The Secret Weapon Your AI Copy Is Missing (And Why Your Customers Write Better Ads Than You)

October 11, 2025 00:21:22
The Secret Weapon Your AI Copy Is Missing (And Why Your Customers Write Better Ads Than You)
The Local AI Show
The Secret Weapon Your AI Copy Is Missing (And Why Your Customers Write Better Ads Than You)

Oct 11 2025 | 00:21:22

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Hosted By

Kyle Guilfoyle Reese Richards

Show Notes

Most people write copy the hard way. In this episode of The Local AI Show, Kyle and Reese reveal a faster, smarter path — how to turn your customer reviews into magnetic ad copy that outperforms anything AI could write on its own.

You’ll learn:

 

Packed with real examples, practical tools, and a mindset shift that’ll change how you write forever.

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Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Speaker A: What if the best copy your business will ever use isn't written by you or even by AI? Today on the local AI show, we're revealing the secret source of marketing gold that's hiding in plain sight and how a single tweak can turn your ads from forgettable to magnetic. Stay tuned, because once you hear this, you'll never look at customer reviews the same way again. [00:00:23] Speaker B: What if you could triple revenue without hiring anyone new? Most local businesses already have the tools to do it. They just don't know it. Join us as we explore how AI automation and smart advertising can help you work less, earn more, and build systems. [00:00:38] Speaker C: That keep paying off. [00:00:39] Speaker B: The local AI show is where Main street gets street smart, one simple building block at a time. [00:00:45] Speaker C: Today, what I thought we could look at is how to write compelling copy. [00:00:52] Speaker D: I mean, copy can be anything, right? It could be website, content, sales page, content, ad. [00:00:56] Speaker C: I believe that what makes copy good is efficiency and simplicity in the message. So it's like, how quickly can I transmit something from my mind to your mind so you get it? And one of the first things I learned when learning how to write copy was that the best copy comes from our customers. It's not like, you know, creativity is important and it can really help you give a unique perspective or frame your product or service in a way that helps it stick. But ultimately the best, the best words come from your actual customers who have not only voted with their wallets, but have enjoyed your product or service so much that they go out of their way and they leave a review. Right? [00:01:44] Speaker D: I'll just leave a better tip or something. When someone actually goes there and, you know, writes this very nice, well written review about certain aspects of your business or the reviews, the views or the patio or the food or whatever. Now we can take that information and craft copy with it. [00:02:03] Speaker C: Here is a simple way that you can use AI to collect reviews, process them, and ultimately give you the best sound bites that come from your customers that you can use to social posts or website or this simple process. The tool called Appify. It's free up to a certain extent. It's more than enough for what we're going to do here. And all you do is put in your Google Maps URL. You go to Google Maps, find your business and copy and paste that URL in here. You can cap the number of reviews you get. I have it. Sorting by highest reviews. You could also look at the lowest reviews and, and then, and then that'll help you want to. You hit start. It literally scrapes your Google Business Profile finds all of your reviews and the magic happens when you export it. You hit export as a CSV and then, well, it'll produce a CSV. Then what we're going to do with that is we are going to go into Claude here and really simple. I mean you can, you can adjust this prompt. The very best reviews that will use in clients ads filter for uniqueness. Let's make sure that they aren't boring. I want to be able to copy and paste these into their ads. Right? You can really beef up. That prompt comes from Michael Masterson. The cub test. Make sure that you put all of your copy through this filter which is, is anything either confusing, unbelievable or boring? You could put that into your prompt so that it processes it that way. Greece, you also had a tip on, on how you work with AI to get effective copy. [00:03:33] Speaker D: Right now, for example, I need to create a sales page for an AI dashboard or an LLM, a large language model dashboard. In Looker Studio I saw cool dashboard and then I wanted to make some changes to it. So I just sent the dashboard to somebody on Fiverr and found somebody that has experience with Google Looker Studio and I said, hey, here's the sheet, can you copy this? And I want to make these changes and add these things in and you just choose your Google Analytics account and your Google search console account and then it pulls in all of this data. Very helpful to find traffic coming from LLMs and which ones they're coming from and which pages they're going on and which search queries they're using to find your website. So I need to write a sales page for this particular dashboard and we're giving this away for free because it's just branded, right? So it's just eyeballs. The way I did this is I took a screenshot, a scrolling screenshot of this entire dashboard and then I fed that into AI and I essentially said that I want to create three sales pages for this dashboard. And I just gave a description of the dashboard. This is an AI traffic dashboard that brings in data from this and this. We're giving it away for free. And here's all the things that you can see on the dashboard. And I have a project set up in. So the project is for my agency. So they know that we're a digital marketing agency and they know all the details about our company. And so I go into that project and then I upload this screenshot and