How Brands Can Use ChatGPT And Other Generative AI For Content Marketing
Chances are, by now you’ve heard of ChatGPT, the generative AI app that has received attention for its conversational and human-like responses to queries. Launched by OpenAI toward the end of last year, the chatbot uses a language processing model to predict responses that are eerily reflective of human speech and take mere seconds to conjure.
Just five days after launching, the app garnered more than a million users who have used the technology to do everything from write essays, research topics, draft emails and templates, and fix code.
Given the app’s low-cost content output, savvy digital marketers were quick to put the new technology to use. Here’s what digital marketers should know about how to use ChatGPT (and how not to).
Let’s Start With Its Limitations
Before relegating your content strategy to ChatGPT, it’s important to understand the technology and its inherent limitations. Because it uses a language processing model, its output is based on a prediction of language. The result is a human-like response, but just like fallible humans, the bot can be wrong. Crucially, the model is not based on the factual foundation of the content. According to the app’s website:
“ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers. Fixing this issue is challenging, as: (1) during RL training, there’s currently no source of truth; (2) training the model to be more cautious causes it to decline questions that it can answer correctly; and (3) supervised training misleads the model because the ideal answer depends on what the model knows, rather than what the human demonstrator knows.”
Using ChatGPT To Draft Blog Content
Even with the limitations, many digital marketers have found that ChatGPT can be an effective tool for drafting a blog article, social media post, or other piece of online content. It’s relatively straightforward to overcome the possibility of false outputs by simply engaging an editor to verify the result.
Marketers who want to employ ChatGPT to generate content should also be aware of potential impacts to SEO. Google has traditionally penalized auto-generated content, which it deems low quality in accordance with the company’s spam policy. Moreover, it’s important to consider the competitive landscape. ChatGPT’s software competes with Google, so there’s broad speculation that Google will move to penalize content generated by its competition.
The stakes are high. Penalties such as this can result in a website being completely removed from Google’s search results, so be sure to tread carefully.
A safer strategy would be to use the software to build general outlines and have a human fact-check content and iterate on the draft to ensure it’s both novel and value-driven.
Integrate ChatGPT With Your SEO Strategy
When you learn about timely keywords that impact your industry, ChatGPT can be used to write content that includes or answers questions about the keyword to support search engine optimization. The result is low-cost content that can be quickly generated in response to a fleeting opportunity and may generate traffic to your website.
Of course, it’s still essential to fact-check the content and make it your own to avoid actually hurting your website’s SEO.
Using ChatGPT To Write Emails And Other Collateral
ChatGPT may offer benefits with email marketing, because there are no potential SEO consequences. As with a draft of a blog or article, it’s important that a human intervenes to ensure that the content is accurate, and in line with the voice of your brand. You may also need to copy-edit for redundancies and unnecessary words and phrases.
The software can also help write content for marketing presentations, mailers, scripted videos, and social media.
While there’s no doubt that the technology is revolutionary and unprecedented, it still needs human checks and balances for use in digital marketing and everyday life.
