Writing ad angles from pain points
An angle is a different reason to care, aimed at a different person, and your customers have already written most of them for you.
You have four ads running and they are all doing roughly the same thing. Different music, different opening shot, same promise underneath. When one of them stops working, the others stop working too, which is the clue: they were never separate ads.
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, because it is aimed at a different problem, and the person it lands on may not think they have a sleep problem at all. They think they have a guilt problem.
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' actual 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
Every question is a doubt that nearly stopped a sale. Collect them, count the repeats, and the ones that keep coming back are objections your advertising is currently leaving to the product page.
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
The uncomfortable one, and the most useful. A return tells you what somebody expected and did not get, in their own words, at the moment they were annoyed enough to be honest.
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 the reviews on competing products, particularly the mediocre ones. Somebody explaining at length why a rival product disappointed them is describing, for nothing, the exact promise your ad should make.
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 wearing your logo. 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 is the difference between an angle and a use of their words they never agreed to.
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.
The order matters more than the wording. An ad that opens on the product asks a stranger to care about you. An ad that opens on the problem asks them to recognise themselves, and recognition is faster than persuasion. A person who has just seen their own Tuesday described accurately will watch another few seconds to see who did it.
One problem per ad
This is the discipline that makes the rest of it work, and it is the one people abandon first.
When you have five good problems, the temptation is to fit all five into one advert so nothing is wasted. Do not. An ad that mentions five problems is an ad with no subject, and it forces the viewer to work out which part is about them while they are already scrolling. Five ads, each about one problem, will find five different people, and each one can be judged on its own.
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 underneath it.
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.
If nothing in the list surprises you, you have not read enough of the raw material yet. The angle worth having is usually the sentence that made you slightly uncomfortable when you first read it.
Keep reading
This is a service, and the method is written down.
Everything above came out of doing the work rather than writing about it. If you want the method instead of the story, it runs in order on one page.
Start with a free audit
Tell us where your content is now. We will come back with what we would change and what result to expect.
A person reads the channel and writes the audit by hand: a considered read typically takes three working days. That is the usual shape, not a promised turnaround. We use these details only to reply to you: no lists, no lurking.
What you will get
A fit snapshot: where your channel stands, and whether we are a match.
Two to three opportunities: specific, prioritised, yours to keep.
A recommended next step, even if that step is not us.
The audit is free and commits you to nothing: nobody follows up with a call you did not ask for.