then I say, hey, make me sales copy for this sales page for this product and give a description of the product and then it can see from the screenshot so you don't have to be very detailed about it because it see all the data on there. And then I said I want three sales pages in the style of David Ogilvy, Gary Halbert and Eugene. Here it is just easy, right? Sales pages for an LLM Looker Studio traffic dashboard that rank Pass Digital will be giving away as a free download, right? One in the style of David, one as Gary Halbert and the third as Eugene Schwartz. An example of the dashboard to give you more to work with if you don't know who famous copywriters you start with. Give me a list of the top 10 copywriters in the history of the world and then it'll give you a list. Choose three or four or five. Gary A favorite of mine so it tells you what style it is. So David Ogilvie has an elegant, authoritative, data driven persuasion. So I'll read off part of this to see the difference and then we'll go over and compare and see if there's anything different with. So finally, see exactly how much traffic you're getting from AI models like Perplexity. Most businesses don't realize this yet. And a new wave of customer discovery is happening outside of Google Search. Millions are asking questions directly to AI and those AI are recommending businesses. Until now you couldn't see if your website was being mentioned. Now you can. Introducing the LLM Traffic dashboard from Ridecast Digital. Built inside Looker Studio. This free dashboard to your Google Analytics account and your Google Search console. In one clean report you'll discover LLM sessions. How many visits to your site are coming directly from AI tools Engaged sessions Are these visits sticking around or bouncing? Average session Duration how long AI referred Visitors Day LLM refer breakdown See whether ChatGPT or perplexity is sending you the most traffic for the first time you'll have hard data. No guesses, no speculation, just truth about whether these emerging AI platforms are bringing customers. Download it free today and start measuring the future of search before your competitors even realize it exists. David Ogilvy is very data driven to me. Not quite personable or exciting enough. So I'm a bigger fan of this guy. So Gary Halbert is punchy, conversational and he got his claim to fame from direct response Mail mail. So he starts off with hey listen up. You know those people who ask chat, GPT or clone where to buy something? Guess what? Those AI tools are sending traffic to websites like yours. Here's the problem. Google Analytics doesn't Show you squad about it. You have no idea if ChatGPT is mentioning your site. That ends today. I put together a dead simple looker studio dashboard that shows you exactly how many visits are coming from AI models. It's called the LLM Traffic dashboard and I'm giving it away for free. Here's what it does for you. Tells you how many sessions coming from ChatGPT. And perplexity shows you how many of those sessions actually engage with your site. Breaks it down by AI refer so you can see which bots even shows you session duration so you know if it's actually hanging out or just ghosting you. This isn't theory, it's real data. I hooked it up for businesses like yours and the results are shocking. Some sites are getting more AI traffic than they get from social media. If you want in on this, grab it now. It's free. No catch. Just pure intel your competitors don't have. Download the dashboard today and spy on your AI traffic. And then the last Eugene layered awareness building, urgency, inevitability. He says the search revolution has already begun. For decades, traffic came from one place, Google. You optimize your site, climb the rankings and watch the clicks roll in. But something new is happening. Millions of people are no longer typing into Google. They are asking AI models directly. Which tour should I book in Victoria? What's the best local closet company near me? Where can I get a massage therapist in town? And instead of showing you a search results page, the AI simply names a business. If you're not tracking this, you are flying blind into the biggest shift since Google itself. That's why we built the LLM Traffic dashboard by Right Pass Digital. This looker studio Dashboard connects your GA4 and G SC data to reveal a hidden layer of traffic you've never seen before. Every session from chat, GPT, clothing, complexity, engagements rates, engagement rates so you can see the AI referred visitors or quality traffic or empty clicks. Time on site grooming. Whether they trust what they find, growth trends over time to watch AI mentions snowball month after month. The old world of SEO was about ranking in Google, the new world is about being recommended by AI. This dashboard is your first weapon in that battle. Download it free today. See the traffic your competitors don't even know exists. And when they finally wake up to AI, you'll already be miles ahead. The favorite one that I like the most, which is Gary Halbert's, and then I would take some of the things that I like from other ones and then put it in here and then add some just Different CTA calls to action. Choose bits and pieces that you like that make sense to you and speak to your customer, thinking always of benefits and not features. What does it do for your customer? But at the end of the day, using this style, it's a very simple prompt and screenshot and you can come up with an entire sales page. [00:09:58] Speaker C: It's interesting. I've actually been thinking a lot about what makes copy good, at least in 2025 and at least through my lens. Because I actually think that a big issue with a lot of copy that is on the Internet right now is. Is ironically that it has been produced by AI. And I just think that at a gut level we can feel that and it actually makes us less interested in the copy. I think there's a real. It's usually when the copy is too slick or too clever or reads