“Hmm … probably not,” the writer of this blog post repeats to herself, notes of relief wavering in her voice.
No, really, probably not. But it’s certainly true that artificial intelligence, or AI, is going to change things in the marketing content creation process, likely rather drastically.
“We’re embracing AI as a tool.”
– Mary Verdin, President, Verdin
According to Verdin President and Chief Strategy Officer Mary Verdin, “At Verdin, we’re embracing AI as a tool. We can leverage the ability to gather content, then write it with the tone and emphasis that only someone who understands our clients can do. AI can bring us information, but humans can bring the subtlety and nuance that is appropriate to the clients to really differentiate them from their competitors.”
Let’s explore what AI programs do – what they do well and what they do poorly – and how we can use them as a tool to enhance our work.
In this blog post, we’re focusing mostly on the now-famous AI tool called ChatGPT and its potential in the world of language-based marketing content creation. Think blog posts, email newsletters, social media post copy, press releases, website content and so on.
ChatGPT launched in November 2022, and in just five days gained 1 million users, an astounding rate, according to Statista. Why? Because it’s impressive. Really impressive. According to a new CNN Business report about real estate agents who already can’t imagine working without the tool, “ChatGPT is trained on vast amounts of online data in order to generate responses to user prompts. It has written original essays, stories, song lyrics and research paper abstracts that fooled some scientists. Some CEOs have used it to write emails or do accounting work. It even passed an exam at an Ivy League school.”
Here at Verdin Marketing, we signed up for a free account to use the OpenAI-developed tool right away to take this thing for a test drive. First things first, we typed in “Tell me a joke about marketing.” It said:
Why did the marketer quit his job? He realized he was just spinning his wheels.
Groan. Maybe humor isn’t ChatGPT’s strong suit. Then, because we’re in the tourism marketing niche, we asked it to produce a variety of content pieces that the writers on our creative team are regularly tasked with: a blog post with the five top fun things to do in a certain destination, three examples of social media posts about another tourism stop, and so on. In seconds, the work was done. What’s more, it was pretty good. It lacked creativity, humor or any hints of a brand’s unique tone of voice (all important goals for our writers), but in general the information was accurate, relevant and clear.
What ChatGPT Does Well
ChatGPT was created with the purpose of holding a conversation with the end user. Maker OpenAI had humans create model conversations for the AI to study and learn from, a system called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback. That makes using the tool really intuitive. You tell it what you want just as you would tell an employee writing for you what to write. Adding clarifying information makes its responses better.
Michigan firm Revel specializes in highly individualized B2B (brand-t0-brand) marketing. According to their recent blog post, AI isn’t going to put writers out of work, but “we need to reframe what it can do for us.”
Just as Google made a writer’s life easier starting around the turn of the millennium by putting so much information at the fingertips of every user, ChatGPT now goes another step further. Not only does it grab the information you need, but it organizes it in a way that feels so intuitive.
AI is like Google on steroids with a personality.
– Jason Piasecki, partner at Revel
Jason Piasecki, partner at Revel, says, “AI is like Google on steroids with a personality. … ChatGPT provides quick answers to questions previously found through multiple Google searches.”
“ChatGPT can also be used to give us a head start on headlines and content,” says DBA Marketing Communications President Don Becker. DBA is based in Wisconsin and has been building brands for manufacturing companies for 30 years.
Information gathering and organization is definitely a strength for ChatGPT, and Torchlight Marketing’s CEO Joshua Erdman says he also sees nearly endless potential in the world of SEO, or search engine optimization, and keyword research.
“One of my engineers just yesterday asked ChatGPT to provide searches people would use when looking for epoxy flooring,” Erdman said. “It was amazing, as what was provided was not just a robotic list of keywords. This will definitely help us up our game when we are building new search campaigns.”
Here are some ideas for how we as content creators can best use ChatGPT:
- Brainstorming
- Ideation
- First drafts of blog posts or nearly any kind of popular marketing content
- Keyword research, in particular for longtail keywords
- Background research
- Simplifying complicated documents into summaries
- Writing multiple variations of something
- Headline writing
- Writing phrases with very specific parameters, like rhyming, alliteration or character limits
- Writing emails and other internal documents
- Getting yourself out of writer’s block
Those are just a few of the examples we can think of after reading up on the topic, interviewing some marketing professionals and playing with ChatGPT a little, but we’re quite sure the sky’s the limit.
Where ChatGPT Needs a Human Assist
We were pretty well blown away when we first started fiddling with ChatGPT, but it didn’t take us long to uncover some issues.
We prompted the AI: “write about sushi restaurants in brentwood california,” and it turned out recommendations not for the city of Brentwood, in the East Bay Area of California, but instead for the Los Angeles neighborhood with the same name. We later asked ChatGPT for five activities tourists might enjoy in a destination in our area, and it provided four good examples and one that has closed in the past year.
“The facts or premise can be wrong,” Erdman says. Indeed, ChatGPT only has so much information inside of its data vaults. This data includes a vast array of texts from various sources, including books, articles and websites, but not the entire internet. Not that all information on the internet is correct in the first place. It seems even artificial intelligence needs a good editor who knows how to fact check.
Ethical concerns have also cropped up in the news quite a bit, from students using AI to cheat on homework to questions of copyright infringement.
The other way in which ChatGPT falls short, as impressive and intuitive as it seems, is in terms of creativity and tone. ChatGPT is not going to come up with exciting new turns of phrase, because it is quite literally designed to sound like phrases that have already been written. It struggles – though it does try – with tone of voice, as well.
ChatGPT does not replace marketers. It enhances us.
– Joshua Erdman, CEO at Torchlight Marketing
“AI can’t create content in a company’s voice, which is important to create authentic brand messages,” says Revel’s Piasecki. Professional writers know that emotion, humor, cultural and ethical awareness, slang, creativity and empathy are as important in effective marketing as getting the information right.
“We need to be transparent with our clients,” Becker adds. “They trust us, and it’s up to us to use all of the tools available to us and deliver a great product that gets results.”
“ChatGPT does not replace marketers,” Erdman says. “It enhances us.” When we asked ChatGPT how it falls short in creating content, it said:
“It’s important to note that while AI models like ChatGPT can generate high-quality content, they are not a replacement for human creativity and judgment. The best results are achieved when AI is used in collaboration with human experts, to help augment and improve their work.”
Pretty good answer, if you ask us, but it could use a creative touch.
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