This article originally appeared on Business Insider.
In my 18-year marketing career, I’ve written millions of words of marketing copy.
I started my career by creating copy for early e-commerce brands on Myspace, then worked in not-for-profit fundraising, influencer marketing, and now real-estate coaching.
I’m now a chief brand officer for a real-estate-coaching business. Language-modeling AI tools like ChatGPT quickly get me 80% or 90% of the way to finished work.
I started using AI tools in 2022 but didn’t find them to be effective at capturing brand voice and tone. Then ChatGPT took the world by storm in 2023. I use it for dozens of things every day, but these five hacks have been the most helpful.
Quickly write social-media posts and emails
I work for an industry-disrupting real-estate company; most of our advice goes against conventional wisdom. If I let ChatGPT generate without an outline, it’ll give me posts and emails full of outdated conventional advice.
So I prompt ChatGPT with: “Write me a [number]-word social media post/email in a conversational tone like Jess Lenouvel using the following outline,” adding three or four bullet points.
Adding our CEO’s name to the prompt helps ChatGPT mimic her writing tone, cadence, and even emoji usage.
Create variations of the same message
Figuring out new and exciting ways to convey the same message in copy is a struggle. After you’ve been working at the same place for five years, you run out of creative variations for ads and content.
To generate variations of copy I’ve already written, I use this prompt for ChatGPT: “Think like a digital marketer and generate four variants of this Facebook ad copy.“
I feed the AI one example because I like to have some control over the initial messaging. ChatGPT can struggle to get the tone of our brand right if I don’t give it a clear starting point. If I give it a more general prompt, it inevitably puts together stiff-sounding copy with strategies we’d never use.
Check and modify the copy’s tone and reading level
People want easily understandable content in their inboxes and on social media. The average American is thought to read at a seventh- or eighth-grade level.
I think the best marketing copy reads a little below that, at a fifth- or sixth-grade level. This means short sentences and paragraphs, a conversational tone, and simple language.
Before ChatGPT, I’d use Hemingway to test the reading level of my copy and fiddle with sentences to hit a fifth-grade level. With ChatGPT, I can write freely and then prompt the AI to change the reading level and tone for me.
Overall, I save 20 to 30 minutes a day with this prompt.
Write long-form storytelling posts by giving the AI a specific structure and outline
Storytelling is the backbone of psychology-based marketing. Our company is positioned like a personal brand, so I have to engage audiences with personal and emotional stories about our CEO and our successful members.
But writing long prose can be tedious, so I get GPT-4 to do it for me. It’s better at this storytelling than the 3.5 version.
Here are two prompts I use:
- “Following this story structure — 1. Capture the heart, 2. Set up a tension, 3. Resolve the tension, 4. Conclude by offering value — write a 1,000-word story at a grade-five reading level in the first person using the following information,” followed by a list of plot points.
- “Write a 400-word social media post in a conversational first-person tone like Jess Lenouvel about [topic] using the following story points.”
The more specific you can be in your instructions, the better output you’re going to get.
Generate A/B-test hypotheses for troubleshooting marketing problems
Sometimes as a marketer you need to solve a problem but aren’t sure how to test alternatives or which metrics to track to determine which strategy is better.
ChatGPT can help with that, too. It can comb through specific tests a company’s looking to run for optimizing landing pages, increasing sales, or lowering bounce rates, and it can generate ideas to help guide your strategy.
Here’s a recent prompt I gave it: “I’m running an A/B test to compare application page A and application page B in order to increase the number of applications to our program, and I need help generating hypotheses based on email click rate and form completion. Can you provide recommendations for what to test and how to measure success?”
Based on the suggestions from ChatGPT, we’d test:
- Adding a button to our emails to increase the open rate as opposed to plain-text linking.
- Varying the language on the button to see which generates a better click rate.
- Reducing the number of questions on our application page.
These are only some of the many ways I’m using generative AI. I interact with other marketers on Discord servers and in Facebook groups to get more ideas for using ChatGPT.
On average, ChatGPT saves me between six and eight hours a week.
Almost every time I’ve asked myself “I wonder if ChatGPT can do this” or “I wonder how I could get ChatGPT to help me with this,” I’ve unlocked a new way of streamlining or optimizing my workflow.
