How will ChatGPT change marketing? The answer, plus 12 use cases (with prompts!) for using ChatGPT in marketing, and 6 marketing tools that leverage GPT3.
Alex Methvin
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been utilized in marketing strategies in recent years and has grown more intelligent with every additional rendition. This prompts us to ask the question, how far will AI in marketing go and could it replace certain marketing roles or even entire teams in the near future? With the recent launch of Open AI’s ChatGPT this has been a very real concern at the forefront of every marketer’s mind over the last 2 months.
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT stands for “Chat Generated Pre-Trained Transformer” and is an AI chatbot that utilizes a natural language processing model called GPT-3.5 that was developed by OpenAI. A variety of industries, including marketing, have used it as a tool to improve and automate customer interactions and improve their overall customer experience. I have personally used ChatGPT to write blog post outlines, meta info, and even code, but I have also had friends use the tool for things like product descriptions, website copy, and even event planning.
Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, the world hasn’t stopped talking about it. We have seen many use cases and ideas on how to use it but we haven’t seen enough comprehensive use cases of how we can leverage it in marketing. In this blog post, we will explore how the generative AI tool, ChatGPT, can be used in marketing, including the tools and strategies that can be employed, and what the future of marketing looks like because of ChatGPT and other language models.
How Can Marketers Effectively Leverage ChatGPT?
ChatGPT and SEO: Keyword Research, Clusters, and Topic suggestions
1. Asking ChatGPT for Keyword Research
ChatGPT can help you start a keyword research plan with only a few simple questions. Start by telling ChatGPT what primary keyword you would like to rank for and then asking it what supporting keyword you should rank for. You’re going to find that the answer might not be 100% applicable to your specific use case, but it is designed to give you a starting point. Remove the keywords that you feel are irrelevant to your brand.
Now you’ve begun the basic steps to a keyword research plan without having to download additional tools or have little to no SEO knowledge.
2. Asking ChatGPT for Topic Clusters
Utilizing ChatGPT to help you create content clusters that can help you begin the process of creating an effective pillar page outline. To ask ChatGPT for content clusters say: “Organize the above keywords into content clusters.”
The first group, SEO agency related keywords, are all about the agency itself and what it does. The second group, Business related keywords, are about the specific industries or types of businesses that the agency works with. The third group, Services related keywords, are about the different services that the agency provides. The fourth group, Expertise related keywords, are about the expertise and level of knowledge the agency possesses.
This ideation is a perfect place to start if you’re attempting to build out or add a larger cluster strategy. Having these ideas out in front of you can help you identify connective elements between each subject which makes it easier to plan a cohesive plan moving forward.
3. Asking ChatGPT for Topic Suggestions
Ask ChatGPT to generate a list of the most frequently asked questions related to your primary keyword that are relevant to your target audience.
This will enable you to create quality content that can help you gain features in SERP results and provide the most value to your audience. These questions can be answered in a Frequently Asked Questions section on your website, individual blog content pieces, or even social media posts.
ChatGPT and Web Development: Debugging and Solving Tag Issues
1. Asking ChatGPT to Help You Debug Code
In this video by Front Dreams, they ask ChatGPT to help them debug their footer code. With a simple prompt of “Help me fix this:” and copy/pasting their slice of code, ChatGPT returned the fixed code in seconds with an explanation of what it changed. Watch how it was done, below!
ChatGPT and PPC: Writing ad copy, keyword research, and campaign structure
1. Writing ad copy
ChatGPT can be a great tool to help you write high-converting PPC headlines. In order to ask ChatGPT for a list of Google ad headlines ask this: “Write 5 high-converting headlines for a google ads campaign containing the keyword “seo agency” in 90 characters including spaces.”
It’s important to remember that ChatGPT is a generative pre-trained bot and only has access to its training data. So as more people use the platform, the better its responses will be, but until the AI is further developed it’s best to use it as an idea initiator rather than an idea generator. That means that these headlines can be used to give you a general direction for your own headline generation.
2. Keyword research
Keyword research for paid ads can be done in a very similar way to keyword research for SEO. If you’re developing a ppc campaign you’re going to want to target keyword variations and synonyms in your campaign. A quick and easy way to build a keyword variation list is to use this ChatGPT prompt, “Create a list of keyword variations and synonyms for “keyword” for a ppc campaign.”
ChatGPT began to give me a list of over 50 different keyword variations. However, something I noticed is that there were a few duplicates. So although this is a quick and easy way to create a keyword list outline it will still require a set of human eyes to refine and decide which keywords are fully appropriate and applicable to their campaign.