too much like a canned ad. I've been trying to distill our principles for how to write copy. That the first order of business is to get people to actually read it and consume it and sit there and be interested in it. It's not to be. This sounds good, right? Because if you're just writing copy, having AI do it and then publish it, it's going to be very hard unless you're measuring it to be able to tell that that copies and being read. But for me, when we write copy, I imagine because we work with restaurants, I imagine that I'm a busy restaurant owner or manager that really cares about. About the product that they're putting out and they put a lot of thought into it and they want to communicate the thought that's part of it. Thoughtful and unique, but it also. Also honestly imperfect. I think it's more stream of consciousness. I remember including there's this guy in Montreal who's a restaurant owner and on his menu, most restaurant menus, you see the ingredients and maybe clever little description. But on his it was just little stories about the dishes, really short, four or five sentences max. And. And he would just be like, yeah, this was something my mom used to make. I always really loved it. And it just sounded human. And I think that is another key principle. It's gotta sound real and human. I think at this stage, unless you really prompt the AI, it is hard for it to produce copy like that. What it will produce is the. That is how it works. Copy that is actually interesting gets read is copy that is unique and non generic does not sound. Most importantly, it's real and to some extent and is also imperfect. It's not trying Too hard to be perfect. That is not interesting. What is interesting to human beings is stuff that is real, that comes from lived experience. Other copywriters. Gary Halpert, who. The things I have many of our new team members do is read the Boron letters. Have you read the Boron letters? The Boron letters. If you want to learn how to write good copy. That book is amazing. And you know why it's amazing? Because it's Gary Halbert writing from prison to his son, and he's giving him life lessons that he has, you know, gleaned lived experience. And that's a letter to his son. That's another principle that I've been trying to adopt and how my team should feel. You're writing to a friend or to someone specifically. And when you write to friends, you're not overly. You're not manufacturing things, manicuring things. You're just being, hey, what's up? This is something I'm dealing with. It just sounds normal. I think that's kind of the irony. A lot of this stuff and a lot of how people are using AI to write words. We correctly have this term AI slop. Because it. It just. It's just fluff. It doesn't actually come from lived experience. It's someone, you know, trying to phone it in. Phone it in. They're just, here's a picture. Write copy. And then they copy and paste it. And then, you know, and then we end up with AI Thoughtful. And it is. It is not coming from lived experience. Actual thought that one human wants to transmit to another human. In many cases. That's what I'll say about that. So if you recall, earlier in the episode, we went to apify, we got a bunch of reviews, and then we pulled up and prompted Claude and it came up with. I mentioned the prompt earlier. And here we have some of the dozens and dozens of the very best reviews from this restaurant. And it just picked out some of the good ones. Phenomenal. 11 out of 10. See, that is unique. That's unique. Special occasion perfection. Drinks were unreal. That feels real. Food was phenomenal. That's a little can, but, you know, someone actually wrote it. Incredible experience. Boring. Going back to that CUB acronym Confusing, unbelievable or boring Jazz era with contemporary twists. That's okay. Warm and inviting. Fantastic live music. Okay. But at least this gives us a really great starting point. And this is when I talk about generating reviews. It's the. The holy trinity getting more reviews, you more visibility and discoverability. It will increase the conversion rate on that visibility and it Also gives you marketing. More reviews you get, the more you give AI in this case to work with. If you can make your reviews interesting and media rich and ideally to some extent, keyword rich, just imagine people devouring your reviews. They're actually fun to read. The absolute first step I would kick things off with because not only are you efficiently conducting market research and finding out what your guests or your customers like the most, but you're also then parlaying that into actual copy that you can put directly into your ads. If you want to run a really interesting experiment, I would test a social proof campaign versus maybe something that you think is really creative and see which one does it better. [00:15:21] Speaker D: So is this in the actual review itself or was it making something from the review? Like was it creating content from the review or is it just saying, hey, the review about this awesome. [00:15:31] Speaker C: It was picking out the best sound bites from the actual reviews and then it also summarized the entire reviews. So here, I'll go back this in a sec. This is exactly how I will use this. [00:15:41] Speaker D: I would use that as a base. I like these this into whatever sales page. I can't write a full sales page with just reviews, right? Oh yeah, yeah. Social proof. [00:15:53] Speaker C: Yeah, you'll include the social proof in your website and your landing page. But this is really specifically for meta ads in this case. And we'll also use people's reviews in Google Ads too. [00:16:01] Speaker D: As soon as I get reviews for this traffic dashboard, of course it's going up there. I've got reviews for my own website. [00:16:07] Speaker C: What I'll do is we'll get absolute gem best in Toronto. That's great. I'll put that right on the creative. Then we'll also have this as the headline. I'll probably just make this the copy. I'll