The best-performing ad we ever ran for a Colorado contractor was not written by us. It was a sentence lifted almost word-for-word out of a one-star review left on a competitor's Google listing. This is the process we use to find sentences like that, packaged as an AI skill you can run yourself.
Most small business ad copy fails for the same reason: it is written from the inside out. You know your service, you know what makes you good at it, so you write about that. “Quality workmanship. Licensed and insured. Family owned since 2009.” Every competitor in Douglas County is saying a version of the same thing, which means none of it registers.
The ads that work sound like the customer, not the company. They name the specific, slightly embarrassing, oddly detailed problem the person was Googling at 9pm on a Tuesday. When someone reads their own situation described back to them in their own words, they stop scrolling — not because the copy was clever, but because it was accurate.
The good news is that your customers have already written that copy for you. They wrote it in Google reviews, in Reddit threads, in the neighborhood Facebook group, and in the questions they asked on your last five sales calls. It is sitting there in plain text. This skill is the process for going and getting it.
You give it your offer, your service area, and where your customers talk. It hands back a working document, not a summary.
This is the part that separates useful output from generic output. Point it at the wrong rooms and you get mush.
For a local service business, Reddit is one source among several — and often not the best one. Here is the order we work through, roughly from richest to thinnest:
Keep it local where you can. A national subreddit will tell you what people think about roofing. Your neighborhood group will tell you what people think about roofing after a Front Range hailstorm, with an insurance adjuster involved. The second one wins every time, because it is the situation your buyer is actually in.
Fill in the brackets, save it once, and re-run it every time you launch something new.
--- name: customer-language-angles description: Mine real customer conversations - reviews, forums, local groups - for the exact words buyers use, then turn them into ranked pain points, a swipe file, and testable ad angles. Use whenever I am researching messaging for a campaign, a landing page, or a new offer. --- # Customer Language to Ad Angles ## What I will give you - Business and offer: [what I sell, in one or two sentences] - Service area: [city, county, or radius - or "national" if not local] - Target customer: [who they are and what situation they are in when they start looking] - Sources: [3 to 6 places, e.g. Google reviews for 3 named competitors, r/HVAC, the Castle Rock CO Facebook group, Nextdoor] - Optional: [price range, competitors, an angle I already suspect works] ## How to research 1. Work through each source and pull material from roughly the last 12 to 18 months. Older than that and the situation has usually changed. 2. On review sources, weight 3-star and 4-star reviews the heaviest. They contain the clearest statements of what someone expected and did not get. Read 1-star for objections and 5-star for desires. 3. On forums and groups, read the replies, not just the original post. Aim for 100+ comments or 60+ reviews total across all sources. 4. Capture phrases VERBATIM, including typos, run-ons, and all-caps. Do not clean them up. The exact wording is the entire point. 5. Track how often each problem, want, or doubt repeats. Frequency is the ranking signal - not how compelling it sounds to you. 6. For each pain point, identify the TRIGGER EVENT: what specifically happened right before this person went looking for a solution. ## What to output, in this order ### 1. Trigger events (5 to 8) The specific moments that send someone searching. One line each, most common first. These become the opening line of ads. ### 2. Ranked pain points (6 to 8) The problems people describe, most frequent first. One line in plain language plus a rough sense of how often it came up. ### 3. Ranked desires (5 to 6) The outcomes people say they want. Same format. ### 4. Ranked objections (5 to 6) Why people hesitate, distrust the category, or say a previous provider failed them. ### 5. Swipe file (15 to 20 verbatim phrases) Exact quotes in the customer's own words, copied word for word. These get pasted straight into ad copy. ### 6. Testable ad angles (8 to 10) For each angle: - Hook line: a scroll-stopping opener in the customer's own language, short enough to be a hook - Rooted in: the trigger event or pain point it maps to - Source: the specific review or thread it came from, so I can verify it - Best fit: which channel this angle suits (search, social, email subject line, landing page headline) ### 7. Objection-handling lines (5 to 6) One plain-language response to each top objection, written to sit on a landing page or in an ad's body copy. ## Rules - Real quotes only. Never invent a quote, a review, a statistic, or a customer. - If a source turns out to be thin or inactive, say so plainly and suggest a better one. Do not pad the results. - Prefer the plainest, most specific customer wording over anything clever. - Cite the source for every single angle so I can check it myself. - Flag any angle that would create a claims or compliance risk - guarantees, pricing promises, medical or financial claims, or anything that names a competitor - before I run it. - Keep the customer's own framing even when it is technically imprecise. How they describe the problem is how they search for it.
Save it as a Skill in Claude, drop it in your skills folder for Claude Code, or keep it as a file you reopen each launch.
You are my ad research assistant. I sell [OFFER] in [SERVICE AREA] to [TARGET CUSTOMER]. Research these sources: [GOOGLE REVIEWS FOR COMPETITOR 1, COMPETITOR 2, COMPETITOR 3], [SUBREDDIT OR FORUM], [LOCAL GROUP]. Focus on the last 12-18 months. On reviews, weight 3-star and 4-star heaviest. Read the replies, not just the posts. Capture phrases exactly as written, typos included. Then give me: 1. The 5-8 trigger events that send someone looking for this service. 2. The top 6-8 pain points, ranked by how often they come up. 3. The top 5 desires and the top 5 objections. 4. A swipe file of 15-20 verbatim customer quotes, copied word for word. 5. 8-10 testable ad angles. For each: a hook line in the customer's own language, the pain it maps to, and the exact source it came from. Use real quotes only. Never invent a quote or a statistic. Cite the source for every angle. Tell me if a source is too thin to be useful instead of padding the results.
Same job, no setup. Works in any chat assistant that can browse the web.
Here is the shape of a good setup, using a category we work in often.
Note how specific the customer line is. “Homeowners who need a roof” produces generic output. “Homeowners who just took hail damage and have never filed a claim before” produces angles about adjusters, deductibles, and the door-knocker who showed up an hour after the storm — because that is what those people are actually worried about.
The output from a run like that usually surfaces something you would never have written on your own. The trigger event is rarely “my roof is old.” It is “three trucks showed up in my driveway the day after the storm and I have no idea which of them is legitimate.” That is not a roofing ad. That is a trust ad, and it will beat a roofing ad every time in that market.
“I didn't want a new roof. I wanted someone to tell me straight whether I actually needed one.”
The kind of line this process is designed to find — and the kind you would never write from scratch.The research is the easy half. Here is how we make sure it does not just sit in a document.
Run the skill, pull the angles, test the top three or four, and you will be advertising in the language your market already uses. It costs you nothing except the reading, and the AI does the reading.
We do this research at the start of every paid campaign we manage — then build the landing pages, run the tests, and report on what actually converted. Book a free strategy call and we will walk you through what we would test first in your market.
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