3. Campaign structure
In my opinion, this was probably one of the most helpful and robust answers from ChatGPT. I gave ChatGPT a simple prompt of, “Create a ppc campaign structure for keyword “_____”. In return it delivered 3 different ad groups with focus keywords, supporting keywords, and headlines.It also went a step further and gave me suggested campaign settings. If you’re designing ppc campaigns for an unfamiliar product or you have minimal ppc experience then this can be a great tool to give you a place to start designing your first campaign.
ChatGPT and Copywriting: Blog Post Outlines, Social Media Captions
1. Blog Post Outlines
Once you’ve completed your keyword research and know the questions your audience is frequently asking, then it’s probably time for content marketing. Unsurprisingly, ChatGPT can help you with this too! In fact, ChatGPT helped me create an outline for this blog that you’re reading. I started by asking chat-gpt bot, “Please write me a blog about ChatGPT in Marketing: In-Depth Guide with Tools, Strategies and Examples” and this is what it returned:
As you can see, I didn’t copy and paste the response, but it did provide me with a general outline and helped me think about the overall structure of how I wanted to present this information. Also, because I did not ask ChatGPT to provide a certain number of words, its response was fairly short. I did find that parts of ChatGPT’s response were going to add value to certain sections, but I also found that some of it was not going to provide any additional value.
It’s important to not copy AI responses verbatim because Google is not going to reward you for content that’s unoriginal and doesn’t provide additional value than what’s already on the internet. So with any ChatGPT response, use it as a guide, not a crutch.
2. Social Media Captions
Social media captions through ChatGPT is a great time saving hack that can help you execute a month’s worth of content in seconds! I’ve used other AI caption writers like Copy.ai. From my experience, one of the main differences between an AI copywriting tool like Copy.ai and Chat GPT is that it’s easier to write multiple captions at once utilizing ChatGPT. However, in my research for this article I found out that Copy.ai actually uses ChatGPT to help businesses generate marketing and sales copy!
So in order to leverage ChatGPT for social media caption copywriting use this prompt. “Create 30 social media captions for a _______ company.”
Some ChatGPT users have even experimented with asking the bot to write their captions in specific tones to coordinate with their brand voice. Some examples of tones that you can ask ChatGPT to write in include funny, expertly, knowledgeable, and inspirational. By feeding the AI specifics about the brand, products, and more AI can create a targeted tagline or starting point for you and your team to either implement right away or expand upon.
Chat GPT and Ad Copy: Optimize Your Existing Ad Copy
1. Optimize Your Existing Ad Copy
If you have existing ad copy that is not achieving your target CTR, then it’s possible that ChatGPT can help! The more specific you are with your requests the better the outputs are. This is why I decided to let ChatGPT know I was trying to increase my CTR and wanted headlines that were better than the original. See the conversation below:
Now I have 5 strong attention-grabbing headlines to inspire future ad copy! I like to think of ChatGPT as a creative side-kick. The AI tool does not always give perfect answers and sometimes the information can be outdated, however it’s a great tool to get creative juices flowing and form outlines.
ChatGPT and Content Development: Writing Product Descriptions
1. Write Product Descriptions
The creators of ChatGPT, OpenAI, actually used the platform itself to generate product descriptions for its own website resulting in the company saving time and resources. If you have an ecommerce store with hundreds of products it can be extremely time consuming to write product descriptions. The good news is, ChatGPT can be integrated with Google Sheets and you can run a function that automatically writes hundreds of descriptions in seconds. I recently read an article by Elliott Davidson from Contrast explaining how to do this.
Step 1) First, Navigate to Google Apps Script within Google Sheets (Go to Google Sheet → Extensions → App Script)
Step 2) Second, copy and paste the following code into your Google Apps Script Project
/**
* Generates text using OpenAI’s GPT-3 model
* @param {string} prompt The prompt to feed to the GPT-3 model
* @param {string} cell The cell to append to the prompt
* @param {number} [maxWords=10] The maximum number of words to generate
* @return {string} The generated text
* @customfunction
*/
function runOpenAI(prompt, cell, maxWords) {
const API_KEY = “YOUR API KEY”;
maxTokens = 150
if (maxWords){maxTokens = maxWords * 0.75}
model = “text-davinci-003”
prompt = prompt+cell+”:”,
temperature= 0
// Set up the request body with the given parameters
const requestBody = {
“model”: model,
“prompt”: prompt,
“temperature”: temperature,
“max_tokens”: maxTokens
};
console.log(requestBody)
// Set up the request options with the required headers
const requestOptions = {
“method”: “POST”,
“headers”: {
“Content-Type”: “application/json”,
“Authorization”: “Bearer “+API_KEY
},
“payload”: JSON.stringify(requestBody)
};
// Send the request to the GPT-3 API endpoint for completions
const response = UrlFetchApp.fetch(“https://api.openai.com/v1/completions“, requestOptions);
console.log(response.getContentText())
// Get the response body as a JSON object
const responseBody = JSON.parse(response.getContentText());
let answer= responseBody.choices[0].text
// Return the generated text from the response
return answer
}
Step 3) Once you have an OpenAI account, get your API key
3.1) Click on your name in the top-right corner
3.2) Click on view API Keys
3.3) Create new secret key
3.4) Copy the key
Step 4) Paste your key inside your Apps Script project, replacing the text “YOUR API KEY”
Step 5) Save your project and go back to your sheet
Step 6) Use this function – “=runOpenAI(“write a 100 word product description that is light hearted and funny”,F2)”
There you have it! Now you can easily begin writing hundreds of product descriptions in seconds. As always, make sure to review the output and adapt the answers as you see fit.
