The most important step before writing a marketing headline is to understand what drives your customer. Across all the performance marketing campaigns I’ve optimized for travel, retail, construction, medical, and health brands, the same pattern holds true. Get to know the customer first and the results will follow.
In today’s automated media environment, advertising platforms now handle most of the targeting and bidding for you. As a result, messaging and creative are the main variables you continue to control.
Industry research consistently attributes about half of sales growth to creativity. This means the brand with the message that resonates has the advantage. Reducing a buyer’s anxiety often makes the difference between a significantly higher CTR and wasted ad spend.
I’ll show you how to apply this information and improve the performance of your marketing campaigns using a framework I call Friend Codes.
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Understanding customers like a friend
Friendship is mutual. To create campaigns like a friend, you need context, understanding and insights.
Economists and behavioral psychologists have well-documented processes for discovering this information. Marketers have long turned to these experts to better understand customer emotions, identity cues, silent frustrations, and unexpressed motivations.
Now, AI can apply simplified versions of these processes to analyze engagement data, customer requests, call recordings, and more.
The AI ability of Friendship Codes
I created the friendship codes in a file AI abilitiesusing need codes as the underlying behavioral model. Like a set of written instructions you give an AI assistant once, a skill performs a complex task in the same disciplined way every time you ask. Think of it as a standard operating procedure (SOP) followed by the project or chat.
Instead of re-explaining your method in every chat, define it once. Include drivers to look for, questions to ask, output format to follow, and rules to never break. From then on, you feed the AI assistant new data and it executes your playbook rather than improvising or starting from scratch every time.
Creating a skill takes longer initially, but makes future work easier. Once you’ve developed a thoughtful, high-context skill, you can hand the AI assistant a messy pile of personal and external input. These could include transaction history, survey responses, focus group transcripts, Google Business reviews, Amazon reviews, app store comments, and competitor text.
How to develop the Friendship Codes skill
You don’t need my exact tools to develop your first skill. But you need a clear set of drivers, thoughtful collection of business data, and time to think critically about what you learn.
To develop your first skill, start with four main drivers:
- Function: Trust and long-term value.
- Compliance: Social proof and belonging.
- Experience: Sensory projection.
- Pulse: Signaling identity and prestige.
This skill identifies which factors are dominant for the audience and returns structured information. You’ll get results like which fear is blocking the purchase, which driver is doing the real work, and where the Venn diagram circles overlap. Then, the competency creates a sequential plan across the customer lifecycle, from acquisition to sustainment, defining what to do and when.
The Friendship Codes framework
First, collect your data. This includes customer relationship management (CRM) information, reviews, survey responses, search terms, competitor messages, and relevant Reddit posts. The goal is to understand how people speak when they are honest.
Next, put the success of your business into context. Clarify what has worked in the past.
Then, perform the Friendship Codes skill and ask the following questions:
- What would your customer say to a friend but not say in a survey?
- What concerns do my customers have before making a purchase?
- What are the three most common things customers say about my brand?
- What are four insights that I couldn’t find anywhere else that will generate the business outcome I want?
- Give me two versions of a headline for each of my marketing channels.
How friendship codes work in practice
This framework provided valuable insights for a premium home builder I worked with. We’ve found that buyers who spend more than $500,000 are terrified of hidden upgrade costs and the regret that comes with them.
This insight helped us rewrite the title. A generic version said something like “Quality New Homes.” The version coded friendship responded directly to the fear: “Luxury without the headache.”
We took this information and tested the copy across all channels, including search marketing, email marketing, and social media marketing. Search marketing campaigns saw a 30% increase in click-through rate (CTR).
The same intuition applies to each stage. Upon acquisition, resolve the fear into a search title. After the purchase, it becomes a moment of loyalty: a proactive check-in confirming that there were no surprise costs and the friend who follows.
Use artificial intelligence to drive understanding and connection
The brands that win in the coming years will use AI to understand people more deeply and then act on that understanding with the warmth of a friend who constantly shows up, remembers what matters, admits mistakes, and gives as good as they get.
Use AI to move faster and explore what matters most to your customers. So, think critically and communicate like an understanding friend.
