Here, I will explain some practical use cases of how marketers can use ChatGPT for content marketing to support different digital marketing channels. We'll see that knowing how to prompt ChatGPT is a key skill, so I'll show different prompting techniques before reviewing specific applications for the different digital marketing channels.<\/p>\n
Some of the key digital marketing channels that I'll describe are summarized in this visual from my book Digital marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice<\/em>. In the prompt examples I focus on organic and paid search and social media marketing, but start with email marketing.<\/p>\n ChatGPT and other GenAI tools can be used across all these channels and for more strategic marketing activities. I agree with Dylan Roberts from KMPG who told Business Insider<\/a> :<\/p>\n \"It's going to automate select tasks that knowledge workers are engaged in today so that they can focus on higher-value tasks<\/em>\".<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I agree, although in my other post I show how GenAI can support those higher-value strategy and planning tasks too. (Support is the key word there, not replace!)<\/p>\n Another oft-quoted way of looking at the impact of AI on marketing is<\/p>\n \u201cYou won\u2019t lose your job to AI, but to someone who knows how to use AI.<\/em>\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I also agree with this, for now, but in the longer term, many are calling BS<\/a> as we move towards the scary world of AGI and the singularity where the number of marketers and other business professionals are decimating.<\/p>\n To help our members make the huge personal and business changes need to make better use of AI for marketing, we have developed many learning modules and templates. I recommend starting with these:<\/p>\n Download our free ChatGPT prompt cheatsheet<\/strong><\/p>\n This Google Sheet recommends practical prompting techniques and examples of useful marketing prompts for strategy and planning.<\/p>\n Access the ChatGPT prompt examples and cheatsheet for marketers<\/a><\/p>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n Download our premium member resource \u2013 AI for Marketing playbook and governance policy template<\/strong><\/p>\n Create your own AI marketing strategy and governance policy using Smart Insights simple template and use-cases for improving use of AI within your business to increase productivity, maintain brand trust and reduce costs.<\/p>\n Access the AI for marketing playbook and governance policy template<\/a><\/p>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n A lot of the excitement amongst marketers about ChatGPT and similar GenAI tools is that across all the media and channels shown, it can act as a 'hands-on' productivity tool for analysis and creating content and visuals for marketing. I certainly don't think it will replace marketers just yet, but I see it as a great collaborative tool to improve the quality of creative and to create more effective content.<\/p>\n So, before we dive in and look at the examples for different channels, it's helpful to learn some basic principles of prompt engineering<\/a> so you can efficiently prompt ChatGPT and other GenAI tools.<\/p>\n My number one tip for prompt engineering is to make your goals clear to the AI. The best way to do this is by using a templated approach (where you can use a standard approach) to make it easy to re-use prompts using a prompt library. Done right, this is a huge time saver.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s always good to start with what you\u2019re looking to achieve with your communications:<\/p>\n Try to get into the habit of building these fundamentals into your prompts. ChatGPT is great at interpreting written narrative instructions, but if you get into the habit of using a templated approach like this, we think you will get better response by providing these details quickly.<\/p>\n Here's an example:<\/p>\n Task:<\/strong>\u00a0Write an email to older existing customers to make them aware of a new product<\/p>\n Objective:<\/strong>\u00a0Make audience aware of new hearing service<\/p>\n Audience:<\/strong>\u00a0Existing customers of an eyewear company<\/p>\n Action:\u00a0<\/strong>Encourage the audience to sign up for a test if concerned about their hearing<\/p>\n Positioning:\u00a0<\/strong>Position the brand as offering cutting-edge testing technology<\/p>\n Whether you work in a marketing team of one, or a larger organization, you should agree your role and what you're aiming to achieve in your communications using ChatGPT's Custom Instructions as shown below.\u00a0 Not using this feature is the biggest 'beginners mistake' i see with using ChatGPT for marketing.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This feature was introduced in 2023 and can be accessed via 'Customize ChatGPT' in your settings, (under your profile in the top right). Custom instructions enable you to provide general context for ALL prompts about your requirements and business. A great time-saver!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n ChatGPT is an advanced natural language generation (NLG) model that doesn't require prompts (known as 'Zero shot<\/em>' amongst AI professionals). However, it's useful to know and we will see it works much better if you can be more specific, i.e., you give it specific context through examples and more detailed instructions, ('One shot<\/em>' or 'Few shot<\/em>').