Increasingly, it’s hard to talk about marketing without mentioning artificial intelligence (AI) and ChatGPT. This innovative tool has quickly become a hot topic as we discover how it can transform our industry.
While talking about AI can spark questions and ideas, experimenting with tools like ChatGPT will give you a better sense of how it can help you work more efficiently.
In this post, we’ll explore how to use ChatGPT for email and social media marketing copy and provide tips to get the most out of this tool.
Let’s start with some definitions.
What is ChatGPT and how does it work?
ChatGPT is an AI chatbot that generates human-like responses to questions and prompts. OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public in November 2022, drawing millions of users to experiment with the tool. In fact, according to the most recent data, ChatGPT has over 100 million users.
To understand the tool a little better, I asked ChatGPT how it works. Here’s the answer it generated:
“ChatGPT is based on the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) architecture developed by OpenAI. GPT is a deep learning model that uses a Transformer neural network to generate human-like text responses. It has been trained on a large corpus of text data to learn patterns and relationships between words and sentences.”
It goes on to explain that the model trains on a massive amount of data from the internet to learn to predict the next word in a sentence using the context of previous words. Then, human reviewers help fine-tune the model to improve its performance.
When you interact with ChatGPT, it takes your input, such as a question or writing prompt, processes it through its neural network, and produces an output or response. It can help with various tasks, like copywriting, creating resumes and cover letters, writing code, planning trips, and much more.
However, there’s a major caveat. Here’s how ChatGPT explained it:
“It’s important to note that ChatGPT’s responses are generated based on patterns it has learned from the training data. While it can provide useful and coherent answers, it may also generate incorrect or nonsensical responses in some cases. It’s always a good idea to verify the information provided by ChatGPT with reliable sources.”
That means I had to fact-check ChatGPT’s explanation of how it works. We’ll talk more about how to work with this limitation below.
How to use ChatGPT for marketing copy
Let’s get a crucial point out of the way: ChatGPT can’t replace you as an email or social media marketer. Your understanding of the nuances of your business or industry are paramount to creating valuable content that helps achieve your goals.
However, ChatGPT can help you generate ideas and give you a starting point for marketing copy. This can be especially useful if you work with a small team or on tight deadlines.
As you become familiar with how ChatGPT creates content, you’ll get a better idea of how to use it to write marketing copy, like emails and social media posts. Here are 7 tips to get started:
1. Write a detailed prompt
It takes practice and experimentation to find prompts that result in the most helpful ChatGPT answers. Generally, the more detailed the prompt, the better the result. Let’s take a look at some examples.
In this prompt, I asked ChatGPT: “Can you write an email promoting a summer block party for a brewery? The event is on July 7 in Denver, Colorado.”
ChatGPT generated a lengthy email with a formal tone, making up a lot of details since I didn’t provide many.
For the next prompt, I added more detail about the event and a desired email length: “Can you write an email promoting a summer block party for a brewery? The event is on July 7 in Denver, Colorado. The event highlights are beer tasting flights, beer and food pairings, live music, and lawn games. The tone should be informal and fun. Please limit the email to 200 words.”
That’s more like it.
In this version, the tone is more engaging and friendly. For example, while the first email started with “Dear [Recipient’s Name],” this version opens with “Hey there, beer enthusiasts!” And this time, the email includes the event highlights I provided rather than made-up ones.
ChatGPT’s email might not be perfect, and it’s a little longer than I requested, but it provides a good first draft I can edit and optimize.
2. Ask follow-up questions to repurpose content
One of the great features of ChatGPT is you can ask follow-up questions because it remembers the context of your conversation. This can save you a lot of time when repurposing content for various channels.
Continuing with the previous example, now that we have the event email copy, let’s ask ChatGPT to condense the information for a social media post. Since it already knows what we’re talking about, I don’t need to provide the details again.
My prompt was: “Condense this into a short caption for an Instagram post.”
ChatGPT turned the 300-word email into a 41-word post, including emojis and hashtags suitable for the channel. Again, the result may not be perfect, but it saves time and provides a good start for social media captions.
3. Generate subject lines
Subject lines may be short, but it can take a lot of brainstorming and wordsmithery to get them just right. This is another task ChatGPT can do for you.
Let’s keep going with our hypothetical brewery block party. Now, let’s ask ChatGPT to generate 5 subject lines with a 50-character limit for the email it just wrote. Here’s what it came up with:
The options ChatGPT generated follow subject line best practices, like keeping them short and creating a sense of urgency. All I need is to pick my favorite and make minor edits.
In this prompt, I didn’t give ChatGPT a lot of details because it can pull them from our previous conversation. But if you ask ChatGPT for subject lines only, provide specific details in your prompt or paste the content of the email for the best results.
4. Fact-check everything
As we mentioned earlier, ChatGPT’s output may sound convincing, but it’s not always accurate. That’s because the tool has a few limitations.
According to OpenAI, “ChatGPT is not connected to the internet, and it can occasionally produce incorrect answers. It has limited knowledge of world and events after 2021 and may also occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content.”
Additionally, ChatGPT doesn’t reveal its sources, even when you ask, because it doesn’t gather information from a single source like a search engine, such as Google.
To navigate these challenges, research and check every fact ChatGPT generates before including it in your final draft.
5. Don’t give ChatGPT private information
While ChatGPT can feel as helpful as a personal assistant, remember that your conversations with ChatGPT are not private.
As OpenAI explains, “As part of our commitment to safe and responsible AI, we review conversations to improve our systems and to ensure the content complies with our policies and safety requirements.” Additionally, “Your conversations may be reviewed by our AI trainers to improve our systems.”
Keep this in mind when writing your prompts, and avoid including sensitive personal information or nonpublic business information.
6. Optimize the copy using your creativity and expertise
ChatGPT may have a large data set to learn from, but it doesn’t have the experience and creativity that humans bring to the table. The model can generate a starting point for your marketing copy, but marketers’ ideas, research, and knowledge make the content unique.
This is all to say that once ChatGPT generates an output, tap into your expertise and creativity to turn it into marketing copy that reflects your company’s voice and engages your audience. After all, no one knows your audience better than your internal teams.
7. Perform A/B tests
The best way to find out if ChatGPT content helps your business is to perform A/B tests. For example, test elements like AI-generated subject lines and social media captions to learn if these generate engagement, clicks, or conversions.
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