Best Marketing Tools Using ChatGPT and GPT3:
Now that we’ve covered the best use cases for marketers to utilize ChatGPT, let’s cover some of the other ChatGPT and GPT3 tools that can help you leverage AI’s full potential for yourself and clients. Here’s a list of 8 of the best marketing tools that are using ChatGPT and GPT3:
- Merlin by Foyer
- ChatGPT Chrome Extension
- Promptheus – Converse with ChatGPT Chrome Extension
- Copy.Ai
- Viable
- Debuild.co
- Replier.ai
- ABtesting.ai
Merlin by Foyer allows you to access ChatGPT at the click of a button without having to leave your existing tab or window. Working on a Google Sheet and need a quick formula? Open Merlin, let it know what you would like to accomplish and within seconds you have a formula that solves the problem. Reading a long piece of content on a web page? Merlin can help you save time and give you key focus points simply by highlighting text and clicking command g (on mac).
The ChatGPT chrome extension also allows you to access ChatGPT from anywhere on the web for free. Their goal is to enable users to “Ask anything anywhere”. As someone who strongly dislikes having too many tabs open at once, this is a great tool. Using the ChatGPT chrome extension is like sitting in the same room as Google (if it was a person) and being able to ask unlimited questions whenever you want.
The Promptheus chrome extension allows you to access ChatGPT using your voice. It’s the closest you’ll probably get to having a real conversation with a computer. In the demo video for Promptheus the user verbally asks questions and ChatGPT writes answers in real time without missing a beat.
Copy.Ai is an AI copywriting tool that is useful for crafting emails, blogs, and social media posts. Copy.Ai utilizes the GPT 3.5 technology behind ChatGPT. The founders of Copy.Ai started by creating simple GPT-3 powered apps and sharing them with their friends on Twitter. Copy.Ai was born when they realized that while they were developing these simple apps most of their time was being spent on writing the marketing copy. Their solution was a tagline generator which then became the present and robust Copy.Ai.
Viable is a self proclaimed “Experience Analysis Platform” that also leverages the power of GPT-3. Viable takes your customers’ feedback from various sources like Survey Monkey, Twitter, and Front and then creates automatic natural language reports. These reports distill all the feedback into the most important themes based on the urgency of language, customer tiers, churn risks, and more. I like to think of it as an automated customer service assistant.
Debuild is my personal favorite on this list because it allows people with little to no development experience to create the software they need with just a few simple prompts. It’s as simple as describing your app in plain English and selecting the use cases. Within seconds the AI will use GPT-3 technology to write your SQL code and help you assemble the visual interface. Debuild is still an evolving platform, but even in its bare bones form shows the power of GPT-3 technology beyond simple conversations and task execution.
Replier.ai utilizes GPT-3 technology and your database of previous responses to craft personalized human-like responses to all your customer reviews. Replier.Ai connects to all major review platforms including; Google My Business, Yelp, Shopify, and even UberEats. A bonus feature of Replier.Ai is that it also creates post-ready social posts of your customers’ reviews and writes the captions so you can easily share customer reviews on social media.
ABtesting.ai utilizes GPT-3 to create automated text suggestions for your headline, copy, and call to action on any web page so you can execute high-quality AB tests faster and easier. In addition to writing the copy for you, they also integrate seamlessly with your WordPress or Wix site with a Javascript snippet that’s less than 1KB. This ensures that running the tests won’t impact your site’s performance…music to my SEO brain.
For a more extensive list of the best GPT-3 tools, check out our blog, Best GPT-3 Tools, Examples and Use Cases.
ChatGPT Prompt Engineering: Tips on How Marketers Can Use ChatGPT More Effectively
- Use and define role play: One of the most effective ways to use ChatGPT is starting the main prompt with “Act like you are a ” or “You are this expert“. If you’re asking for public speaking advice, for example, start your prompt with “You are an experienced public speaking coach.” There are hundreds of useful role play ideas on GitHub here.
- Always Add context. If you were asking someone to complete a a complex task, you will need to give them backstory and context so they can complete it effectively. AI is not any different, the more context you give, the more relevant, customized and useful the answer will be.
