With the advent of ChatGPT, using AI to create marketing content has entered the mainstream conversation. The question is, how far can we take this? What can AI do better than humans, and what can only be done by human marketers, writers, and content creators?
Used well, these tools can save time and increase productivity, and may actually be able to increase the quality, reach, and effectiveness of your marketing content. Used poorly, and you can lose touch with what makes your business and brand unique and relevant to your customers and prospects, and possibly miss out on revenue opportunities.
Let’s look at ten ways you can begin using AI and ChatGPT for your marketing content creation.
1. Generate new ideas and keywords
Suppose you want to run a campaign based around a new product or service. What problems does this service address? What articles can you produce related to that? You’ll be able to think of some. But using ChatGPT, you can unearth more ideas and keywords that you may not have thought of, or that would have taken you much more time and effort to discover.
In this way, ChatGPT is a time-saver as well as a source of untapped ideas.
2. Brainstorm headlines and email subject lines
Getting headlines right is essential. Headlines generate clicks, and they motivate people who’ve found your content to actually read it. The same is true with email subject lines. You use headlines as SEO page titles, as well as for on-page headings. You also use them in social media posts.
But after you’ve written a blog or email, coming up with good headlines and subject lines can be difficult. Is the first one you think of the best one to use? How much time should you spend developing alternative headlines?
You can ask ChatGPT to create a list of possible headlines and subject lines, and it will spit them out in seconds. You might reject them all, but it’s likely that ChatGPT’s suggestions will spark new ideas you hadn’t considered. You may also find a gem that just needs a little polishing.
3. Give clear prompts to ChatGPT
ChatGPT is not a search engine. It’s like having a virtual assistant that can come up with real ideas and suggestions for marketing content. The more specific and clear you can be with your prompts when using ChatGPT, the better results you will get.
When asking it for ideas or for actual marketing content, be specific with the outcomes you want. Consider including suggestions for:
- Length of content – tell it to write 500 words, and it will try to meet that request
- Tone and style – how do you want this content to feel and sound?
- Audience – have it write for a specific audience
For example, suppose you want to create a blog about whether ecommerce stores should use free shipping as a marketing strategy. A good ChatGPT prompt might read this way:
“Write me a 750 word blog post with four pros and cons for ecommerce stores using free shipping. Make it practical and useful.”
We tested this out, and while its resulting article was only 430 words, it did list out four pros and cons that were applicable to the audience and gave reasonable explanations for each. Your human content creators could take this article and embellish it to be more relevant to your customers, and to connect them to other resources on your website.
4. First attempts at outlines and articles
The last tip shows how you can use ChatGPT to take a first crack at a new article. You couldn’t just copy and paste the 430-word article it produced, but it gives you a place to start. You could then use it as a jump start to build out a very effective article.
Another approach is to ask ChatGPT to write an outline for an article, instead of the actual article. From there, your writers can produce the finalized marketing content, which will include links to other resources on your site, appropriate calls to action, and other marketing language unique to your business.
5. Generate content for different marketing channels
ChatGPT can be used to produce social media posts on all the major channels. And because social posts tend to be shorter, you could ask it to create, say, five tweets and five Facebook posts based on a blog post or email you’ve written, or around a new product. You could also ask it to write the email.
You could do the same with SMS marketing. Have ChatGPT create a five-text welcome sequence for new SMS subscribers. Again, what it produces will likely not be your final product, but it speeds up the content creation process by giving you something to work with right from the start — across many of your marketing channels.
6. Adjust your prompt if first output misses the mark
ChatGPT remembers your previous prompts during each chat session. So if you don’t find its first attempt at content creation useful, alter your prompt and attempt to narrow down what you’re looking for so it doesn’t veer off in ways you didn’t expect the first time.
7. Don’t use ChatGPT for final drafts
We’ve touched on this already, but it’s very important. ChatGPT content should not be used as-is. In fact, there are several risks of doing so, ranging from factual inaccuracies and unintentionally offensive tropes to bland content.
Have your content writers take what ChatGPT produces and make it better. They can make it align with your brand, make it more useful for readers, give it a greater sense of authority and individuality, include a real author byline and photo, and make sure it’s correct and sensicle.
They can also verify any quotes and statistics ChatGPT may have used.
And, most importantly, writers can create internal links to relevant pages and marketing assets on your site, as well as calls to action. ChatGPT can also be used to generate CTA ideas, but again, you will need an actual human marketer to finalize and choose the ones you end up using.
8. Create sending schedules — send-time optimization
For things like emails, SMS, and social media posts, when to send out your content always entails some hand-wringing and guesswork. But ChatGPT and other AI tools can quickly access a wealth of data and use it to optimize your send-times based on your audience, industry, and other factors.
9. Repurpose marketing content
Repurposing marketing content has always been a great way to increase your marketing efficiency. With ChatGPT, you can do this even faster.
Suppose you write an email and want to turn it into a blog post. Simply feed the entire email into ChatGPT, and ask it to write a blog post about this. Or, go the other way and turn a post into an email.
You could also use it to create social media posts based on a blog post or email. You could ask it to create a blog post based on a webinar transcript, or write a landing page to access the replay of the webinar.
As you think about your marketing content needs and how much effort it takes to produce everything, repurposing has always been a major time-saver. With ChatGPT, it’s even faster.
10. Conduct background research
Digging around the internet to find statistics, data, arguments for and against something, and just general information about a topic, is time-consuming.
You can use ChatGPT to locate and summarize existing content and data around a particular topic, saving yourself the time. This approach will also likely result in discovering sources and information you wouldn’t have found on your own, perhaps some treasured golden nugget that would have been buried on page 13 of a search engine, but that ChatGPT found and brought to your attention.
Let the algorithm inspire further research and new prompts and push it to refine broad ideas into focused concepts and complicated explanations into simple ones.
Just be sure to fact-check everything.
ChatGPT and marketing automation
ChatGPT is now integrated with the emfluence Marketing Platform. Among other things, you can look forward to using it to inspire fresh ideas for email campaigns, SMS messages, and landing page copy.
But it will do so much more than that as we leverage it for more and more marketing tasks for our clients.
Reach out to our support team to enable ChatGPT in your account, or contact us to schedule a demo.
