Enhancing your marketing with ChatGPT

Yes, this is another article about ChatGPT.

But unlike other articles, this one doesn’t leave you wondering:

• What prompts should I use?
• What are the best use cases for me to start with?
• How does ChatGPT actually make a difference in marketing?

It has tangible information and actionable steps that make your day-to-day easier. Take it from someone who has implemented ChatGPT in his daily work and life, Devang Sachdev.

Devang has extensive marketing experience in hardware and software, working at giants like NVIDIA and Twilio. Currently, he’s the VP of Marketing at Snorkel, a data-centric AI platform powered by programmatic labeling and foundation models.

On the Performance Marketing Insiders podcast, Devang shared a number of ingenious ways he’s using ChatGPT to boost marketing productivity, from competitive intelligence to keyword research, to messaging. He even uses it to learn faster.

Piqued your curiosity? Let’s dive in.

What’s the difference between ChatGPT-3 and ChatGPT-4?

ChatGPT-3 is the older version of ChatGPT. It was trained on a 175 billion parameter model, with data points through 2021. ChatGPT-3 focuses on text-based input, meaning that you type in a prompt.

ChatGPT-4, the newest iteration of ChatGPT, can accept other input modalities. You could feed it columnary information or spatial relationships or even images.

One of the co-founders of OpenAI, Greg Bachman, fed ChatGPT-4 a hand-sketched drawing, and the model produced a working website.

This is called “crossmodal” understanding — the model is understanding the image and generating things related to the task, whether it’s more images, text, or a website.

ChatGPT-4 is trained on more recent, more pervasive data. But of course, training is always point-in-time. It takes retraining to keep the model current.

8 Ways to use ChatGPT

So, what is generative AI good for in marketing? Let’s explore four distinct ways you can use ChatGPT to level up your research, refine your messaging, get the most out of your content, and learn faster.

1. Market research

Marketers need to conduct market research to understand who their ideal customers and their competitors are. That way, they can position themselves the right way.

ChatGPT-4 is especially helpful in this activity. You can ask it the simple question, “who are the key players in [insert domain here] domain?”

From there, you can refine it based on your existing knowledge of a field. You can ask it to visit each competitor website and tell you how they are positioning themselves. What is their lead? What are their top five differentiators?

Another question that is sometimes even more insightful is, “what are this competitor’s shortcomings?” This can help you identify white space or gaps in the market.

An added bonus of using chatGPT in this way is that it builds trust — it’ll show you it knows your domain and will produce insights that are relevant to you. The more prompts you ask, the more contextual its responses will be.

2. Mystery shopping

ChatGPT is a great mirror. Asking it for the shortcomings on your website can reveal ways to improve that you may never have thought of before.

It’ll also show you what an average visitor’s takeaway will be. And if it’s not in line with what you want, you can fix it.

This technique is particularly useful if you’re making changes to the front end of your site, ensuring that it’s in tip-top shape.

Another way to apply this is in job-seeking and interview prep. If you’re thinking about moving into a marketing role at another company, asking ChatGPT to tell you about their strategy and sales funnel can help you think of questions to ask your interviewer.

But mystery shopping is an excellent best practice even if you’re not using ChatGPT. For example, Devang shared that he just added a chat capability to his company’s website. He pretended to be a prospect to see exactly how BDRs responded.

Another way might be filling out one of your web forms and seeing how long it takes for someone to call you back.

3. Keyword research

No matter how much you hate it or love it, SEO is a critical component of any modern marketer’s strategy. ChatGPT can help you accelerate your SEO strategy through keyword research.

Ask ChatGPT to give you a list of keywords related to your market or one of your competitors, broken down by search quality (i.e., high, medium, low). That will help you narrow your focus to the keywords you could capitalize on.

You can take this a step further, too.

Most SEO strategists know that developing content around search results FAQ pages is highly valuable.

So Devang asks ChatGPT for the FAQs associated with each keyword and to generate responses to those questions. Putting yourself in the mind of a prospect while using ChatGPT will get you better responses you can use in long or short-form content.

