15. How to use ChatGPT to create content for your marketing

Introduction

Episode Transcript

We've seen how AI is already impacting sales and marketing, but the question still remains. How do you use it in real life? Creating content that really hits the spot and connects with your audience is a challenge, even when it's written by an expert copywriter. So is it really possible to create captivating stories and persuasive copy using AI alone? Or are our jobs safe for a little while longer? In today's episode, we take a deep dive into ChatGPT and we see exactly how it can help you create marketing content and where the skills of an expert marketer are still required. For those that are fearful of AI, this isn't a story of doom and gloom. But beware, our jobs are definitely going to change. Let's get started. Hi everyone and welcome to the Authentic Marketing Podcast in association with Demodia. I'm your host Simon Harvey and as always I'm joined by my co host Daniel Klaiber. Hi there Daniel.

Hello Simon. And hello listeners, it's great to be back again. It's

good to have you here and good to have everyone back again. So Daniel, last week we talked quite a bit about AI tools for marketers on the podcast. And we're talking about how they help marketing people to automate and simplify their work. And today though, I want to spend a little bit more time talking in more detail about one of those tools in particular, one of your favorites, I think inside there. So, you know, we talked about ChatGPT last time, so I want to focus a little bit more on that. Um, I know many of our listeners out there have found themselves overwhelmed by the myriad of things that they can do with that. You know, there's just way too much stuff that you can do, way too many things, and they've got no idea where to start or how best to use it, basically. So in today's episode, I want to go through and look in a lot more detail about how ChatGPT can be used for some specific use cases, basically.

Well, that sounds good to me. I know many of you listening out there don't have the time to sit there and write content day after day, but ChatGPT, That is hopefully soon going to be a problem of the past. Natural language processing and machine learning have made significant improvements in recent years. So it really is now possible to use AI for real content creation. Cool.

So, uh, yeah, maybe we can spend a bit of time talking specifically about ChatGPT then. You talked about this idea of content creation, creating content. Maybe you could tell us a little bit more about how we do that specifically then today. So what I'd really love to know is how we can create real world content, basically. So I've got a couple of examples that I wanted to spend some time going through together, which I think are things that most of our listeners do on a regular basis when we're creating campaigns. So number one is going through and creating emails. And then number two, perhaps we could look at how we could create something like a blog post or some related social posts that we can use, um, around that, you know, maybe we start with that first example, then how would one of our customers use something like ChatGPT to create emails that maybe you could talk us through, you know, the exact steps that you go through, because I know you use these tools for, for creating some of this content with us. So how do you go about doing that? You know, how do you prompt ChatGPT basically?

All right. Um, yeah. So first of all, it's important to tell JetGPT the purpose of your email. Like, what do you want to achieve with the mailing? Is it to sell something, to promote something, to sound like a personal email etc.? And the reason for this is so that it knows how it can optimize the outcome for your purpose. Then after that... It is time to provide ChatGPT with some background on your customer. You can explain to it things like demographics, purchase history, preferences, or engagement levels. For example, I can also tell it whether I want the email to be formal or informal, and it will adapt the text to that. Also, if you want, you can give it some background material to base the email on. For example, you can give it some old texts that you've created in the past in order. For it to learn how you word things and make it sound more like you, if you want it to be based off a blog, for example, you might give that to chat GPT as well. And then finally, I tell her what I want it to write about. It might be something like write me an invite to a webinar or create me something to promote this blog. It's really up to you. Once that's done, it will go off and write

your email. That sounds quite promising, then, in terms of what you can do in there. So, from your experience, then, you know, how have you found those results to be? Are they something that's useful straight away? Um, you know, you can just basically take them and use them as they stand? Or how much do you find that you need to go through and manually fix up those things once you've got the content?

