Your shoppers' questions are your best creative briefs

This summer, I hosted a French-language webinar with Benjamin Prevot, co-founder of the agency Ben&Vic. One stat he shared stuck with me: on Meta, creative strategy drives at least 50% of ad performance. Hence his advice for peak season (Black Friday, the holidays): start from your Q4 budget to work out how many creatives to produce, and which types.

There's a catch, though, and it's a big one: producing more creatives won't help much if they all repeat the same message. And that's what usually happens: you test a new hook or a new format, but behind the rewording (sometimes painful), the creative idea stays the same.

Yet creative teams rarely run out of ideas. They run out of raw material.

And that material is already in your hands. It sits in the questions your customers ask before they buy.

The richest source of inspiration: your customers

You'll find these questions all over the place: in tickets sent to your customer service team, in reviews, in social media comments, in replies to your emails, and in return reasons.

But among all these sources, I put on-site conversations in a category of their own. Reviews and returns come after the purchase. Shoppers who didn't buy leave very few traces (guessing their intent from GA4 or a heatmap is a risky exercise). A conversation with an AI Shopping Assistant, on the other hand, captures their questions before they decide to buy. Often right at the moment they get stuck.

For this material to be useful, 2 rules apply:

• When the question comes up: a question asked before purchase helps you win new customers. Asked after purchase, it helps you bring them back;
• The customer's exact words: "Is it dishwasher safe?" gives a creative team far more to work with than "care question".

Aurélie Camus from Léa Nature gave a telling example during the webinar: by analyzing more than 17,000 conversations with iAdvize's AI Shopping Assistant, her team found that the brand talked about "expression lines", while shoppers were asking how to get rid of their "frown lines". The right word was there, in the conversations, and not on the product pages.

Same question, different concerns

Don't rush the brief, though. "Why is it so expensive?" can mean "I can't see the difference with the cheaper model." Or "I'm not sure I'll use it enough." Or "I bought something like this before and it's still sitting in a drawer."

That's 3 different concerns, which call for 3 different kinds of proof. A demo of a product's durability will never reassure someone who doubts they'll actually use it.

To find out which concern is behind the question, you need to ask. That's where a conversation beats a review or a ticket: the AI Shopping Assistant asks the right follow-up questions to understand what the shopper is really looking for before answering. The question tells you what's blocking, the follow-up tells you why.

From question to brief

Once you've pinned down the concern, you need to pick the content that answers it best: an ad, a product page, an email or an influencer video. Here are 5 questions shoppers often ask before buying, and for each one, the type of content to brief:

• Difference: how is this different from what I already use? The brief asks you to show the difference, not to claim you're better. A side-by-side demo, a comparison page or an influencer explaining why they switched products;
• Personal fit: will this work for someone like me? A generic testimonial won't answer that. You need an influencer who actually lives that situation, or a selection of reviews from customers who share it;
• Price: why does it cost this much? A durability demo, a breakdown of what's in the box, the cost per use. A 15% discount doesn't answer the question: if the shopper can't see the value, they'll simply wait for a better deal;
• Choice: which one should I buy? First-time buyers get lost in your catalog. A "first purchase" page or an email explaining who each product is for helps far more than a full product list;
• Usage: am I using it right? Post-purchase confusion is a content topic too. A setup video becomes an onboarding email, a product page video and a must-have in your influencer brief.

Every answer you produce also feeds what the AI Shopping Assistant can say on your product pages. So the work you do for your ads pays off twice.

Shopper Insights: your best ally

At iAdvize, every AI Shopping Assistant conversation is available in our reporting suite, Shopper Insights. The AI Analysis view lets you read real conversations, spot the questions the Assistant can't answer yet, and identify missed opportunities.

The routine is easy to set up: before each creative meeting, someone on your team pulls the recurring questions on your key product pages, in the shoppers' own words. The team picks one, the closest to the purchase decision, and turns it into a brief.

For each test, write down 5 things:

1. the customer's words,
2. the concern behind them,
3. the proof you have,
4. the content you produce,
5. and the behavior the test should change.

That's exactly Aurélie's approach at Léa Nature. Her advice for getting started: keep it simple, with the most frequent questions and the Assistant answers that need work. Once the answers are reliable, dig into recurring themes, which feed product innovation and marketing teams. The Assistant then becomes more than an answer engine: it turns into a source of insights for the whole company.

What to do 5 weeks before Black Friday

My advice for this week: go through your last 30 tickets and the conversations on your product pages, and find the question your creative has never answered. That's where you'll find the questions of people who haven't bought yet, in other words THE audience your media budget is going after.

Want to see the questions your shoppers really ask on your product pages? Request a demo on your own site.