He also has fed ChatGPT company product pages and blogs and asked it to create FAQ-style content for his site. Devang’s team adds external information and formats it to be in line with the rest of his content.

The benefit of going this route is that he can ensure the output is based on his team’s existing content.

Note: The more technical your product is, the less effective ChatGPT will be at creating sophisticated content. Since it’s been trained on a limited dataset, asking it to go beyond FAQs or content summarization, or 101 content generation may require extra due diligence.

4. Content repurposing

Companies have a ton of content. Reusing and repurposing that content can get more eyeballs on your site and target more of the prospects you want.

One way to make this easier is to feed your content (think whitepapers, webinar transcripts, podcasts) into ChatGPT and ask it to create blog posts, LinkedIn posts, ad copy, or other short-form content.

5. Summarization

We’re all busy, and sometimes we don’t have the time or willpower to sift through information.

ChatGPT can make your life so much easier.

Say you ran a customer survey. You can feed ChatGPT the responses and ask it to summarize the positive and negative feedback.

You can feed it long emails or tweets. You can give ChatGPT meeting notes or long Zoom call transcripts and ask it to provide key takeaways, next steps, and agendas for your next meeting.

Devang says he even uses it to synthesize his 360-degree performance reviews. The possibilities are endless.

Note: One word of caution — don’t use ChatGPT to summarize anything you don’t want out in public. Theoretically, it could spit it back out in a context you don’t want it to be released in. Use ChatGPT through the API to keep your data more secure.

6. Borrow other people’s writing styles

This is an extension of number 5.

Say you’re asked to summarize a podcast transcript. You write your prompt, you paste in the transcript, and ask ChatGPT for a summary.

But at the end, you can include something like “in the words of Malcolm Gladwell” or whoever you want to mimic. A bonus of using this strategy is that it can help you learn how these people think and write.

As Devang says, “If I want to talk like Obama, I better start using some of his phrasing, right? That’s on my bucket list, maybe one day.”

7. Read books

Most popular books are widely available, and ChatGPT-4 understands them to some degree.

You can ask it what the book is about, which is great; you’ll get a good summary.

But you could also ask for a one-line summary of each chapter. If a chapter stands out to you, you can ask ChatGPT for more information.

Devang shares, “I used ChatGPT to read the book The Power of Atomic Habits. I went through this approach of a broad summary and then chapter summaries. The funny thing is that I ended up reading the book after this process because I wanted to get more color. But I could’ve used it for those quick takeaways.”

8. Learn from your peers

There are some BDRs and customer service reps that prospects and customers gravitate toward.

Wouldn’t it be great to know what kinds of words or language they’re using to communicate?

That kind of information would be extremely valuable when creating ad copy or other marketing campaigns. You could feed transcripts of those conversations into ChatGPT and ask it to pull out the major themes or keywords to use in your marketing materials.

A non-work-related bonus of ChatGPT

One more use case for ChatGPT that Devang shared with us was using it to dream up creative bedtime stories for his kid.

He asks his son for a human and non-human character and a mission they are on and feeds it into ChatGPT. Devang then takes the text produced by ChatGPT and puts it into a text-to-speech application. And voila, fun and memorable story!

Think of chatGPT as your new assistant

ChatGPT is a starting point, a foundation. A human should always be involved to check the outputs and continue training AI models like ChatGPT on the most up-to-date data.

ChatGPT can help you do things faster, generate ideas, and uncover insights. But you will have to apply your knowledge and skills to make strategic decisions. After all, the main goal of marketing is to put out content and campaigns that resonate with a human audience.

In the meantime, give ChatGPT a whirl — at the very least, you’ll learn something new.

Interested in what else Devang had to say? Check out his full episode on Performance Marketing Insiders. And if you want to learn more about AI and its applications, consider attending Snorkel’s virtual conference June 6 – 8 or attend some of their upcoming webinars.

Looking for more fantastic digital marketing tips? Come to our next monthly Growth Clinic to hear from experts about the latest and greatest trends in B2B and B2C marketing.