<\/p>\n Prompting is a simple new skill that we will have to learn to improve the quality of ChatGPT results. We can't just rely on the AI, we have to apply our experience and intelligence as what some are calling 'Prompt Engineers'. It's a skill just like learning Google in the way that some people are better at getting answers from searching Google because of their experience. However, there are no defined 'Advanced search' prompts or syntax, since like Google the Chatbots have dispensed with those because it's natural language.<\/p>\n We'll start with some examples of useful prompting rules for email marketing. Then we'll look at search and social media marketing.<\/p>\n The obvious application here is email copywriting, but emails don't exist in isolation. They often work best in a series of communications such as a Welcome sequence, so we will take an example of this to put ChatGPT 'through its paces'. Although this example is email-focused, many of the techniques can be applied to other channels, which will be explored below.<\/p>\n For me, effective marketing copywriting boils down to creating relevance for particular, audience, engaging them, and persuading them to take action to the next step. So, within these examples of Email marketing, I won't just ask ChatGPT to generate a copy, I'll look to understand why that copy has been created. Here is a simple checklist which shows the prompting approach I have developed.<\/p>\n It's an essential practice to start a new conversation to clear previous dialogue and once you have set the context, this is retained through the course of the conversation and you can return to it if you save the dialogue.<\/p>\n Here, you can see I'm specific in my prompt explaining the context. The product I'm promoting is an office cleaning service.<\/p>\n What do you want the AI to do for you?!\u00a0 Here, the goal is that these are for marketing and welcome emails for new prospects, for example:<\/p>\n It may be sufficient to set the context as shown above, but some have recommended you can improve the quality of the prompt by asking ChatGPT to act as a defined role or with a particular tone of voice. So, for example: \"Act As an Email Marketing Copywriter\". I didn't find this useful in my use - you can set the context in other ways, no need to over-prompt!<\/p>\n The first subject lines shown above are OK, but are quite generic. They reminded me of what Steve Krug called 'Marketing Happy Talk<\/a>' in his book 'Don't make me think',\u00a0 i.e., quite bland and generic fluff which is not engaging for the audience. I don't think an experienced copywriter will write: \"Say Goodbye to... Top-Notch\". Doesn't work for me.<\/p>\n So next I asked it to refine its suggestions to give improved alternatives relating to someone in B2B switching to another service. These are much more specific.<\/p>\n The prompts above show how you can specify the goal, but you will end up with more effective creative if you ask for a number of alternatives.<\/p>\n I initially asked the AI for alternative subject lines as above and then alternatives for the body copy as shown below. Then you can choose from the best or use A\/B testing to see which works best for your audience.<\/p>\n The subject lines above are perhaps a little overlong, but could be OK for an initial test.\u00a0 You can also usefully specify the number of characters. It's cool that for Google Ads, for example, ChatGPT knows the limits (although it was only trained up to 2001, so bear in mind they could be out-of-date).<\/p>\n As you use ChatGPT, use it as an opportunity to learn best practices by asking it why it has done things in a particular way and what they are based on. Don't just treat ChatGPT as a black box, ask it why it has chosen particular approaches. Here I ask it why it has structured the email as it has. This is the type of explanation you would get in a book or course on email marketing from an expert. This is great since it can help inform your own copywriting approach.<\/p>\n You can take this one step further by asking to learn from experts in this field. Here we see some good recommendations. Not sure about Neil Patel as an email marketing expert specifically though...<\/p>\n On LinkedIn, email copy specialist Chase Diamond shared some more ChatGPT prompts for email copywriting<\/a>.<\/p>\n We'll now look at some of the best recommendations of prompts for other digital marketing channels. Some of the best compilations are from those curated and shared by Alex Velinov, the CTO of Tag Digital based in Glasgow in his two popular prompt lists on LinkedIn (ChatGPT for Marketing List 1<\/a> and List 2<\/a>) , linking to different specialists in their field. I'll highlight which I think are some of the most useful of these grouped by digital marketing channel.<\/p>\n It's not surprising that GenAI is well-positioned to generate keyword topics for writers.<\/p>\n Renowned SEO consultant Aleyda Solis has the best organic search summary here, with her blog ChatGPT for SEO: 20 Ways to Leverage ChatGPT in your SEO Activities<\/a>.