While a picture is worth a thousand words, ad copywriting must work even harder, selling a product or service with just a few lines of content. Marketers have a limited character count to grab the audience’s attention, meaning ads must be punchy and leave a lasting impression.
Are you looking to maximize your copywriting capabilities and boost your marketing budget? Here’s a snapshot of ad copywriting, including best practices, tips and examples.
Why Ad Copy Matters
Ad copywriting is a type of advertising specifically for advertisements, including display ads, flyers, posters, billboards, social media ads, mobile ads and more. It’s a form of content marketing that makes people react to an offer, whether they come across your brand in person or on their devices.
While a stellar ad has many aspects, a campaign is only as good as its copy. The words you select and how you choose to use them directly impact an ad’s effectiveness, influencing your company’s success in several ways:
- Grabbing attention: An ad acts as a first impression for your brand — you’ve only got a few seconds to turn heads and make people curious before they move on to the next company. With effective copy, your ad can be the one that sticks with people, making you top of mind when they’re ready to make a purchase.
- Engaging the audience: Great ad copy makes audiences feel like it was written just for them, weaving in humor, emotion and intrigue to keep them interested. The more you customize the campaign for your readers, the more they’ll lean in and engage with your company.
- Communicating value: Your audience wants to know, “What’s in it for me?” That’s where advertising copy really shines. Use the minimal space to put a spotlight on how your product or service will make their lives better, easier or a lot more fun.
- Building trust and credibility: In a world full of choices, gaining your audience’s trust is everything. Your ad copy should reassure people that you’re not just talking the talk, but walking the walk. Whether you’re writing Facebook ad copy or gearing up for an email marketing campaign, you should find ways to show that your brand will do exactly what it says it will.
- Driving conversions: Every word in your ad copy should be like a breadcrumb leading straight to that “Buy now” button. By the end of your message — even the very short ones — your audience should know exactly what you want them to do, whether that’s signing up, making a purchase or subscribing to an email newsletter.
- Reflecting your brand voice: If your brand was a person, your copy would be its love language. Whether your company is quirky, professional or a blend of both, your copy should echo that unique tone, making your messaging consistent. Every recognizable ad campaign, raises brand awareness, helping people feel like they know and understand your company.
- Optimizing for search engines: In the digital world, your copy isn’t just meant to impress humans; it needs to charm search engines, too. By weaving in the right keywords naturally and making the content readable and relevant, you can ensure that ads appear in the right places. You can also take advantage of Google Ad options for the most effective ad copy on all digital platforms.
What does all this look like in practice? Here’s one example of a Brafton ad out in the wild:
Let’s dive in further and unpack this thing called ad copywriting:
Ad Copywriting vs. Traditional Copywriting
While ad copywriting and traditional copywriting share many similarities, their objectives, style, mediums, audience engagement and metrics are different.
Ad copywriting is all about crafting concise, impactful messages designed to grab attention quickly and motivate immediate action. On the other hand, traditional copywriting involves creating longer-form content that’s both comprehensive and detailed. Both are critical for your company, but they’re done differently.
Ad Copywriting: The Details
- Format: It’s typically short, punchy and highly focused. Ad copywriters usually work within tight constraints, like limited character counts for online ads or brief scripts for commercials.
- Tone: The tone is usually urgent and direct — without making audiences feel stressed, of course.
- Channels: Ad copy is used in digital ads, print ads, radio and TV commercials, billboards and other advertising platforms.
- Performance-oriented: This type of writing is usually tied directly to measurable outcomes, such as click-through rates, conversion rates and return on ad spend (ROAS).
Traditional Copywriting: The Details
- Format: This type of copywriting often involves longer formats like blog posts, brochures, website content, white papers, press releases and email newsletters.
- Tone: The tone can vary greatly depending on the audience and purpose. It can be formal, conversational, technical or creative based on the context.
- Channels: Traditional copywriting is found in websites, printed materials, articles, emails, social media posts and more.
- Relationship-building: While it should still aim for conversions, traditional copywriting often focuses on building a relationship with the audience over time, rather than prompting immediate action.
