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7 ways ChatGPT can level up your marketing

From content creation to website optimization, Deksia’s Kent Lewis details 7 marketing benefit of ChatGPT.

7 min read

Digital TechnologyMarketing

7 benefits of using ChatGPT for marketing

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Designed by OpenAI, ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM) chatbot developed on GPT-3.5. ChatGPT revolutionized the artificial intelligence world by creating a free, intuitive, conversational interface to a highly intelligent and vast database.

The potential of ChatGTP and similar AI chatbots is profound. This is particularly true for marketers looking to improve the quality and quantity of their outputs and results. This article explores a variety of ways marketing can be enhanced via ChatGTP, despite its current limitations.

Current limitations

In December, ChatGPT created a stir due to its accessibility, novelty and accuracy. Within five days, the platform had over one million users and continues to grow in use.

However, there are significant challenges and limitations of the relatively new AI engine. Let’s start with the fear that ChatGTP and AI will displace a significant percentage of the workforce. While AI is not likely to displace skilled workers anytime soon, there are valid concerns from knowledge workers, particularly for designers, copywriters and programmers. 

A more valid short-term concern is the current limitation of AI in general. Specifically, it’s the lack of ability to solve complex problems, understand emotion or even the context of its own output. 

ChatGPT also tends to represent incorrect information as fact (ask it to create your personal bio and gauge for yourself). There are also concerns about racial bias, its ability to manipulate to create hateful content and copyright and compensation issues for the original data sources (writers, programmers, artists, etc.). 

Finally, there is the reality that Google doesn’t like (others) using AI, and it considers some types of content a violation of its search engine guidelines.

ChatGPT tips and tricks

All is not lost, however, with ChatGPT and related AI chatbots. There are workarounds for many of the current issues. For example, ChatGTP is currently very difficult to access due to demand, so consider utilizing the platform in off-hours. Although access and demand are global and “off-hours” are relative, it may be the only way to gain access today. 

It’s also important to clearly phrase prompts (questions) for the best results. Results can be further refined (even simplified) with additional prompts to create a useful output. ChatGPT tends to be overly verbose, so it can be helpful to ask for a summary or response with a shorter word count limit. Remember the output is only as good as the input, so look for major improvements in the quality of responses over time as the database grows, algorithm learns, and humans adapt to the interface. 

ChatGPT benefits for Marketers

Despite early challenges, ChatGPT is and will continue to be a game-changer for marketers. There are seven primary benefits to using ChatGPT to inform, optimize and measure the impact of your marketing efforts. Outlined below are a handful of effective strategies and best practices to level up your marketing in 2023 and beyond.

Research and Inspiration

To better inform and shape your content marketing efforts, ask ChatGPT questions to generate idea lists based on its vast knowledge and ability to quickly compile lists on just about any topic. From there ask ChatGPT to organize the data by subtopic or expand or simplify the list to your liking. ChatGPT can be useful for creating keyword lists for search engine optimization (SEO), finding useful statistics or reference sources for deeper manual research. 

Content creation

The most obvious – and overused – functions of ChatGPT is for rapidly creating content on any given topic with little more than a single prompt. For example, I asked ChatGPT How to Use ChatGPT for Marketing. In less than 2 minutes, I’d created a blog post from the query. Of course, I could have expanded and further refined the post, but was only testing it to prove a point. (Side note: I committed not to use ChatGPT to write this article, which was certainly tempting.) 

The most common content assets created via ChatGPT today include: articles, FAQs, ad copy, product or service descriptions, social media posts, translations and summaries. Over time, the content depth and complexity will increase. This doesn’t include AI-driven images or video capabilities of sister platforms, which we’ll save for another day.

Website optimization

Being an old-school digital marketer, I immediately saw the value of ChatGPT to streamline and enhance SEO efforts. ChatGPT can be used to create keyword-related assets including title and meta description tags, creating link development lists, reducing duplicate content and creating A/B testing variations of landing page text or even ad copy.

It also can be used for code-level technical optimization, including structured data, Hreflang pattern tags, .htaccess rewrites for redirects, analytics integration, robots.txt rules and general review code.

Data analysis and reporting

For those of us lacking math, data analysis or related skills, ChatGPT can be used to analyze and summarize data. This includes composing regular expressions or spreadsheet formulas, setting up custom pixel conversions, generating RegEx tags to filter Search Console Performance Report, fetching data and sentiment analysis. 

In short, ChatGPT can handle a good deal of the most tedious, repetitive tasks a digital marketer currently has, yet can see things humans might miss. As alluded to earlier, it is not a direct replacement for humans, but ChatGPT can save time and improve the accuracy of reports. 

Content personalization

One of the more advanced capabilities of ChatGPT is personalization. The engine is so efficient and effective, that it can rapidly create customized copy for websites, emails or digital ads. ChatGPT can also be used to provide product or content recommendations based on behavior data, improving the customer experience across the web, email and social media platforms. 

Process automation

The bigger picture for ChatGPT and similar AI chatbot platforms is the ability to streamline marketing programs via automation. The low value, repetitive, relatively simple tasks can be outsourced to ChatGPT. 

Other areas of opportunity include more advanced tasks like generating reports or analyzing data.

The key to successful AI integrations is to outline and standardize the processes you wish to automate. Unfortunately, defining key processes is largely a human effort, but with a significant upside once documented.

Customer service enhancement

I’m an advocate for customer-centered design, from marketing and sales to service and support. For nearly two decades, I’ve championed social media as an affordable market research and customer service platform. ChatGPT takes this concept to the next level. Chatbots have been integrated into websites for automated customer support for years. ChatGPT and equivalent bots are far more sophisticated, to the point their writing and communication skills are virtually undetectable to the average person. 

If you haven’t already integrated chat into your website, social and email channels, now is the time. It’s affordable, robust and provides critical cost-savings and scalability to your marketing, sales and customer service efforts.

ChatGPT is helpful in creating and understanding content and concepts, but it still requires human oversight to maximize its potential. To hedge your bets against AI taking away your job, start testing ChatGPT as a tool to inform, streamline and enhance current marketing efforts. As a ChatGPT expert in your organization, you’ll dramatically increase your value to your current and future employers. 

In the remote chance ChatGPT fails to dramatically impact your organization or department, at least you’ll know how to get your job done faster and better with AI tools.

 

Kent Lewis is chief marketing officer for Deksia, a strategy-driven creative marketing agency. He also is founder of pdxMindShare and co-founder of SEMpdx, both based in Portland, Oregon. Kent’s industry recognition includes Marketer of the Year by the American Marketing Association and Top 100 Digital Marketing Influencers by BuzzSumo.

 

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