Can ChatGPT Improve Your Marketing Efforts?
(And no, chatGPT did not write this blog)
Like the rest of the interneting world, the recent wave of new AI tools caused an unmistakable disruption in how we see the future of communication, leaving us excited, energized and, well, a little angsty. This time, the future isn’t 10 or 20 years down the road, it’s now—and it just blew down the front door of the marketing industry.
With the public release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022, and the wave of developments since, it’s clear AI technology is at an inflection point. We’ve seen plenty of AI marketing tools arrive and fizzle out, but this is different. The era of AI marketing finally feels like it has arrived.
So, what are we going to do about it?
ChatGPT excels at communicating information, making marketing—along with academia, law and coding—ground-zero for AI adoption. Using it feels like you have the smartest person in the history of the world sitting right next to you, existing for the sole purpose of helping you communicate, and now it’s coming to search engines near you. You’d be stupid not to try it out.
As a marketing agency specializing in the creation of authentic connections, Lemonade arrived at ChatGPT with healthy skepticism—but we arrived nonetheless. So what did we find? We found an AI marketing tool that’s more powerful than many in our industry realize; a tool that can greatly enhance efforts to build more impactful—and authentic—connections between clients and customers.
Don’t believe us? Keep reading!
What is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT is kind of like a crystal ball: You see the future you want to see if you stare into it long enough. But, technically speaking, it’s a stunningly intuitive AI-powered chatbot platform that applies natural language processing to conversations. In other words, the aforementioned smartest person in the history of the world, willing to communicate in any written style or format you can imagine.
It does this by harnessing the power of generative pre-trained transformers (hence “GPT”) to create human-like conversations with users. ChatGPT leverages GPT-3, the latest version of OpenAI’s deep learning model, to accurately respond to users in real-time. It can understand the context of a conversation, which means it follows the natural progression of a conversation, much like a person. But this is only the beginning of what it can do as an AI marketing tool.
So, what can it really do? Well, for starters, it can play “Six Degrees of Separation.” Once you wrap your head around how it’s able to do that, the possibilities of what ChatGPT can do for marketers will blow your mind.
GPT-3 (the deep learning model that powers ChatGPT) was trained on internet text sets equivalent to the size and scope of roughly 2 million books. It scanned databases, blogs, news sites, social media (including your hot takes, probably), journals, legal documents, works of fiction and non-fiction, encyclopedias, and so much more. So, when you ask it to explain something like supply and demand, or how many degrees of separation between Kevin Bacon and Dwayne Johnson (2), it provides a near instantaneous answer in a conversational manner. So what does that mean for marketers?
How Can ChatGPT Improve Marketing?
The more you play with ChatGPT, the more you realize that it’s so much more than just a copy generating machine. Yes, it can write blogs and emails, but that’s the tip of the iceberg. From strategy to paid, project management to creative, the new wave of AI can help boost productivity, creativity and insight across a marketing organization.
Just a few examples of ChatGPT’s capabilities include:
Ideation: We’ve already begun to integrate ChatGPT into our ideation process. By providing prompts and suggestions, ChatGPT can help spark new ideas and provide fresh perspectives that might not have been considered otherwise. It can also be used to generate creative content ideas, such as headlines, taglines, or social media posts, which are great to get the ball rolling. We’ve also used ChatGPT to analyze customer feedback and generate ideas based on their needs and preferences.
Content Creation: This can be a tricky concept for some, and every agency should decide how far to “final” it wants to use AI marketing because ChatGPT has the capability to generate content for marketing communications. For example, it can be used to create blog posts, social media posts, and email newsletters, all mapped to strategy, creative direction and tone/length parameters.
Language Translation: ChatGPT can be used to translate marketing communications into different languages. It’s as simple as that.
Sentiment Analysis: Since ChatGPT can quickly consume and analyze information, agencies or businesses can use it to quickly analyze customer feedback and sentiment. Just drop text into the chatbot’s open field, ask it to analyze sentiment and you’ll have a pretty indepth answer. This allows agencies to take temperature checks on the fly, or help inform long term strategy. AI marketing for the win!
Demographic Research: ChatGPT can also be used to conduct demographic research to help businesses better understand their target audience. This lowers the threshold for obtaining insights into customer demographics, behaviors and preferences.
Industry and Competition Analysis: ChatGPT can also be used to analyze industry trends and competition. By analyzing industry data and news, ChatGPT can provide businesses with insights into the latest industry developments, which can help them stay ahead of the curve and make informed marketing decisions. Similarly, it can also analyze competitor data, such as their marketing campaigns, product offerings and customer engagement strategies, to help businesses identify areas where they can improve and differentiate themselves from the competition.
This is just the tip of the iceberg of how ChatGPT is changing how we think about AI marketing. ChatGPT can draw correlations, develop logical arguments, act as a sounding board to check if creative ideas map to strategy, and so much more.
What Can’t ChatGPT do?
Yes, ChatGPT is exceptionally powerful, but it does have its limitations (for now). After a few months of tinkering with it as we decided how best to integrate it into agency work, we’ve discovered a few areas that require significant human intervention or attention.
Lacks Emotion and Empathy: ChatGPT is an AI language model, and as such, it lacks the ability to truly empathize with customers or understand the nuances of human emotion. While it can provide quick and accurate responses to customer inquiries, it may not always be able to provide the personalized touch that some customers may be looking for.
Limited Understanding of Context: ChatGPT operates based on the data it has been trained on and may not always be able to understand the context of a particular conversation or request. This can lead to misunderstandings or incorrect responses that could potentially harm customer relationships.
Dependence on Quality Data: ChatGPT's effectiveness is highly dependent on the quality and diversity of the data it has been trained on. If the data is biased or incomplete, ChatGPT's responses may reflect those biases, leading to potentially negative consequences for the business.
Inability to Replace Human Interaction: While ChatGPT can be a valuable tool in marketing communications, we don’t think it can fully replace the importance of human interaction in building strong customer relationships. There may be some customer inquiries or issues that require the personal touch of a human representative, and businesses should not rely solely on ChatGPT for all customer interactions.
Security Risks: ChatGPT may be vulnerable to security risks, such as data breaches or hacking, which can potentially compromise customer data and harm the reputation of the business.
As an AI marketing tool, ChatGPT has so much potential to enhance marketing communications in a number of ways, but we feel it’s important for businesses to be aware of its limitations and to use it in a way that is most effective for their specific needs and goals.
Where do we go from here?
ChatGPT is one of the most exciting tech developments we’ve seen and we’re excited to learn more as it continues to evolve, along with its competitors. While it does an amazing job at lowering the threshold on certain marketing tasks—like generating insight, simple content creation, ideation starters—it also creates more work in its wake. That said, it’s overwhelmingly upside.
If your business is interested in integrating ChatGPT (or AI marketing in general) into marketing its efforts, get in touch with Lemonade today.
LEMONADE
Lemonade is a full-service ad agency specializing in creating authentic relationships. Our diverse crew of intentional creatives and strategists aims to connect brands with culture in ways that inspire action. From getting ahead of the latest social trends to decentralizing our thoughts on Web3, we create paths for brands to enter the conversation in meaningful ways. https://www.lemonadetheagency.com/#contact