Can ChatGPT replace your marketing team?

Unless you've been living under a rock, you'll have heard about the ascendant rise of Open AI's ChatGPT and GPT-4 (plus other similar tools). These natural language processing tools have brought AI content writing to the masses – but does this mean that your content marketing team is now defunct?

The short is no. For a start, great marketing has always been much more than just promotion. The traditional 4 P’s include Promotion but also, Product, Price, and Place. When these three work together they provide value for the customer and for the company.

But the longer answer is that AI tools are very likely to play some kind of part in your customer communications, sales, and marketing going forward.

Here's our lowdown on what ChatGPT and GPT-4 can do for your marketing.

What do we mean by AI content writing?

ChatGPT and the new breed of large language models (LLMs) are artificial intelligence tools. They use a chatbot-style interface to answer your questions, provide you with information, or (in the use case we’re interested in) write simple or complex written content for you.

These LLMs have access to a giant data source of information, languages, and writing styles. By entering a suitable prompt into the chat window, you can ask your AI tool to write anything from a blog post to a business email. And you’ll get the results in seconds.

You quickly get access to well-written content and can produce more content, more quickly.

Does AI content writing replace your content marketing role/s?

In short, ChatGPT is a tool that enables content production but is not a replacement for an experienced, professional marketing writer. Yes, you will get decent quality content as an output, but the very nature of AI means that the content will be serviceable and generic, rather than exciting and on brand. What humans love about humans is personality, imperfection and uniqueness. Also, while the A.I. may give an appearance of understanding the topic, what it produces may be inaccurate, and contain biases.

If you want your content to really pop, the output from ChatGPT is going to need some tweaking and editing to make it stand out among the sea of content that washes past each day.

A good marketing writer will:

• Review the ChatGPT output and look for opportunities to rewrite the content

• Fact check any claims and add stats, quotes and factual links to more information

• Bring the text in line with your own brand writing style and tone of voice

• Add some human personality and make the content less ‘vanilla’.

ChatGPT won’t write your marketing content for you. It still requires you and your marketing team to come up with the themes and topics for your blogs, newsletters and customer-facing advertising. But AI content writing tools CAN be an extremely useful productivity tool.

For example, ChatGPT can:

• Draft out blog outlines – ChatGPT will happily churn out detailed blog outlines, based on your chosen theme and prompt (the instruction you give to the AI). You’ll still need to edit and tailor this content to make it your own, but you’ll be able to produce a far greater number of blogs in much less time. It’s an easier way to keep that content rolling!

• Sketch out sales emails – ChatGPT can also help with your sales emails. Ask the AI to write you a short, snappy 200-word email that summarises the main selling points for a particular audience and it will turn it around in the blink of an eye. The content will still need a little tweaking, but the main text is there in a second.

• Write product summaries – If you point it to a link for your product/service pages, ChatGPT can summarise the key points and deliver a short, snappy summary of the key functions or customer benefits. This allows you to very quickly pull together product one-pagers and flyers for events or for you to send out to prospects.

• Come up with web content – if your website needs an update, ChatGPT can turn your product summaries into eye-catching web copy. Tell the AI that you want a landing page, or a product page and it will generate well-crafted copy in no time. As always, you will need to review and edit the output, but it makes the process so much faster.

• Write social content in different formats – when you want to promote your blogs and web content, ChatGPT is an expert at generating content for social media posts, tailored to the character counts or SEO requirements of platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn etc.

Combining AI and a content marketing expert will supercharge your content

If you want to create original, fresh content and engaging messaging, you 100% still need a person. AI content-writing software is a tool to be used to streamline the process and make things consistent. But good ideas still come from human brains, not from an algorithm.

And a final note - Chat GPT is not confidential and also may not delete specific prompts from your history, so don't share personal or sensitive information with Chat GPT.