Unleashing AI to Craft UGC Ads: My Journey
Finding the perfect formula for a high-performing ad is difficult. Like, very, very difficult. I am sharing with you how I recently tried to overcome this challenge for one of my clients, climony.
In my previous posts (1,2), I shed light on how analyzing successful ads can unlock the secret to crafting captivating campaigns. This time, I'm using the power of AI to enhance the success of my ever-green ad. All are based on climony content in combination with a viral video from a creator I like. You will see which prompts I am feeding so that you can replicate my path.
My goal is to create UGC ads with the help of copy.ai & chatGPT and beat the performance of the ever-green ad.
Are you ready?
I am!
Let’s start.
Ingredient list 🧑🏻 🍳
Copy.ai (free version)
ChatGPT 4.0 (paid version)
A viral video from a creator that you like
The best ad, website content, blog post
Marketing specialist/community manager to create the ad
Steps
1: Utilize copy.ai to extract brand voice
2: Onboarding ChatGPT as a Senior Copywriter
3: Feeding climony’s evergreen ad on ChatGPT
4: Mimicking reference video style (creator: Rich BFF)
5: Applying the winning formula by feeding climony website content
6: Creating extra “hooks” for the new UGC video
7: Shooting the ad with the climony marketing specialist
Final thoughts
———
Let’s get started!
1: Utilize copy.ai for brand voice
✅ First stop: I went over to Copy.ai (free version), where I want to extract the tone of voice of my client, climony (a sustainability app).
✅ It gave me a good guideline. I also had copy.ai analyze the strength of my brand to feed it to ChatGPT:
👉Prompt: Conduct a competitive analysis of climony.com - look at their strengths, weaknesses, strategies, customer service, pricing, feedback, etc.
2: Onboarding ChatGPT as a Senior Copywriter
✅ Feeling adventurous, I switched gears to ChatGPT and requested to act like a senior copywriter:
👉Prompt: ChatGPT, you're the copywriter for the climony app. I'll give you more info on the brand in the following prompts. Keep asking and learning.
✅ Then, I onboarded “the senior copywriter” by giving it more brand information:
👉Prompt: Here are the app's strengths: [Inserted climony’s strengths]. Now, Ask me about the website content to continue learning.
✅ After this, ChatGPT asked me to share the website content. I answered:
3: Analyzing climony’s evergreen ad on ChatGPT
✅ If ChatGPT misunderstood any of my prompts, I asked it to correct them. Now that ChatGPT was all set and acting like a trained senior copywriter, I threw “THE question” at it:
👉Prompt: So, ChatGPT, ready to rock as climony's senior copywriter?
✅ With an affirmative answer, I verified if it was up-to-knowhow with UGC, hook, and hold rates. After confirming that it knew what I was talking about, I gave ChatGPT the transcript of climony’s top-performing ad and asked it to dissect it into elements:
There I inserted the ever-green ad script.
✅ The first result I got didn't entirely satisfy me. So I challenged ChatGPT, asking:
👉Prompt: If you were to fully take on the role of a senior copywriter, knowing everything about the app, can you imagine catchier, more convincing scripts?
4: Mimicking reference video style (Rich BFF) on ChatGPT
✅ By this point, I felt assured that it understood the assignment. I wanted to create a UGC ad, and I want it to create new scripts. Now I was ready to give the next challenge: Mimicking the style of the Rich BFF reference video based on all what it learned from me so far:
✅ It agreed, so I shared my reference video from Rich BFF with its transcription, including captions, because chatGPT can’t analyze videos or check links yet.
5: Applying the winning formula based on climony content
✅ The initial result was a bit too short and “salesy”. I was surprised it still didn’t understand the assignment. So I challenged the machine 🤖:
👉Prompt: Rich BFF’s videos have longer scripts, though. Can you be more specific with your points, just like she does in her videos? I think you're jumping to "selling" a bit too quickly:
✅ The next result was on point! It provided me with both captions and a proper transcript. The next step was feeding further my two blog posts from the climony website and applying the secret sauces of our best ad and Rich BFF’s video.
And boom! It spat out the scripts in GERMAN (it is pretty good).
✅ I shared the blog posts, and then I gave the second post:
👉Prompt: Now let me give you another blog post... [Inserted another blog post content here]
6: Creating extra “hooks” for the new UGC video
✅ ChatGPT gave me 2 scripts based on the 2 blog posts, one ever-green ad, with tone of voice of the brand, based on Rich BFF’s successful video. The very last step was to prepare more hooks so I could AB test:
👉Prompt: I took the scripts you made here. But let's circle back and create 2 more alternatives to the first caption and script. I want to try different hooks.
🥳 Et Voila! 🥳 I have the scripts, captions, and different hooks! And this is the result of one script with one hook (of course, we created more):
Final Thoughts
The whole process was intriguing and full of learning. It speeds us up 10x, if not more. Things that I remind myself of at this point:
🤔 The process can be more straightforward: I could have skipped feeding the evergreen ad, as the reference video and blog content could have been enough to get what I needed.
👩🏼 🍳 Iterate the ChatGPT 4.0 and copy.ai prompts in case they are not serving as I want.
👀 Always double-check the facts, even if you've shared an article from your blog. As you know, ChatGPT can hallucinate 🔮😳
✍️ Ensure the copywriting, especially in a foreign language (like German), is checked by a native speaker.
I'd love to hear about your experiences with AI and UGC in advertising. Share your stories and tools you love in the comments!