You can benefit from ChatGPT because it brainstorms, researches, and writes content, saving you hours. Its predecessor, GPT-3, was trained on 570 gigabytes of text and had 175 parameters. You can just imagine how much more extensive ChatGPT’s training is and what that means for marketing.
Yet, despite the potential, ChatGPT is still a robot – and not the cool transformer type. It’s restricted by the data it receives, its lack of understanding, and its limited content creation ability. So, don’t expect it to write America’s next greatest novel.
But it still has a place in marketing if you understand its limitations and use it alongside a human writer or two or three.
Let’s dive into the world of ChatGPT and its potential to transform the way you perform small business marketing.
Contents
What Is ChatGPT?
ChatGPT from OpenAI uses natural language learning to process and respond to questions with human-like accuracy. Because this artificial intelligence tool’s answers are so natural, people can easily mistake its responses for a person. That’s why marketers and content creators want to find ways to streamline their jobs with ChatGPT.
It received over a million users within a week of its November 2022 launch for public testing and 57 million within the first month.
OpenAI trained ChatGPT using an extensive database of information and human feedback. Then it responds to questions by pulling from the database and replicating human speech patterns.
How Does ChatGPT Work?
Knowing ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot might not instill much confidence. You might remember asking Siri to tell you a story and receiving a snarky reply.
Or when you ask Alexa to add an item to your grocery list, it ends up playing a song instead.
So how is ChatGPT different from its (less-than-stellar) contemporaries?
While other more common AI partners perform tasks, ChatGPT focuses on answering questions.
The technology ChatGPT uses is closer to predictive text than Siri or Alexa. When you’re typing, predictive text analyzes your patterns and suggests how to continue your sentence.
Now multiply that 1,000X, and you’ll be scratching the surface of what ChatGPT is capable of.
ChatGPT offers a tempting alternative to human writers because it has insane abilities like coding, writing entire blog posts, answering complex questions, and pulling research from a vast database.
How Is ChatGPT Different Than GPT-3?
ChatGPT comes from the same technology as GPT-3. GPT stands for generative pre-trained transformer. However, GPT-3 is trained for general use using straight text, and ChatGPT is trained to converse. Its database included human conversations and feedback. So, ChatGPT sounds far more natural.
How Is Google Bard Different from ChatGPT?
Google who?
Don’t worry if you haven’t met the crew’s newest member. Google Bard came out on February 6, 2023. So, we’re all still learning about it.
Here’s what we DO know so far.
Google Bard is a chatbot with similar functions and abilities. However, Google Bard connects to the internet. That means it can pull information about breaking stories and recently published blog posts that ChatGPT doesn’t have access to since it wasn’t available during its training.
One way Google demonstrated Bard’s ability was by asking it whether piano or guitar was easier to learn. Bard scanned dozens of articles and summarized everyone’s opinion in three short paragraphs to help the user make a more informed decision.
Just think about how that will transform the future of search engine optimization because people will search phrases rather than keywords to gain more specific results. Writers can also research faster. Of course, that’s not even mentioning how it may impact content creation if Bard heads in that direction.
Currently, Bard is still in research mode, so the public has yet to see it in action and learn Google’s full intent with it.
4 Ways You Can Use ChatGPT for Marketing
All ChatGPT’s technical abilities are as useless as the g in lasagna unless you can apply them in real-life marketing situations. So, let’s dive into the nitty-gritty of how to use ChatGPT to boost your marketing.
1. ChatGPT for Content Creation
While you can write content for your small business website using ChatGPT, you’ll encounter some issues.
Jenn Leach shared her experience on Medium about how she tried writing a 1,200-word blog post on container gardening. She gave the chatbot the topic and word count and let it do the rest.
While the article won’t win any Pulitzer Prizes, it did capture the main idea. However, Leach ran into several issues, like errors and ChatGPT messing up the word count.
The content she received made an excellent ROUGH DRAFT, emphasizing the rough part. It still needs a person to read through and fact-check, look for inaccuracies, and add a human touch.