take the review and that'll be the primary text copy. [00:16:19] Speaker D: Take one or two of those and then throw it into Chati and ask for it to create a sales page including this for whatever product. [00:16:26] Speaker C: Yeah, you could do that. Yes. We actually make these meta ad campaigns, we call them social proof campaigns. And we literally will bomb all of these different reviews in there. And the effect of that on the market is they perceive, oh my goodness, all these people are saying all these things that are good about this restaurant. And if you want to level that up, you include unique reviews too. One of our other clients, they had this and this actually inspired this. Had this. That's what I talk about when I'm talking about how do we incentivize creativity. I'm telling you if you have people leaving reviews like that, not only are they going to read the reviews, but they're also going to be. I want to be a saucy. A pizza war and feel alive from cutting pizza. Kind of the idea behind a social proof campaign is I don't just want one review going out there. I want people to see a whole bunch of different media. [00:17:16] Speaker D: Walk us through it, though. What does that look like? Like, are you running one campaign and you're just swapping through all these different images is just like a review template that you put up with. [00:17:24] Speaker C: The genesis of went over this. We went over the psychology, firepower matrix, right? [00:17:28] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:17:28] Speaker C: You got curiosity, exclusivity, reciprocity, social proof, which I think is maybe the most important. Scarcity. And then risk reversal and guarantees. And we build this into a campaign. I'm building one right now. Basically, we build out ad sets and each ad set represents a psychological trigger of curiosity, reciprocity, exclusivity, social proof. And then I'll add in the other ones as well. Then what we do is, here's the one. They handed me scissors and I have never felt more alive. Here's another one that's just what they handed me, scissors. We'll basically make variations on that. And then we also have one here that has no copy burnt onto the image. Then we'll also add in a real version of it, an Instagram reel, a vertical video. Basically, what we have in each one of these social proof campaigns is we'll have multiple variations of reviews. We'll have multiple versions of those reviews, and then we have ads with just the image. We'll have ads with reviews burned onto them, onto the creative itself. And then we'll also have reels, vertical video. We basically build all of that into a campaign. And you can see right here, I have. This is literally the entire review as the primary text copy. And the headline is so good, I briefly blacked out. You would have to pay tens of thousands of dollars. Most people just can't write that well, to be honest, it's really hard to get that level of copy. And for it to come from an actual customer, I cannot imagine a more potent duo. They handed me scissors for the pizza, and in all caps. I have never felt more alive. I snipped that Zoe was disarming a carb bomb. Each slice surrendered to me. I was no longer a customer. I was a warrior in a mozzarella war, a saucy samurai, a crusty Edward. Scissored hands with nothing left to lose. The pizza so good. I briefly blacked out five stars. Lexi B. Like that is money copy. And if you have your customers do that, this is why I'm talking about how do we incentivize creativity from our customers? We'll take some of their proven winning videos and add little curiosity notes. Want to know the secret ingredient? And the best espresso martini you've ever had. And that's it. That's the primary text. So it's nice and simple and the headline is. Join us this week to find out what it is. We have a little piece of reciprocity. Order a bottle tonight. We'll bring the perfect appetizer pairing to match. Just mention perfect pairing when you book today. Only a little bit of urgency and a little bit of scarcity layered into the reciprocity. This is how we. You were using that psychological firepower, psychological thing. And we're actually building out campaigns. The way you think about it from a high level is it's not just. Isn't just seeing what others are saying. They're also getting these little bits of, oh, there's a little bit of reciprocity there. Let's. That influences us. It's intriguing. It's giving me a little bit of curiosity. That's a trigger. There's a lot of exclusivity here. Sometimes they're taking any risk whatsoever off the table. And so all of these up in the mind of the market to move people business with us. And so that's the thinking behind campaigns like this. [00:20:18] Speaker D: That's a stunning review. If you're ever struggling with anything, just ask AI Even how to get started or what do I do this or how do I do that? Anything that you need. Who's the best copywriters? Whatever it is, try to leverage AI, but add the personality in there, your own personality. Anything that you output from AI should never be copy pasted onto a website. There should always be some personality in there, some editing to make it kind of your own. Even if you wanted it in your voice and you have content that's in your voice or that you like of somebody else copy, paste that in and say, follow this kind of tone and write this copy. I'll leave it with that little tip there. [00:20:57] Speaker C: Very good. All right, Reece, catch you soon. That's it for this episode. [00:21:03] Speaker B: If you're ready to grow smarter, not busier, head to localaishow.com sign up for. [00:21:08] Speaker C: The newsletter and get the first three moves guide. [00:21:11] Speaker B: It's the fastest way to start using AI and automation to save time, time and grow Revenue this week. Remember, you're on Main street, but you don't got to play small. See you next time on the local AI Show.

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