- Use the “regenerate” button and give it another chance: If you don’t like the reply, click “regenerate” at the bottom of the screen. You can still see previous answers to the same question displayed on left of the screen under the OpenAI logo.
- Leverage the conversational UI: Use conversational interface to edit or tweak the answers. Try one of these prompts for example: make it longer, make it funnier, make it shorter, make it sound more academic, make it more compelling, make it more technical, use fewer adjectives, add more hashtags, give more more options, add another sentence at the end…you get the idea
- Use numbers. If you’re generating something like a list of ideas, brand names or email subject lines, don’t just ask for ideas or options, ask for 10 of them. Use the number to get as many options as you wish for.
- Avoid generic questions, be specific. Rather than asking it to write a generic tweet about art, ask it to write about the Spanish war impact on Picasso’s art and if it impacted other artists similarly. The more specific the ask is, the more relevant and specific the answer will be.
- Turn it to a table. ChatGPT has a unique ability to convert replies into tables, lists, flowcharts, code snippet, and more. If you don’t like long complex paragraphs, ask for the format to your use case and preferences, like a bullet list or a table.
- User restrictions and requirements. Ask your question, but at the end, add restrictions or requirements. For example you can add at the end of your prompt: make it under 100 words, make your response between 50 and 100 characters, avoid the word “synergy”, don’t use the word “innovation”, walk me through it step-by-step, explain it to me like I’m a grandma, breakdown your reasoning behind the advice, find options under $500, make it work for 20 people, remember, I don’t drink beer.
- Get creative. Stretch your critical thinking muscles. Think of a completely different way to ask the question. Critical thinking has always been an important skill in the workplace and in life in general, but with the rise of generative AI, it’s even more important. Two questions may generate completely different answers from AI models—knowing what question to ask an AI system is an extremely valuable skill.
AI Influenced Campaigns
In conclusion, ChatGPT is a powerful language generation model that can be used in a variety of industries, especially digital marketing. With technologies such as using ChatGPT as a content creator, or generating product descriptions and customer support responses, businesses can save time and resources while also providing a better experience for their customers. However, ChatGPT and GPT-3 powered tools still contain flaws that require a professional human to review and edit. If you’re looking to implement or integrate more AI into your marketing campaigns and initiatives, connect with one of the NoGood experts today to find out where you could be utilizing more tech.
https://nogood.io/2023/01/24/chat-gpt-in-marketing/
OpenAI introduced a long-form question-answering AI called ChatGPT that answers complex questions conversationally.
It’s a revolutionary technology because it’s trained to learn what humans mean when they ask a question.
Many users are awed at its ability to provide human-quality responses, inspiring the feeling that it may eventually have the power to disrupt how humans interact with computers and change how information is retrieved.
What Is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is a large language model chatbot developed by OpenAI based on GPT-3.5. It has a remarkable ability to interact in conversational dialogue form and provide responses that can appear surprisingly human.
Large language models perform the task of predicting the next word in a series of words.
Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) is an additional layer of training that uses human feedback to help ChatGPT learn the ability to follow directions and generate responses that are satisfactory to humans.
Who Built ChatGPT?
ChatGPT was created by San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company OpenAI. OpenAI Inc. is the non-profit parent company of the for-profit OpenAI LP.
OpenAI is famous for its well-known DALL·E, a deep-learning model that generates images from text instructions called prompts.
The CEO is Sam Altman, who previously was president of Y Combinator.
Microsoft is a partner and investor in the amount of $1 billion dollars. They jointly developed the Azure AI Platform.
Large Language Models
ChatGPT is a large language model (LLM). Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained with massive amounts of data to accurately predict what word comes next in a sentence.
It was discovered that increasing the amount of data increased the ability of the language models to do more.
According to Stanford University:
“GPT-3 has 175 billion parameters and was trained on 570 gigabytes of text. For comparison, its predecessor, GPT-2, was over 100 times smaller at 1.5 billion parameters.
This increase in scale drastically changes the behavior of the model — GPT-3 is able to perform tasks it was not explicitly trained on, like translating sentences from English to French, with few to no training examples.
This behavior was mostly absent in GPT-2. Furthermore, for some tasks, GPT-3 outperforms models that were explicitly trained to solve those tasks, although in other tasks it falls short.”
LLMs predict the next word in a series of words in a sentence and the next sentences – kind of like autocomplete, but at a mind-bending scale.
This ability allows them to write paragraphs and entire pages of content.
But LLMs are limited in that they don’t always understand exactly what a human wants.
And that’s where ChatGPT improves on state of the art, with the aforementioned Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) training.
How Was ChatGPT Trained?
GPT-3.5 was trained on massive amounts of data about code and information from the internet, including sources like Reddit discussions, to help ChatGPT learn dialogue and attain a human style of responding.
