gender demographics, helping you decide which copy variation will best resonate with your target audience.
With Anyword in your copywriting arsenal, crafting your ad can be a much more streamlined, data-driven process. And what does this mean for you in the long run? Smarter copy choices and better performance — with all of the heavy lifting done by Anyword. Dip your toes into the world of data-lead copywriting and book a demo with us today. And if you’re looking for a way to put Anyword and your writing skills to good use, check out this remote copywriter opportunity.
