The Usefulness of ChatGPT in Marketing and 5 Best Practices for Content Creators
I first learned about ChatGPT in mid-January at one of my company’s weekly meetings when our CEO encouraged our Head of Marketing and me to explore the uses of this and other AI tools that could make project management, content production, and SEO marketing more efficient.
She showed us her experimentation with the generative text bot, and we were entertained by the ways that you could easily produce or synthesize information and have it present the information with a bite of sarcasm or flare of sass as your mood dictates.
I came out of that meeting with my Head of Marketing discussing the interesting new dilemma that this program could pose on journalism, marketing, and the media industry as a whole.
“Could this potentially take the place of human writers or marketing agencies?” I asked him. “Are people going to see the value of paying for a marketing agency to do their content when they could pay a fraction of the agency cost for a subscription fee and just plug and play?”
Thus, began my own quest to really understand the way ChatGPT works, and explore the potential opportunities or dangers it could pose on newsrooms, marketing agencies, digital platforms, and the very real human writers who staff them.
Sara Miller, Senior Manager of Digital Marketing at Directive, a California-based marketing agency, says, “We've been able to figure out ways to use it to help kind of expedite some of the things we're doing whether it's, you know, with keyword research or different things like that. I'd say the main way that we've been using it over the last couple of weeks has been to expedite our process and write content briefs to send to our writers.”
I also began to poke around with the program myself in various capacities to test its capabilities. Due to my company’s interest in the program and seeing how we could utilize it to increase our productivity, I experimented with ChatGPT in regard to content production and SEO tasks.
The first thing I did was ask it to write in 500 words an explanation of the balanced scorecard strategic framework because I had to write a new resource article on the topic and had no idea where to start.
I found very quickly that while ChatGPT was able to produce a technically and grammatically correct 5 paragraph essay on the balanced scorecard, it wasn’t particularly deep or written at a high enough level for our readership. The information itself was also close to correct, but there were small bits that still weren’t quite right.
So I kept refining my queries and found the same issues. While the information was mostly accurate, and the content was somewhat decently produced, it still needed human refinement and some significant copy editing to get it the rest of the way to meet our typical writing standards. To me, it felt like having a bot produce work that still needed to be edited with a fine tooth-comb wasn’t the most efficient use of my time.
Jon Callas, program director at Electronic Frontier Foundation, agrees, as he says, ‘It's not very useful to have one [an AI program] that writes copy that needs to be edited.”
Though on the positive side, it was able to explain many of these concepts to me in a simple, straightforward way that I could understand, and in turn, write and expand on myself. I found it was also successful in creating clear outlines for my resource articles and helping me flesh out some examples and content ideas.
It also helped to assist with some of the more tedious tasks such as writing meta descriptions and backend SEO.
So will this be the new tool for digital marketing agencies? Or even take the place of writers within digital marketing agencies? Sara Miller doesn’t think so. “I don't think that the industry will be negatively impacted by this. I think that everyone's roles are so much more than just the end result. And there's a lot that goes into that. So for me, I don't worry about my position or things that my team is working on. There are pieces that can be streamlined and improve the way that we operate.”
There is also the risk of overuse of the tool and oversaturation that could definitely pose a risk to the program, and ultimately regulate the industry once more. He feels that companies using Chat GPT and other similar programs now may have an edge over the competition, but eventually, that practice will likely be standardized and won’t offer such a competitive edge.
“If everyone's using the same set of tools to generate marketing content, or SEO content or whatever. It's not gonna grab us and so it's not gonna be effective as advertising,” says Michael.
Through my research, interviews, and experimentation I cultivated a few best practices any digital media or content creator should implement when using ChatGPT to assist their work.
Be specific in your prompts: While it’s quite a bit smarter than Alexa or Siri, it still can’t discern intentions. You must be intentional in your prompts and what your desired output will be.
Be realistic: Understand its limitations. One of the first things I attempted was to see if it could read through my entire 10-page interview transcript and synthesize the main points of the interview into one cohesive report. Unfortunately, it is limited in capacity and data accessibility, and as such, was not able to process my entire interview. However, it was able to take the outlined meeting minutes from the Reno Arts and Culture Commission meeting and synthesize the document into a 500-word report.
Be smart. Don’t just take the first bit of information it gives you. Especially knowing how prone to misinformation it is, even ChatGPT tells you not to take its word at face value. Do your research, and do your due diligence.
Be ethical. It can be easy to take the information it gives and to twist it to meet your own agenda, but ultimately, as a content creator, whether that content is in the form of a blog post, news article, or Facebook post, your integrity is your best currency in this industry. Being honest and transparent are the best tools to combat misinformation.
Don’t be lazy. You’ll learn quickly that it has limitations and those limitations may be a hindrance to your task if you’re looking for an easy way to work. However, it can be a powerful assistant if you’re using it for just that- as an assistive tool to make your productivity more efficient and your work higher quality.