How to use ChatGPT for content marketing
Will ChatGPT put copywriters out of work? What does AI do well and what does it do poorly? How should you set tasks and what should you do with successful, as well as unusable, answers? These and other questions are answered by the Head of Content in Octo Browser, Valeria Maksimchuk.
— I live on the internet and I love technology. That's why I closely follow the emergence and development of artificial intelligence. I started using ChatGPT almost from its earliest days.
Our product is an anti-detection browser that replaces a user's digital fingerprint, allowing them to create multiple accounts on various platforms like Google, Facebook, TikTok, and Amazon. It's complex and technologically advanced, and there is relatively little information available about its usage. Applying ChatGPT to create marketing materials for such a product is not easy. This article will be helpful for tech companies facing a similar challenge.
Bypassing the content filter
— ChatGPT may refuse to write on certain topics. It will filter out obviously suspicious requests about napalm recipes or a comprehensive list of English swear words, and also relatively harmless topics like anti-detection browsers. Specifically, ChatGPT's content filters prevent it from discussing 'hacker' topics, which is quite inconvenient in my case. Ironically, these filters can be easily bypassed. There are special prompts available, which can be found on Reddit or even created manually.
Defeating the fear of blank paper
— Anyone who hasn't spent half a day staring at a blank document in search of inspiration hasn't worked as a copywriter. ChatGPT solves this classic problem: you can provide it with any input, and the first lines will appear on the screen. Even if the quality is not great, the important thing is to start. A rhetorical question: in the future, will the fear of a blank page also extend to prompts for ChatGPT?
Taking only the best
— There are content marketing tasks that ChatGPT handles excellently. There are, however, tasks that it struggles with.
What doesn't work well?
- High-quality, unique content with deep expertise. The accuracy of information provided by ChatGPT varies, and there can be serious errors. A copywriter who writes on IT topics may not always have enough knowledge to identify them. Therefore, it is still advisable to write such materials with the assistance of an expert.
- Current topics. The GPT-3 model was trained on datasets collected until 2021, so it is not aware of the latest trends. However, it is possible to use the neural network for rewriting news, and it can produce satisfactory results.
What works well?
- Rewriting. If you need to make a text unique, shorten it, or change its tone, ChatGPT can do this quickly and relatively accurately.
- Development of text structure.
- Preparation of SEO materials. ChatGPT can process, translate, and optimize text for SEO, remove repetitions, add keywords, and increase uniqueness. However, it is not possible to completely eliminate manual work. Algorithms that check text uniqueness are already capable of recognizing AI-generated text. However, this limitation can also be bypassed: manually identify the parts of the text that are flagged as non-unique and use ChatGPT to rewrite them again.
- Generation of article topics. Simply provide some information about a company's work specifics, and the chat will offer numerous options of varying quality. It's just a matter of selecting the best ones.
Providing more context
— At the very beginning of working with ChatGPT, I tried to write a script for a commercial using its assistance. After overcoming the content filter and seeing the initial responses, I felt as if I had found the Holy Grail and could now automate the creation of ideas, scripts, and all other marketing materials. The euphoria continued until I delved into the quality of the content, and realized that editing or even completely rewriting the documents would require almost as much time as creating the materials from scratch.
The initial prompts sounded something like: "Script for a 30-second commercial for Product X, which solves problems X, Y, Z." The output was a complete chaos of words and meanings, but in a very concise form and with the right structure. The problem was that the chat didn't understand the function of our product and it provided irrelevant information. Without proper explanation, it was difficult for it to write about the technologies, so this approach turned out to be useless for our specific product.
To get ChatGPT to generate a functional script, you can try the following:
- Ask it to write the script from the perspective of a specific character, such as Ogilvy or other copywriting experts. It will be able to handle that.
- Clearly define the product's characteristics for advertising and showcase its marketing qualities: unique features, application sphere, and target audience.
- Specify the duration of the commercial and clarify whether scene descriptions are needed or just voiceover. By using this approach, the obtained result can be refined by removing jargon and making minor edits.
Assigning roles
— An interesting observation: if you ask the chat to embody the role of a creator-copywriter from the 1960s-1970s and request that it first outline the key principles of creating an effective commercial, it performs well in this task. I won't delve into the details of role-playing prompts, as many posts have already covered that. It is definitely worth considering this setting, however, and not disregarding its importance.
Creating variants and iterating
— Writing multiple variations of the same text for a human may be considered agonizing. For ChatGPT, it's just another Monday. In order to create a slogan for our company, I provided the chat with a prompt that included the target audience, word count, presence of a sub-slogan, unique product characteristics, as well as the number of variations and the degree of their differentiation from each other. In response, the chat offered me numerous options to choose from. Approximately 70% of them turned out to be useless, but the remaining 30% provided insights and formulations that could be adapted and utilized. In the next stage, when the direction of the slogan was already determined, ChatGPT proved useful for fine-tuning the stylistic details, with the assistance of the role-playing technique mentioned earlier.
— Will I use ChatGPT in my work? Yes. Will ChatGPT replace copywriters? No. It won't do all the work for copywriters and write a unique script. It will, however, reduce the time spent on writing and editing texts, and it will also simplify the development of ideas. For me, ChatGPT has become a junior assistant. I am confident that, in the future, the ability to write prompts and work with AI will become the norm for every specialist in any field.