ChatGPT was also trained using human feedback (a technique called Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback) so that the AI learned what humans expected when they asked a question. Training the LLM this way is revolutionary because it goes beyond simply training the LLM to predict the next word.
A March 2022 research paper titled Training Language Models to Follow Instructions with Human Feedback explains why this is a breakthrough approach:
“This work is motivated by our aim to increase the positive impact of large language models by training them to do what a given set of humans want them to do.
By default, language models optimize the next word prediction objective, which is only a proxy for what we want these models to do.
Our results indicate that our techniques hold promise for making language models more helpful, truthful, and harmless.
Making language models bigger does not inherently make them better at following a user’s intent.
For example, large language models can generate outputs that are untruthful, toxic, or simply not helpful to the user.
In other words, these models are not aligned with their users.”
The engineers who built ChatGPT hired contractors (called labelers) to rate the outputs of the two systems, GPT-3 and the new InstructGPT (a “sibling model” of ChatGPT).
Based on the ratings, the researchers came to the following conclusions:
“Labelers significantly prefer InstructGPT outputs over outputs from GPT-3.
InstructGPT models show improvements in truthfulness over GPT-3.
InstructGPT shows small improvements in toxicity over GPT-3, but not bias.”
The research paper concludes that the results for InstructGPT were positive. Still, it also noted that there was room for improvement.
“Overall, our results indicate that fine-tuning large language models using human preferences significantly improves their behavior on a wide range of tasks, though much work remains to be done to improve their safety and reliability.”
What sets ChatGPT apart from a simple chatbot is that it was specifically trained to understand the human intent in a question and provide helpful, truthful, and harmless answers.
Because of that training, ChatGPT may challenge certain questions and discard parts of the question that don’t make sense.
Another research paper related to ChatGPT shows how they trained the AI to predict what humans preferred.
The researchers noticed that the metrics used to rate the outputs of natural language processing AI resulted in machines that scored well on the metrics, but didn’t align with what humans expected.
The following is how the researchers explained the problem:
“Many machine learning applications optimize simple metrics which are only rough proxies for what the designer intends. This can lead to problems, such as YouTube recommendations promoting click-bait.”
So the solution they designed was to create an AI that could output answers optimized to what humans preferred.
To do that, they trained the AI using datasets of human comparisons between different answers so that the machine became better at predicting what humans judged to be satisfactory answers.
The paper shares that training was done by summarizing Reddit posts and also tested on summarizing news.
The research paper from February 2022 is called Learning to Summarize from Human Feedback.
The researchers write:
“In this work, we show that it is possible to significantly improve summary quality by training a model to optimize for human preferences.
We collect a large, high-quality dataset of human comparisons between summaries, train a model to predict the human-preferred summary, and use that model as a reward function to fine-tune a summarization policy using reinforcement learning.”
What are the Limitations of ChatGPT?
Limitations on Toxic Response
ChatGPT is specifically programmed not to provide toxic or harmful responses. So it will avoid answering those kinds of questions.
Quality of Answers Depends on Quality of Directions
An important limitation of ChatGPT is that the quality of the output depends on the quality of the input. In other words, expert directions (prompts) generate better answers.
Answers Are Not Always Correct
Another limitation is that because it is trained to provide answers that feel right to humans, the answers can trick humans that the output is correct.
Many users discovered that ChatGPT can provide incorrect answers, including some that are wildly incorrect.
The moderators at the coding Q&A website Stack Overflow may have discovered an unintended consequence of answers that feel right to humans.
Stack Overflow was flooded with user responses generated from ChatGPT that appeared to be correct, but a great many were wrong answers.
The thousands of answers overwhelmed the volunteer moderator team, prompting the administrators to enact a ban against any users who post answers generated from ChatGPT.
The flood of ChatGPT answers resulted in a post entitled: Temporary policy: ChatGPT is banned:
“This is a temporary policy intended to slow down the influx of answers and other content created with ChatGPT.
…The primary problem is that while the answers which ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically “look like” they “might” be good…”
The experience of Stack Overflow moderators with wrong ChatGPT answers that look right is something that OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, are aware of and warned about in their announcement of the new technology.
OpenAI Explains Limitations of ChatGPT
The OpenAI announcement offered this caveat:
“ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers.
Fixing this issue is challenging, as:
(1) during RL training, there’s currently no source of truth;
(2) training the model to be more cautious causes it to decline questions that it can answer correctly; and
(3) supervised training misleads the model because the ideal answer depends on what the model knows, rather than what the human demonstrator knows.”
Is ChatGPT Free To Use?
The use of ChatGPT is currently free during the “research preview” time.
The chatbot is currently open for users to try out and provide feedback on the responses so that the AI can become better at answering questions and to learn from its mistakes.
The official announcement states that OpenAI is eager to receive feedback about the mistakes:
“While we’ve made efforts to make the model refuse inappropriate requests, it will sometimes respond to harmful instructions or exhibit biased behavior.