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Types of Ad Copy + Examples
Here’s a breakdown of different types of compelling ad copy, with examples to illustrate how to accomplish this type of writing on your own:
Compliments
Make your customers feel good about themselves by offering a compliment. It’s all about flattery and creating a positive association with your product or service. Dove is stellar at this approach:
Cost Savings
Highlight the financial benefits of your product or service, focusing on how the potential customer can cut costs. Here’s how Huel did it:
Discounts
This copy type emphasizes a special deal or reduced price, making the offer feel like an opportunity too good to pass up. Vogue took this approach, even throwing in a free gift to sweeten the deal:
Free Trials
Free trial ad copy invites potential customers to try out a product or service with no strings attached, making it easier to see if they like what you have to offer. Grubhub isn’t a stranger to offering free trials to its customers:
Options
This type of ad copy emphasizes the variety or flexibility that your brand offers, catering to your audience’s wide range of preferences and needs. Semrush listed the many ways it can help its target audience with this ad:
Scarcity
Scarcity copy suggests that a product is in limited stock or that an offer won’t last long, putting just enough pressure on readers to act fast. See how Sam’s Club got people scooting with urgent messaging:
Testimonials
Using real customer reviews or testimonials, this type of ad copy builds trust and credibility by showing how others have benefited. Shopify used a video testimonial on one of its social media posts to showcase how beneficial its services are to current customers:
Elements of Effective Copy
So, what makes ad messaging actually work? Let the following principles be your guiding light as you start crafting copy:
Understand Your Audience
You get to know your friends over time by learning what’s going on in their lives, being aware of their favorite meals and what they like to do in their free time. Marketers do the same thing with their audience but on a professional level. By knowing who you’re talking to and what’s most important to them, you can speak to them in ways they like being spoken to. This makes them more likely to do what you’re asking them to.
Determine the Best Medium
Picture this: You’re trying to send a note to your friend by carrier pigeon, but they live in a high-rise. Not the best plan, right? Choosing the right medium — whether it’s a tweet, blog post or billboard — is like picking the perfect way to deliver your message so it actually gets to your audience. Without the correct delivery method, you’re really just shouting into the void — or making people angry with repeated wrong messages.
Use an Attention-Grabbing Headline
Because you only have so much space for ad copy, you must grab your readers’ attention from the get-go. Think of your headline as a fishing hook — you’re not going to catch any leads if it’s dull or uninteresting. Make the first words people will read snappy, intriguing and impossible to ignore so everyone will be more likely to read the following body copy.
Know Your Product or Service’s Hook
If you offer people the same features or benefits as everyone else, how will you prove your option is the best? Understanding what sets your company apart from the competition can help you focus on that value proposition in your ad copy. Plus, it’s helpful to highlight the best parts of your brand in ad copy rather than trying to jam-pack the minimal space with too much information; bite-sized snippets are generally best.
Employ Emotional Appeal
Humans are emotional beings and marketers might as well use that to their advantage. Whether you’re tugging at heartstrings or tickling funny bones, make sure your copy connects on an emotional level. Ultimately, when people feel something, they’re more likely to act.
Show Social Proof
Ever notice how people flock to a crowded restaurant? That’s because humans often form their opinions based on how others feel about something. Show your audience that people love what you’re offering through rave reviews, testimonials or big-name endorsements. And if you don’t have great examples of social proof, don’t be afraid to ask your loyal customers about their experience with your brand to garner some positive feedback.
Write Using Urgency and Scarcity
If your favorite local restaurant is doing a pop-up for one day only, you’ll probably drop everything and go, right? That’s the power of urgency and scarcity. When people have all the time in the world to enjoy something, they’re less likely to slot it into their schedules. However, when they know the offer’s limited, they’ll jump into action right away.
End With a CTA
Always, always, always put a strong CTA (call to action) at the end of your ad copy. That way, people actually know what to do with the information you just hand-delivered to them. Make it bold, make it clear and make sure your audience has the next steps.
Getting the Most Out of Your Copy
Traditional copywriting is crucial for telling your brand’s story and cultivating long-term relationships. However, it passes the torch to ad copywriting when companies need their audiences to take action on an offer.
While similar rules apply to ad copywriting, lots of competitors are vying for your audiences’ attention. Make sure to draw people toward your brand — and convert them — with compelling ad copy.
