Writing ad angles from pain points

You have four adverts with different music and opening shots but the same promise. They offer different executions of one idea. A new angle starts by finding another relevant reason to care.

Meanwhile the product does several different jobs for several different people, and only one of those jobs is in the advertising. Usually the one the founder finds most interesting.

The words that fix this are already written. They are in your inbox.

What is an angle, exactly?

A reason to care, not a way of speaking.

Take a mattress. Sleep better tonight and the sleep you have been missing are the same angle in two costumes: both promise better sleep to somebody who wants better sleep. Whereas stops you waking your partner every time you turn over is a different angle: it addresses the effect of your movement on the person sleeping beside you.

That is the test. Change the phrasing and you have a variation. Change who is being helped, and with what, and you have an angle.

Most brands run one angle and many variations of it. The result is a set of ads that all live or die together, which is a fragile way to spend money and an expensive way to learn nothing.

Where are your customers' own words?

In four places, all of which you already own or can read for free this afternoon.

Your own inbox

Open the messages people sent before they bought and the messages they sent afterwards. Not the complaints yet, the ordinary ones. People describe their situation before they ask their question, and the description is the gold. I have a small kitchen and everything I own is on the worktop. Nobody writes that in a brief.

The questions asked before somebody buys

Pre-purchase questions can reveal uncertainty, practical needs or curiosity. Group the recurring themes and decide which the advertising or product page should answer.

An ad that answers the most common pre-purchase question is an ad aimed at the people who were about to leave, which is a larger group than the people who were about to buy.

Returns and complaints

Returns and complaints show where the experience parted company with the promise. Read what the customer expected, what happened and what they wanted put right.

Some of those are product faults and belong to a different department. Some are expectation faults, which means the advertising promised the wrong thing to the wrong person, and that is fixable in a week without touching the product.

Reviews of products like yours

Read relevant competitor reviews for unmet needs and vocabulary. Make a promise only if your own product can substantiate it; another product's complaint does not establish your advantage.

Read for the vocabulary, not for lines to lift. The useful material is always more specific and less grammatical than anything a brand would write. But a review belongs to whoever wrote it and describes a product that is not yours, so a sentence taken from it and run as your advert is both somebody else's words and a complaint about a rival now presented as your own. Keep the phrasing in your notes as a record of how people speak; the line that goes out is one you wrote in that register.

Why do your words and their words never match?

Because you know how the product works and they only know what it is for.

Inside a business, everybody learns the internal vocabulary within a fortnight: the material, the process, the feature names, the abbreviation for the thing. The words become accurate and simultaneously stop describing any experience a customer has ever had. You end up advertising a specification while your customer is trying to solve an afternoon.

The gap between the two vocabularies is where the angles live. When you find a phrase in a customer email that you would never have written yourself, do not tidy it up in your notes. That is the whole find. It stays a record of how they speak, not copy to publish: they wrote to you for a different purpose, so if you want to quote a customer in public, ask them first. It is one message, and it means their words are used with their agreement.

How do you turn a complaint into an opening line?

Say the problem first, in their sentence, and let the product arrive second.

Sit with the list you collected and write one line per problem, keeping the customer's register and their specifics in a line you write yourself. Then put the product at the end of that line rather than the start.

Try opening on a recognisable problem, then show how the product helps. A product-led opening may also work when the object or result is what earns attention. Compare the approaches against the campaign goal.

One problem per ad

Everything else depends on this rule, which is usually the first one dropped.

One clear problem per advert is a useful starting point for comparing angles. Several related needs can belong together when they form a coherent promise; judge whether the viewer can follow it.

It also makes your testing legible. When one angle beats the others, you have a strong lead on which problem your market feels most sharply, one worth carrying into the product page, the email and the next thing you make, and worth confirming before you bank it, because a win can come from the execution, the targeting or the offer as much as from the problem itself.

Which one do you write first?

The problem that appears most often in the returns and the pre-purchase questions, not the one you find most interesting. Those two are rarely the same, and the second one has already had its turn.

Start with a recurring need your product can address. A familiar finding can still be valuable; you do not need to make it surprising or uncomfortable for it to deserve an advert.

Sources and evidence

Our method. Reading inboxes, pre-purchase questions, returns and competitor reviews for vocabulary rather than for lines to lift, and writing one problem per advert, is how this studio builds an angle. Quoting a customer's own words in public still needs their permission; the practice here is about noticing register, not publishing it unasked.