Remember, search engines prize original content. ChatGPT can only pull from what others have already written. So, if you want to create a thought leadership article, then ChatGPT won’t cut it. But, if you write an instruction manual on how to fold a fitted sheet (it is possible!), go ahead and use it.
For deeper topics that require more original thinking, you’ll want to restrict ChatGPT’s involvement. For instance, you can use it to:
- Develop title ideas
- Write meta descriptions based on your content
- Brainstorm topic ideas.
But you’ll still want to write the article to ensure it’s not just rehashing what others wrote.
2. ChatGPT for Social Media
Social media marketing aligns more with ChatGPT’s capabilities than blog writing. After all, social media is all about conversations, which happens to be ChatGPT’s specialty.
Social media posts summarize larger ideas, blog posts, or news stories. So ChatGPT doesn’t need to depend on original thoughts but can pull from pre-existing content or topics to create unique posts.
For examples of how that looks, check out this Forbes article showing some pretty impressive social media posts.
Please don’t fire your social media manager just yet. You still need someone to give ChatGPT topics, correct the posts in case of errors, and personally respond to comments, to name a few of the MANY jobs of a social media manager.
3. ChatGPT for Coding
Coding is one of ChatGPT’s most surprising abilities. It can create codes for programs, websites, and even simple games. Its coding ability isn’t to the point where it will replace professional coders. But it could help someone who doesn’t know much about software and coding perform simple tasks.
Have you ever tried publishing content on your site, but it doesn’t look right? You can use ChatGPT to format your content using HTML code so it performs better.
4. ChatGPT for Answering Customer Questions
Answering customer questions is ChatGPT’s strongest talent and biggest benefit to marketers. That’s what OpenAI built it to do.
Marketers and sales teams can use ChatGPT to aid in customer experience support. Instead of trying to perform all your marketing tasks and reply to customers IMMEDIATELY when they ask questions, you can set up ChatGPT to respond with human-like answers based on data you give about your company.
4 Limitations of ChatGPT
Before converting 100% to ChatGPT, here are some limitations to be aware of when monitoring your ChatGPT content.
1. Works with Limited Data
ChatGPT learns from a database of training materials. While the database is enormous, it’s not live. That means ChatGPT will only know up to the point of its training.
This can lead to factual errors, outdated information, and incomplete answers.
It’s worth noting that Google Bard uses the internet, which might improve its ability to accurately respond to questions. We’ll still have to wait till it becomes publicly available before knowing how it compares.
2. Bases Responses on Predictions
While ChatGPT has human-like language qualities, it doesn’t think for itself. Instead, it creates answers by gathering large amounts of data, detecting patterns, then crafting a response based on those patterns.
Those patterns aren’t always factual or even make sense.
Users have even noticed unwanted biases coming through. For example, when ChatGPT sees multiple posts with the same view, it might adopt that same view as fact and incorporate it in its replies.
One example of its bias is its willingness to praise some political leaders but its refusal to support others.
3. Can Be Verbose
ChatGPT isn’t a writer. It’s a conversational bot, so you’ll notice repeated phrases, longer sentences, and filler, which no marketer wants.
A human writer must always edit or rewrite ChatGPT content to ensure it runs smoothly, makes sense, and is grammatically correct.
4. Requires Clear Inputs
How you ask questions matters because ChatGPT easily misunderstands your intent. This can lead to wrong responses.
Google’s Bard is already showing signs of a better understanding of subtle nuances in language. Once it’s readily available to the public, you can test its full capabilities to see which tool makes the better marketing chatbot.
Are You Considering Integrating ChatGPT into Your Marketing?
ChatGPT has many strengths that can help you improve productivity, create content, and research topics. However, it will never fully replace human involvement. It can’t form unique opinions, understand empathy, or correct errors as humans can.
It works best as a partner than a replacement.
You don’t need ChatGPT to make an impression with your content. Fingerprint Marketing has HUMAN marketers that create marketing strategies as unique as your fingerprint.
Are you looking to use ChatGPT in your marketing? We can build a strategy customized to your tools so you can make the most of them and their limitations don’t hold you back.
Contact us to learn more about our marketing strategy services.