We’re using the Moderation API to warn or block certain types of unsafe content, but we expect it to have some false negatives and positives for now.
We’re eager to collect user feedback to aid our ongoing work to improve this system.”
There is currently a contest with a prize of $500 in ChatGPT credits to encourage the public to rate the responses.
“Users are encouraged to provide feedback on problematic model outputs through the UI, as well as on false positives/negatives from the external content filter which is also part of the interface.
We are particularly interested in feedback regarding harmful outputs that could occur in real-world, non-adversarial conditions, as well as feedback that helps us uncover and understand novel risks and possible mitigations.
You can choose to enter the ChatGPT Feedback Contest3 for a chance to win up to $500 in API credits.
Entries can be submitted via the feedback form that is linked in the ChatGPT interface.”
Will Language Models Replace Google Search?
Google itself has already created an AI chatbot that is called LaMDA. The performance of Google’s chatbot was so close to a human conversation that a Google engineer claimed that LaMDA was sentient.
Given how these large language models can answer so many questions, is it far-fetched that a company like OpenAI, Google, or Microsoft would one day replace traditional search with an AI chatbot?
Some on Twitter are already declaring that ChatGPT will be the next Google.
The scenario that a question-and-answer chatbot may one day replace Google is frightening to those who make a living as search marketing professionals.
It has sparked discussions in online search marketing communities, like the popular Facebook SEOSignals Lab where someone asked if searches might move away from search engines and towards chatbots.
Having tested ChatGPT, I have to agree that the fear of search being replaced with a chatbot is not unfounded.
The technology still has a long way to go, but it’s possible to envision a hybrid search and chatbot future for search.
But the current implementation of ChatGPT seems to be a tool that, at some point, will require the purchase of credits to use.
How Can ChatGPT Be Used?
ChatGPT can write code, poems, songs, and even short stories in the style of a specific author.
The expertise in following directions elevates ChatGPT from an information source to a tool that can be asked to accomplish a task.
This makes it useful for writing an essay on virtually any topic.
ChatGPT can function as a tool for generating outlines for articles or even entire novels.
It will provide a response for virtually any task that can be answered with written text.
Conclusion
As previously mentioned, ChatGPT is envisioned as a tool that the public will eventually have to pay to use.
Over a million users have registered to use ChatGPT within the first five days since it was opened to the public.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/what-is-chatgpt/473664/#close
How can I use ChatGPT for marketing?
I’ve been advising on digital marketing and new innovations for over 25 years. Since it was called Internet Marketing… This tends to make you super cynical as to new claims about marketing innovations. Over this time, many of the techniques for digital marketing and approaches to planning digital marketing strategies and campaigns have remained similar.
Much Martech now promises to be be ‘AI-powered’ while still relying on manual analysis and customizations. In fact, I’d say that it’s the development of search and social media platforms that have been the main drivers of change. Until now, that is...
Having tested ChatGPT, I believe it will spark mainstream adoption of AI amongst marketers, since it will be used as a practical tool to support creative development to help marketers working on search, email and social media marketing.
I won’t explain the technology behind ChatGPT, if you’re looking for an introduction, I recommend this overview of ChatGPT from Search Engine Journal. In essence, it is a free (for now) conversational SaaS AI chatbot that understands the intent of complex, specific questions and potentially produces human-quality responses.
You'll see from my examples that you type in a question and it responds with an answer, remembering the context from previous questions. For more channel specific marketing tips, you can read more about my top 8 recommended prompts for using ChatGPT for digital marketing.
Latest ChatGPT developments for marketing - 20th April 2023 update
Since I originally wrote this article on Using ChatGPT for marketing just after it launched, there has been a whirlwind of developments from OpenAI and their partners. For marketers who are busy with their day job, this can be bewildering and you can miss some of the key developments, so I have summarized some of the main developments in a brief timeline of the latest ChatGPT developments . These include:
- 1 ChatGPT features integrated into Microsoft Bing
- 2 New Open AI business services and upgrades including GPT–4, Plugins for ChatGPT, ChatGPT Plus
- 3 The AutoGPT agent
- 4 Privacy limitations of ChatGPT
- 5 Launch of Bard and Maji project by Google
- 6 Increased usage of other AI writing tools for marketing
Members can read about other ‘need-to-know’ key digital marketing developments in our regularly updated latest Digital Media updates tracker.
How many marketers are using ChatGPT?
Our recent LinkedIn survey found that more than three-quarters of marketers want to use ChatGPT to improve their marketing performance, but only 40% are actively doing so right now.
Sometimes, it can be difficult to know where to start. That's why we've created a Quick Win for Smart Insights Business Members to rapidly review and assess new ChatGPT opportunities in 2023: How to use ChatGPT for marketing.
