If you feel like you haven’t been able to go a day over the past couple of years without hearing about artificial intelligence (AI), it’s not your imagination. AI has completely taken the world by storm, revolutionizing how businesses manage their marketing campaigns practically overnight.
ChatGPT is one of the more ubiquitous tools to hit the scene, and for a good reason. It’s free to use and capable of generating incredibly human-like text in seconds, as well as handling numerous other tasks. But what is ChatGPT, and how can you best start using it as part of your ongoing marketing strategy?
Understanding ChatGPT: What It Is and How It Works
The brainchild of OpenAI, ChatGPT is a functional chatbot designed to mimic and simulate natural human conversation accurately. Users can leverage the familiar chat interface to request that the AI behind it execute nearly any task, including completing entire content pieces. This process is called prompting.
ChatGPT accomplishes this via extensive pre-training on massive existing datasets. The AI then leverages what it knows about patterns and context to generate natural, appropriate responses to diverse user prompts.
Key Marketing Applications of ChatGPT
Although many different individuals and companies have adopted ChatGPT for content marketing strategies since it first hit the scene in November 2022, it’s been especially popular among marketers. The following are just a few key examples of how marketers and content creators are using it:
- As a supplementary research tool
- To take the guesswork out of keyword research and SEO analysis
- To analyze the voice and tone of existing written content
- As a fast, inexpensive alternative to traditional content writing
- For identifying patterns in vast amounts of existing data
- To improve audience targeting efforts
- As a tool for creating outlines and content briefs
- To take the tedium out of accomplishing repetitive tasks
Best Practices for Using ChatGPT in Your Marketing Strategy
Although ChatGPT can be an amazing productivity tool for businesses and brands of all types and sizes, it’s important to understand it’s not a magic bullet. Knowing how to use it wisely is crucial, so follow best practices like the following examples.
Understanding the limitations of ChatGPT
While ChatGPT does produce incredibly human-sounding content, it doesn’t take much analysis to realize that its ability has limits. As with most fully AI-generated text, ChatGPT output can be shallow, error-prone, and guilty of a lot of circle talk.
Therefore, it’s best used as a productivity aid for human creators rather than as a replacement for them. It can help with brainstorming, outlining, tone analysis, language choices, and more. But any ChatGPT-generated content you decide to use should always pass through human hands before publication.
Consider training ChatGPT on custom data
ChatGPT’s Plus tier has a custom instructions feature that can be highly useful for marketers looking to eliminate guesswork in branding. You can use it to feed the AI brand-specific information about your business, your customer base, etc., and leverage it to create template instructions for each individual use case.
When ChatGPT knows your brand on this level, it’s much easier to use it for multiple purposes. These include basic content creation, customer behavior analysis, brand voice analysis, and more.
Master new features as they come out
Like many of today’s top AI tools, ChatGPT is continually developing and introducing new features that can further streamline your digital marketing strategy. Previous versions include an image feature to help develop graphics and a voice feature that adds a new dimension to prompt crafting.
Explore new options as they’re introduced to get the most out of your ChatGPT experience. Experiment with different ways to integrate them into your strategy to determine what works best.
Use it to take customer care to the next level
As any digital marketer knows, winning engagement and five-star customer service are key to managing any successful brand. ChatGPT also happens to be an amazing tool for automating numerous routine interactions, providing faster responses to questions, and keeping your customers satisfied overall.
Use the custom instructions feature to train the chatbot’s live settings. Provide background information and configure potential response patterns to build a great supplementary customer service tool.
Avoiding Pitfalls: Using ChatGPT Safely and Ethically
Of course, learning to identify and sidestep potential pitfalls is also essential when integrating any type of AI tool into your ongoing approach to digital marketing, ChatGPT included. Here are a few important factors to be aware of.
Adhere to best SEO practices
“Unless it is amazing and people link to it and share it, you just won’t rank well.”
– Neil Patel, entrepreneur and digital marketing authority
Remember, although ChatGPT can take a lot of drudgery out of routine content creation, you don’t want to over-rely on it. Content that contains a lot of unedited, un-humanized AI content can scan as low-quality and unhelpful, hurting your SEO rankings.
Keep quality levels high by combining AI efficiency with irreplaceable human ingenuity and creativity.
Always validate output
AI chatbots like ChatGPT aren’t perfect by any means. They’re especially prone to informational errors, contradictions, and bias, so it’s important to watch out for these factors when using AI to help with content creation.
Ensure ethical use
It’s important to use AI technology, such as the kind that powers ChatGPT, ethically, especially since it’s still developing and many people want to misuse it as a get-rich scheme.
In addition to evaluating output for accuracy, be transparent about using it when it makes sense to do so. Consider citing it as a source or as part of a resource list when using it to generate ideas or help with content creation.
Why kick your digital marketing strategy up just one notch when you can elevate it by several?
In addition to integrating ChatGPT into your marketing strategy, consider signing up for a free 14-day WriterAccess trial and connecting with professional content creators who can humanize your output to perfection! You’ll love the difference the right talent makes in your final product.