You shouldn't be relying fully on what you get out of ChitGPT. It's always important to review and edit what you get because it's not going to be perfect. It's just going to give you something that goes in the right direction, but it still requires your expertise to finish the

content. Cool. So I think one thing that we can do, you just remind me actually in the show notes at the end of this, we can put in a document that describes the process that you've just gone through. So then when people want, they can follow along for themselves. You know, what we'll put into there is the prompts that you use. Uh, and we'll give an example of some texts that people can download those and follow through your example yourself and actually set up, you know, that webinar invite email. Yeah. So moving onwards a bit, um, looking at some other things, you know, you've got your email that you've just written now, that webinar invite that's out there. Another example that I mentioned at the beginning might be a blog post then in there. A lot of people tend to follow a similar sort of process when they're writing a blog post, and maybe they'll create then a couple of social posts. Again, maybe you can give us some ideas of how you go about creating that stuff.

Well, I would take the same approach as I would do with the email. The only difference is before I tell ChatGPT to write the blog post for me, I would tell it to gather information. I would tell it to ask me a set of questions that it needs to know the answers to in order to make my blog post as individual and personalized. As it

can be. So by that you mean you can actually ask it questions or get it to ask you questions rather in that sense? Exactly, yes. Okay, I didn't realize you could do that.

You can tell it to ask you to gather all the really important information that it needs so it can create a blog post that exactly matches your purposes. It will then ask you 10 to 20 questions and you just answer those in as much detail as possible. The key thing in here is to give as much information as you can, and the more information you give to ChatGPT, the better the result will be. As always, yeah. Um, if it hasn't already asked you, then you can give it the same demographic and style information as we did for the email before. And also, if you have some recent blog ChatGPT. So ChatGPT knows your writing style and wording, and it sounds more like something that you have created. If you want, you can also add criteria for things like the text length, the language, and so on, then ChatGPT will generate the post for you. Cool.

So the way that you go about sort of describing that, it sounds a little bit like you're trying to give a creative brief to an agency or a freelancer or something like that. Exactly, yeah. So, it's exactly like you're working with a real person, you're trying to prompt them how to do a blog post. So, basically, you know, you're describing the writing style that you want to that person, you know, the length of the post, um, audience, sorts of topics you want to cover. You're giving them some ideas what they can talk about on that, some of the background bits in there. Maybe you're, you're highlighting to them a specific call to action or something that you want to make at the end of it then. So yeah, it's, um, it's basically meaning ChatGPT is becoming your, your freelance writer at the end of the day, by the sounds of that. Exactly.

Yes. Uh, you can actually imagine ChatGPT like an employee. Yeah. Sounds like it. So you just tell it what to do and it does things for you. Um, the only difference to an employee is that. It has unlimited resources and general knowledge. So it knows basically

about everything. Oh, I wouldn't necessarily say that. We'll see. It does sound promising though, definitely. So how about things like limitations? I mean, I joke about unlimited knowledge in there, but I'm sure it's knowledge is limited, basically. You know, is there anything in particular that our listeners need to be aware of? When they're using ChatGPT for creating any of their content.

Yes, unfortunately, there are some

limitations. Uh huh, there's always some things, always a catch

there. Firstly, it can only provide you with a text up to around 800 words in the free version. Some of these limits are removed if you pay. And it only has a training database with data up to until 2021. Unlike what some people may think, it doesn't have access to any real time data. Another thing to watch for is that it does have a habit of making

things up. Oh, that's never good. Especially if you're trying to trust these

things. Uh, there have already been a couple of well publicized cases where ChatGPT has made up statements that people didn't really say and also in one instance a lawyer used it for his research and it created a set of fake court cases that were then stated in trial.