This guide is for anyone looking to learn more about ChatGPT, but would be particularly useful for marketers executing or managing channel specialisms. E.g., Content marketers, social media marketers, SEO specialists or strategists, etc. to learn how you could use the AI chatbot collaboratively to improve efficiency in your team, in less than 20 minutes.
There are many potential applications for AI in marketing, but it hasn't yet delivered on its promise
Following the November 30th 2022 launch of Chat GPT from Open AI and the hype that has followed since, my cynical filter was set to maximum. After all, at Smart Insights, we’ve been writing about the uses of AI in marketing for years - see our 2017 summary for how AI can support marketing from Rob Allen and I where we summarized these applications of AI across the customer lifecycle. ChatGPT is in the chatbot category supporting the Convert/Engage part of the RACE customer lifecycle.
15 marketing applications of Artificial Intelligence (2017)
Since this time, the use of AI in marketing hasn’t become as widespread as might be expected. This is based on research with our members over the last few years. For example, our recent report on marketing automation practices showed that just 13% were using AI and machine learning for marketing at the time of the survey. Close to one-third of respondents (38%) are planning to deploy within 12 months, which shows that many businesses are looking to exploit the benefits of AI.
However, half (49%) of businesses still have no plans to implement AI or machine learning to support their marketing. Sure, some large businesses with resources for business insights teams have developed in-house machine learning tools to improve analysis and targeting of customers, but it’s not a mainstream tool according to our research. Its main adoption has been by advertisers who use Google and Meta’s tools to improve their targeting and and ROI, but who aren’t knowingly applying AI to their businesses.
Still, the initial growth rate shared OpenAI’s co-founder is impressive, so I tried to keep an open mind…
They haven't tweeted any updates, but I'd imagine they're in the tens even hundreds of millions by now. Some are talking about a $30 billion value for OpenAI.
Starting with a simple question
So, onto my test, an obvious test for me to understand and explain how ChatGPT could be used by marketers was to use it to write this article. But first, I thought I’d put it through its paces by asking it about what I’ve been advising about all these years. Here’s how it went…
Signing up is simple and free and gives you access to a conversational interface. I started by asking ‘What is digital marketing?’…
Like many, it treats digital in isolation, rather than looking at integration with physical channels.
Let’s make it more specific...
We’re about helping marketers use a more strategic approach to their digital marketing, so that question was next up…
Again, it’s a plausible answer, referencing allocation of resources to meets goals, which could be used to introduce a student assignment on the topic. It’s not perfect though, seemingly confusing overall strategy with digital marketing campaigns and not referencing the importance of investing in always-on or lifecycle communications. The relationship to marketing fundamentals, like segmentation, targeting and brand positioning aren’t covered which is a major omission.
How to structure a digital marketing strategy
OK, let’s make it more practical, many of our members turn to us to help in structuring a digital marketing campaigns and plans. So next I asked ‘how to structure’ a plan…
I was surprised and even flattered that the response referenced Smart Insights… One of the weaknesses of AI is that often the source of the reasoning isn’t explained, so this is helpful, but link(s) to sources and reasoning would be more so. This would be an obvious improvement to ChatGPT. Here the structure and the definition given isn’t our standard recommendation using RACE and misses some aspects like marketplace analysis.
Show me an example?
We’ve also found that examples are really useful for explaining how to create digital marketing strategies. We provide many examples for different industries in our templates. How does ChatGPT do here?
Wow! This is an impressive and useful example, particularly if you’re structuring your own plan, since you can ask for your sector.
Can ChatGPT replicate a discussion between a digital marketing consultant and a client?
This example is for an SME and is reminiscent of a recent conversation that I had with the marketing manager of Upbeat Clean, an ethical office cleaning business based in Derby. So, I decided to continue with an evolution of the conversation which was similar to what I had with the owner of the business. In developing our resources for Smart Insights such as our marketing playbooks and templates, I’ve always looked to follow a model of providing guidance by specifying and prompting the questions marketers should be asking to get more performance from resources available, so I love that this tool can mimic a Q&A approach to improve marketing results, albeit dependent on the quality of the training data.
Like for many, the company I was working with was resource and budget was limited, so I asked the AI how the plan could be modified since budget was limited budget…
The highlighted advice is similar to what I would give, to ‘double down’ on co-marketing.
For the business in question, local marketing getting featured in Google My Business for people looking for services in a location was particularly useful, so I thought I’d check whether the AI could deduce this.
It did… impressive. Local SEO with GMB was top of the list. A tool like this is like having your own personal consultant…
I thought I’d test it further by asking specifically about local SEO…
Again, lots of simple practical suggestions similar to those I recommended to the not-for-profit I was working with (which worked for them to improve rankings). OK, you could find these from a blog post, but you’d have to find a suitable one first.
