2024 seemed to be the year that the conversation around AI heated up – what is ChatGPT, will AI take my job, and should I be using this new technology? Now, one year later, AI seems to have a permanent place in society. It is now used in every Google search we make, we come across Instagram images where some people can barely tell if it is AI-generated or real, and students across the country are either taking classes to learn more about it or getting nailed by professors for using it to write their papers.
If you’re curious about our original thoughts on AI, listen to our episode Plain Talk About Marketing: AI in Content Creation
As I’m writing this blog post, it has come to my attention that I could easily use AI to write this post for me, touch it up a bit, and call it a day. I am not going to do that, however, even though you probably wouldn’t have known the difference.
So, now that we have established that AI is, in fact, everywhere, is AI important to use for your marketing and branding? We’ve been testing the waters over here and taking courses ourselves to learn just how to utilize ChatGPT without sacrificing our client’s voices, the value of our content, or our integrity.
How to Properly Use ChatGPT for Your Business
When it comes to ChatGPT, it is not a know-all genie who will give you exactly what you are looking for when you type in “write me 10 social posts for my company”. ChatGPT is currently one of the most helpful tools out there when it comes to brainstorming, developing, and analyzing your marketing. You should talk to it how you would speak to any normal employee (gives off robots taking over the world vibes, we know).
The most important thing we can tell you that we’ve learned when it comes to the software is the information you feed it and the time you spend creating your prompts is crucial. To properly mimic your voice, branding, and information, you must feed it all the information it needs to understand your business. Website verbiage, links to existing blog posts, social media grids, etc., the more verbiage you can give it, the more knowledgeable it will become about your mission, voice, and brand.
After you have given it as much information about you as possible, that is when prompting comes into play. Long, descriptive, well thought out prompts will give you the best results. You need to let ChatGPT know who it is and give it a clear goal of what it is accomplishing for you. Here is an example of when we asked ChatGPT to help us plan our first quarter of content:
“You are the best content strategist there is in the game. The year is 2025 (please go off this calendar), and today is Friday, January 3. With what you know about our business and the schedule we’ve kept in the past, create an editorial calendar for the year with themes for each quarter and month based on different cyclical trends in the marketing and PR industry, holidays that could be included in our content (Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Memorial Day weekend, etc.). Also, please create some fun ideas or campaigns around the editorial calendar.”
From here, ChatGPT created specific marketing campaigns for every month and devised goals and objectives for our business and how to achieve them. It didn’t write the content for us but rather helped us brainstorm new and fun ideas to include in our marketing. If we had just entered “Create a yearly editorial calendar that includes marketing ideas for our small business,” the results would have been dramatically different.
Your first prompt will not always be successful. It takes time to have a conversation with the program and dial in what it is you are looking for. Tell Chat what you like, what changes need to be made, and provide additional information or instructions as needed. Here is an example below:
“This is great! From here, please create the strategy for each month and campaign. Give all ideas for how we can be the most successful. One other thing we need to push in content – this company has a few community outreach engagements in the spring and the summer (describe engagements). Please develop those engagements into the content calendar and how we can promote them successfully, focusing on the cause of the engagements.”
Quick Tips When Using ChatGPT
- You’re not going to love everything it gives you on the first try – or even the second or third try. Always reply with your feedback and let it know what changes you would like it to make to get the best results. Let it know if you think the content is great, or if you’re looking for something different.
- There are common phrases, words, and emoji placements that give away if ChatGPT generates your caption. Your followers probably can’t spot it, but fellow users or marketers can if they are familiar – and you may lose credibility in your marketspace for not editing for a human voice. Here are some ways we spot it:
- If the first sentence of your caption is surrounded by two emojis or two ** symbols on either side.
- Captions tend to be overly positive
- Generic phrases like “make every moment count” or “dare to dream”
- Wording like “Today, we”, “Here’s to”, and our personal favorite, “In today’s fast-paced world,” are commonly seen as well
- You don’t have to use the full caption they provide. Grab the bits and pieces of multiple captions you like to create your own or edit the captions yourself to bring back some of your voice or a more human-like tone.
Learning the simple ins and outs of ChatGPT can significantly up your marketing game. If everyone else is doing it, why not learn the basics and give it a shot? Using ChatGPT to brainstorm campaign ideas, blog topics, and more is a very useful tool to get your creativity flowing and give you the head start you need to create your content. Be sure to check if the stuff it’s telling you is accurate! Don’t take AI content at face value. Sometimes it makes stuff up, so do your due diligence!
Give it a try and let us know how it works! Follow along as we continue to expand our knowledge of ChatGPT and stay up to date with the latest industry trends when it comes to AI.