ChatGPT. Today’s easy AI buzzword. High schoolers and college kids are using it to write papers in lieu of spending hours leafing through old books in the library – or, hell, even just doing their own googling. It was a short-lived ride, though. Now they’re getting busted. There’s actually a software that schools are now running to detect ChatGPT plagiarism.
The influx of AI seems to be a building wave that is crashing suddenly, and proponents and detractors alike seem like surfers desperately swimming to keep pace. And the ever-present question looms again: “Is this all too good to be true?”
“This model has crossed a threshold,” writes Wharton School of Business professor Ethan Mollick – speaking about ChatGPT – in Harvard Business Review.
“It’s genuinely useful for a wide range of tasks, from creating software to generating business ideas to writing a wedding toast. While previous generations of the system could technically do these things, the quality of the outputs was much lower than that produced by an average human. The new model is much better, often startlingly so.”
But what does this mean for you? Can you, as a business owner, simply open ChatGPT, type in a simple prompt and churn out marketing copy? Can you just copy and paste it into your e-mail newsletter, press Send and a few hours later see a handful of new prospects populating your sales funnel?
Mollick writes again: “Until now, AI has primarily been aimed at problems where failure is expensive, not at tasks where occasional failure is cheap and acceptable – or even ones in which experts can easily separate failed cases from successful ones. Applying AI to the creative and expressive tasks (writing marketing copy) rather than dangerous and repetitive ones (driving a forklift) opens a new world of applications.”
ChatGPT and AI are getting exponentially better at not just writing, but at creating content – and not just clunky stuff that sounds like it was churned out of a Fisher-Price toy, but good stuff, compelling and engaging ad copy that would make Don Draper’s head explode with wonder.
“It (ChatGPT) has an incredible capacity to perform different kinds of writing with more significant implications than might be initially apparent,” Mollick continues in the Harvard Business Review.
“Content is about to be roiled by revolution,” writes author Dan Kay on Medium. “We will drown in a wave of robot-written ‘content.’ A human generating content will no longer be an economical use of one’s time.”
But here’s the thing: ChatGPT is a tool. It’s not going to actually run your business for you. “Hey, ChatGPT, take over for my sales team and grow revenue by 300% this month” isn’t a prompt that’s going anywhere.
What is being well-proven, though, is that ChatGPT is, at the very least, an effective marketing time-saver. Will you probably have to spend some time massaging what it spits back to be what you want? Yes.
But try something like this #1 Hootsuite recommended prompt: “Develop two promotional emails for a conference on digital marketing trends. Cover the following topics: emerging technology, automation, personalization, and data-driven decision-making.”
You just saved at least two hours. And time, as we are all well aware, IS money.
Robin Robins’ CMO, Mike Stodola, put it simply: “Do the free stuff so you have money to spend on the paid stuff.”
Here are THREE easy ChatGPT prompts specifically designed to help you get BETTER at marketing your MSP while saving you tons of TIME in doing so:
- E-mail results. Try this simple prompt: “Create an eye-catching subject line for my [product] that specifically mentions the subscriber’s name and interests.”
- SEO. The almighty drive to appear online. Try this: “Give me a list of informational, long-tail keywords I can use to ideate blog posts for [product or company].”
- Sales funnel. Try this to at least kick-start your next course of action: “Develop a sales funnel for a _____ [insert business]. Include e-mails, ads and landing pages that will convert leads into paying customers.”
You may be surprised at not only what you get back, but the new ideas that the results spark!
Want to know how to get started? Here are 65 ChatGPT prompts for marketers from social media giant Hootsuite. The results may surprise you.
ChatGPT isn’t going to run your marketing for you or wave a wand and get you a free Google Ads promotion worth millions. But what it can do is almost equally as powerful: it is an exponentially improved tool to save you massive amounts of time and give you creative and administrative boosts and ideas that will genuinely shock you.
So, continue to put AI to the test. And when you can, put it to work.
Curious to try even more? Here is an encyclopedic list of 400 ChatGPT prompts for business.
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