Principle number one. Avoid customers. Don't speak to them. Don't look at them. Even better, call them customers. Dehumanize them in your head. Keep them as far away as you can. Sit there in your coffee shop thinking about how you're going to manipulate this blob of customers out there that you're trying to get to buy your product. They're just this universal blob that you don't really know that much about. So you want to flip this around. So don't avoid your customers. Speak to your customers as much as you can. One of the biggest mistakes I've made and have made again and again and again is avoiding speaking to the customers who are actually buying the product.
And even when you can, try and retire the word customer as much as you can. Create actual, unique, individual customer profiles of who they are. They're not a customer. They're a father. They're a mother. They live in New York. They live in London. They have specific personalities. They are a human being. And the more you get into how they think, the easier it's going to be to advertise to them. The biggest mistake is sitting there, not thinking or not even understanding who you're advertising to. So some great examples of how to do this. First things first, arrange as many one-on-one customer interviews as you can and record them and look for key bits of language.
Study how they speak and then use how they speak in the actual adverts themselves a more digitally a digitally inclined version of doing this as well is just if you have a lot of data historically taking the comment section all your reviews getting the whole thing scraped and then working with chat gpt and actually using what are the keywords that my customers use what are the actual pain points that they talk about and using that back in the advertising then all of a sudden when the person sees the advert it's talking to them rather than some person far far far away trying to get them to buy something and then you end up with ads that sound way more manipulative a good rule of thumb when it comes to advertising and sales is the best ads don't look like ads and the best sales people don't look like sales people and the way to do this is to just use their language back to them as much as you can so inversion make sure that you speak to customers because you the the way you'd make terrible ads is avoiding speaking to customers so study them and speak to them as much as you can whether that's actual phone calls whether that's scraping the internet whether that's looking at subreddits for specific pain points in the language that they use and then use that language in the actual advertisements.
So I saw a great tweet on this topic recently by a guy called Dwarkesh Patel, and he's chatting about writing advice, but I actually think it applies just as much to advertising as well. And his advice is unreasonably effective writing advice. What are you trying to say here? Then you answer that question, and then you just say that. So likewise with this, if you were speaking to another human being who is the customer about the product or they're speaking to you what is being said and then just use that language in the advert and let it write itself you don't have to sit there trying to come up with something unique and salesy you can just use the language that the customers or the human beings shall i say are already using