Yep. Yeah, I did hear about that one. That's absolutely crazy. I mean, I bet there's got to be a couple of red faces there. Um, yeah, I mean, it really does go to show that you've got to take care basically about taking everything verbatim that you're told from these tools, you really need to read through things and, and fact check stuff. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. From my own experience of, of working with chatGPT and I've used it a little bit, maybe not quite as much as you. But I've tend to found it best to download the data that it produces or download the copy that it produces and put it into something like a word document. And then the first thing I do is to start by reading it through and saying, you know, does anything sound a bit odd inside here? You know, can I really trust what's inside there? So do your fact checks, as I say, and then the key thing is basically adding in your own knowledge. I think, you know, you've got to add in your knowledge, your spin on things. You know, you're the industry expert, not chat GPT in this instance. And that's something I think everyone's got to remember here. So play that role and add in the things that only you know, you know, add in your unique experiences. And I know I've said this to you before, Daniel, but I really think that, you know, this current idea of hiring cheap writers basically to create boilerplate content is very much on its way out. It's pretty much dead, I think, and ChatGPT and similar AI tools, they've really taken over this role already. You know, they're going to have that completely sorted out in the next year or so, I would reckon, and anybody doing that, you know, needs to be on the watch out. As marketers, though, I don't think we have to worry too much, you know, I think we're going to see our jobs changing, but our job now isn't the content writer, it's to be the expert editor, basically, um, you know, I think we're going to take on this idea of taking that basic outline, much as we might have done from this sort of freelancer in the past, uh, and turning it into a masterpiece, you know, that's what our job is going to be, so Yeah, I think it's going to be a change, but personally, I think I find it really exciting. It's a good area to follow. It's going to be an interesting area to work in in the next couple of years, and I really can't wait to see what's coming up over

there. Yes, I'm looking

forward to it. Cool. So, that said, I think we're drawing to the end of our time now. Thanks once again for joining us, Daniel, and for sharing your insights

today. No worries. Thank you for having

me. Thanks for sharing that with us, Daniel. It was great to get some concrete examples of how you can create content in the real world and to hear how as marketers we need to prepare ourselves for what's to come. There's a couple of key takeaways I think from this conversation for me. Firstly, I must say that I didn't know you could actually get ChatGPT to prompt you the things that it wants to know in order to help you. Um, so yeah, give it a try. You just ask it to give you 10 questions that it needs to be answered in order to write your blog post and it's going to prompt you with exactly what it is. You know, it's as simple as that. It's quite impressive really. Second, and probably the most valuable point actually from this conversation though, was more around our role as marketers. I think there's a lot of people that are worried about marketing roles changing significantly or even some of our jobs being taken over. You know, it's true, chat GPT and similar AI tools are a faster and more efficient means to an end. You know, they can create content really quickly and they don't do it badly, but they're not a complete solution. You know, as marketers, the value that we add is going to change, and it's already changing. It's no longer going to be things like writing basic boilerplate copy. You know, I think our value is now two things, and we need to rethink about what our jobs are and make sure that we train ourselves up. Uh, you know, firstly, Knowing how to prompt these AI tools is absolutely essential. You know, you need to know how to prompt the AI tools to get the best results. And secondly, once you've got those results, you need to think about how you take the three quarters finished articles or whatever, and you edit them to create engaging original content. Now that need for original content is definitely not going to change. In fact, it's going to grow as things go forwards and everybody starts to think of AI as a cheap solution. So you're the person that needs to be in there. Editing the content and making it original, making it authentic and making it part of your brand. So if you're having problems working AI into your marketing process, or you need help to create prompts that will get you the best content, then you can hire an authentic engagement coach. Just go to Demodia. com to hire a coach that will show you how to increase the effectiveness of your sales and marketing and give you an easier way to grow your business. So at this point in each episode, I like to reflect on what we've discussed and turn that into a set of concrete actions that you can take to improve your sales and marketing. Today's action is simple. I want you to just go and give ChatGPT a try and create yourself a blog post. Firstly, think about what blog post you could create with the help of something like ChatGPT, then go in there and ask it to write it for you. You can use the prompts that we talked about. And try to create something that sounds like you wrote it. In the show notes, you'll find a document with a whole set of prompts that we use to create the start for some great content. Once you've created your blog, you know, you can then ask it to write an email, some social posts, an email headline, all of those sorts of things. It may sound easy enough, and it is easy to be honest, but you will take a bit of time to get used to it. You'll need to review the content and edit it to sound more like you, definitely. And as I said earlier, your job is to weave your story in there and make it sound unique. That's all then for today's episode of the Authentic Marketing Podcast. Thanks as always for listening. And if you've enjoyed this, don't forget to book the podcast and share it with your friends and colleagues. We love to share our knowledge with you and we hope that we can help your business succeed. See you next time.