<\/p>\n These include prompts to create alternative titles and meta descriptions for posts. I also recommend these two Chrome extensions which will find you the best prompts:<\/p>\n She reminds us that using ChatGPT to support content generation for organic search will be OK if people check the quality and improve - as I have said - a collaborative approach<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Aleyda's recommendations also include keyword analysis and keyword clustering tools. Here are some examples:<\/p>\n I'm not a fan of these since they don't give the relative volumes of search or impressions for different search terms which Google's Keyword Planner or Search Console do. So I won't be using these.<\/p>\n If you're using GSC, then this is a cool technique for grouping or clustering keywords neatly:<\/p>\n Jon Loomer has specialized in Facebook ad strategy for a long time, so interesting to see his take:<\/p>\n If you're more focused on LinkedIn, take a look at these:<\/p>\n This handy Using ChatGPT to automate Market research<\/a> video by Andy Gray<\/a> starts by asking ChatGPT to \"Write a list of the top 10 Danish fashion brands and include their website url, instagram url, facebook url and tiktok url\". This is then formatted into a table and exported into Google Sheets for reference.<\/p>\n This video on how to Automate writing eCommerce product descriptions with OpenAI<\/a> by Elliott Davidson<\/a> shows how to integrate ChatGPT responses with Google Sheets which is powerful for marketers managing a large number of product descriptions.<\/p>\n Unsurprisingly, our free A-Z ChatGPT Prompt cheatsheet for marketers<\/a> was created in collaboration with ChatGPT! We started by prompting ChatGPT to create a glossary:<\/p>\n Prompt: \u201cWrite a glossary of terms for features and techniques for using ChatGPT titled: The A-Z of Prompting with ChatGPT for copywriters\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n This was a great starting point, but didn\u2019t include some of the less obvious, more advanced features of ChatGPT we wanted to pass onto you, such as custom instructions, templates, temperature and TLDR.<\/p>\n So we took the original list, used 'Regenerate' to get 26 more ideas and added to it to with our own ideas to include some of the more advanced practical techniques too, including:<\/p>\n Download this marketing prompt cheatsheet for free<\/a> and keep it bookmarked for quick reference.<\/p>\n So, that's my compilation of ChatGPT prompts that can be used by marketers. I hope there are some you can apply to your marketing.<\/p>\n To help our members make the huge personal and business changes need to make better use of AI for marketing, we have developed many learning modules and templates. I recommend starting with these:<\/p>\n Download our free ChatGPT prompt cheatsheet<\/strong><\/p>\n This Google Sheet recommends practical prompting techniques and examples of useful marketing prompts for strategy and planning.<\/p>\n Access the ChatGPT prompt examples and cheatsheet for marketers<\/a><\/p>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/2023-01-20_09-22-09.png\")
<\/p>\nRecommended Smart Insights resources<\/h3>\n
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\n <\/a>\n <\/div>\n Why understanding 'Prompt Engineering' will help your marketing<\/h3>\n
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<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/02\/CI.png\")
<\/p>\nUnderstanding Zero, One and Few Shot prompts for ChatGPT<\/h4>\n
ChatGPT prompts for email marketing - example<\/h3>\n
1. Set the context for your email creation<\/h4>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/Email-1.png\")
I'm not impressed by these subject lines TBH, they are 'marketing happy talk', which I'll explain how to improve upon below.<\/p>\n2. Define the task and goal<\/h4>\n
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3. Define Chatbot's tone of voice for in-house email style<\/h4>\n
4. Ask follow-up questions to improve your WIP email generation<\/h4>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/Email2.png\")
<\/p>\n5. Ask for alternatives you can select from<\/h4>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.smartinsights.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/ChatGPT-Email-copy-example-4.png\")
<\/p>\n6. Specify your email copy limits<\/h4>\n
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<\/p>\n7. Learn from your AI<\/h4>\n
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<\/p>\n8. Find the source of the recommendations<\/h4>\n
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<\/p>\nOrganic search ChatGPT prompt examples<\/h3>\n
9. Generate relevant topics for growing organic search presence<\/h4>\n
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10. Classify new\/existing keywords based on defined success factors<\/h4>\n
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Paid search prompt examples<\/h3>\n
11. Refine paid search positioning and targeting with AI research prompts<\/h4>\n
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Social media marketing prompt examples<\/h3>\n
12. Generate social media campaigns and assets<\/h4>\n
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Other marketing and digital marketing applications<\/h3>\n
13. ChatGPT for market research generation<\/h4>\n
14. ChatGPT for eCommerce product descriptions<\/h4>\n
15. Advice on ChatGPT prompts for marketing<\/h4>\n
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