Of course with a consultant, you’re paying for their experience and knowledge of tools to help too, so finally, I thought I’d ask about tools to support the local marketing process…
Impressive that the tools I would recommend are there, with details on specific local SEO modules. Some links and reviews would be useful.
What are the weaknesses of ChatGPT?
Many have criticized the lack of rigour of the answers from ChatGPT as shown by the Search Journal article I referenced at the beginning. For example,
If you can’t trust the answers, how can you still use the tool? I think the examples I have shown show, that you can still use the service, you simply have to apply your own experience and knowledge in the same way you do when reviewing Google’s results.
Clearly trust is the biggest weakness since unlike Google, you don’t know the source of the information, you can’t judge based on the type of site or the experience of the author. Google’s system of basing quality on the number of citations of an article isn’t in place. Further research is going to be needed and this will take time, so people will still return to trusted sources and expertise.
Google is also superior in providing different types of results for different types of intent, certain results highlight images or video for example. These visual tools are important to learning yet ChatGPT doesn’t incorporate these… yet. Interestingly, Open AI has created DALL·E, an AI to create Images from Text. I’m not sure of the marketing applications of an armchair in the shape of an avocado…
I didn’t follow though on my intention to structure this article using ChatGPT since it didn’t understand the intent in my question. However, it did respond with a nice summary of the typical applications of chatbots. The quality of ChatGPT responses shows there is still potential in all these applications, but many other providers have failed to deliver this level of accuracy based on my many failed interactions with chatbots!
But ultimately, it didn’t create a usable structure for this article.
Despite this, I defy you to sign up and not be impressed by the answers you receive a range of topics related to your personal or work interests.
Certainly, Google are reported to be panicking, it’s understandable. According to the New York Times, The new chatbot is a ‘Code Red’ for Google’s Search business. According to the NYT, Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, has been involved in a series of meetings to define Google’s AI strategy, and he has upended the work of numerous groups inside the company to respond to the threat that ChatGPT poses.
In a move competitive to Google, Microsoft has also announced an intention to integrate ChatGPT into Bing by March, it will be interesting to see how this develops.
I think it’s also unlikely to remain free. This is a research preview option only and I think others will pay for it. Still there will be free competitors in the future, but how will we compare them?
What are the implications for marketing?
At a practical level, I think success in digital marketing requires three factors to succeed in communicating with your audience, that is, to provide relevance and value and to change the way they think. I think any marketer who is involved with devising communications for website, social media, or email marketing and then spending copywriting can potentially benefit from ChatGPT by becoming more productive AND producing better quality copy. Not by slavishly using the answers ChatGPT produces, but using it to prompt and improve upon your approach and to iterate on it. This is regardless of their experience and the size and type of company they work in. It’s a great supporting tool to evolve your knowledge, to ‘learning by doing’, aka experiential learning. If you believe in lifelong learning it can support anyone.
It will also be disruptive in that in time it offers an alternative model for learning about topics. We all love Google, and through its efforts to apply AI already, it delivers great relevance, but it can be hard work, we have to sift through multiple links to pages that vary in quality. Every day, my search history shows me I visit hundreds of sites… there has to be a better way and there is massive potential for Google and others to improve relevance further by offering a different model of results delivery. Still, I don’t think Google’s ad revenue model is at immediate threat since Chat GPT doesn’t cover brands, products and services as well as Google and there is no linking model.
The quality of its interaction and output also raises much bigger questions about education and healthcare. It will change the way these and many other services are delivered which has only so far been hinted at by previous attempts at Chatbots.
How can ChatGPT be used for working on marketing activities like search email, social media?
We’re already seeing many examples of how output from ChatGPT can be used to create copy and for keyword analysis. In my next article, I recommend the best prompts for using ChatGPT for digital marketing. I’ll look at lots of examples since having the experience to ask the right questions and use their creativity to create an article is still important thankfully! For now.
The use cases I will cover include:
- Keyword analysis for SEO
- Content marketing ideation
- Copywriting / optimization for organic search and PPC
- Email marketing
- Summarising market research
- Writing product descriptions for E-commerce
How many marketers are using ChatGPT?
Our recent LinkedIn survey found that more than three-quarters of marketers want to use ChatGPT to improve their marketing performance, but only 40% are actively doing so right now.
Sometimes, it can be difficult to know where to start. That's why we've created a Quick Win for Smart Insights Business Members to rapidly review and assess new ChatGPT opportunities in 2023.
This guide is for anyone looking to learn more about ChatGPT, but would be particularly useful for marketers executing or managing channel specialisms. E.g., Content marketers, social media marketers, SEO specialists or strategists, etc. to learn how you could use the AI chatbot collaboratively to improve efficiency in your team, in less than 20 minutes.
By Dave Chaffey
https://www.smartinsights.com/