How Content Marketers Can Use ChatGPT to Drive Efficiency 

You’ve probably heard of OpenAI, ChatGPT, and other AI-powered language tools now available for the public in many countries worldwide.  

After all, ChatGPT alone has reached 100 million active users each month. 

Maybe you’ve already taken it for a spin and asked silly questions like “Who rules the world?” or “How big is space?”.  

But how can marketers use this viral chatbot to their benefit, and what are the risks?  

We wanted to see for ourselves just how ChatGPT works and, as marketers, dive deeper into what it could mean for us. 

With much excitement buzzing around the developments in AI tools, there’s perhaps an equally prevalent note of concern in the conversation — and understandably so. 

While the question of “will robots replace us” still looms, we want to shift the conversation to a more positive one — “how can they help us?” 

So, to start, we turned straight to the source and asked ChatGPT itself. 

7 ways marketers can use ChatGPT for better blogs, according to ChatGPT 

Our journey began with a question, or “prompt”, as it’s called in the world of bots. Here’s what we asked: 

Hi ChatGPT! Please Write a long in depth blog about how a marketeer can use chatGPT for creating blog-content in the best way. 

And so the bot answered. 

Our first thoughts  

As you can see, the chatbot has come up with quite a clear and instructional piece of content.  

At first sight, it may look like a completely acceptable post that can be copied and used as it is. Piece of cake, right?   

So, are copywriters and journalists now an extinct species? (Let's not ask the bot).  

But hang on a minute…. After scratching its shiny, grammatically-correct surface and solid grasp of the English language, there are some factors to consider that are cause for concern. 

We’ll dive more into the downsides later, but first, let’s briefly get a better understanding about the bot. 

Wait... How does ChatGPT work? 

Here’s what you should know about ChatGPT. 

What is ChatGPT? 

ChatGPT is a powerful chatbot by OpenAI that launched in November 2022 and quickly went viral.  

You may be familiar with chatbots like Alexa or Siri. Basically, they’re artificial intelligence (AI) programs that can have written or verbal dialogue based on prompts. 

So, what makes this one stand apart? ChatGPT uses something called Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to engage in impressively human-sounding dialogue.  

Based on the prompts you provide, ChatGPT can answer your questions, complete advanced tasks, tell jokes, hold natural conversations, and much more. 

It remembers and learns from your interactions and can use that context for future conversations, and it can even understand and admit when it’s wrong.   

So, with this all in mind: how can ChatGPT benefit us as marketers? 

How to use ChatGPT for content marketing 

Perhaps the main overarching benefit for marketers is this — when used right, AI can help you become more efficient in your job. 

While AI tools don’t have the power to slow down time, they can help marketers move faster — and likely faster than competitors who don’t adopt them. 

Moreover, AI could completely change how marketers fuel their ideation, strategies, and how they present content to their target audiences.  

Certainly, with more and more big players heavily investing in these tools, the landscape is already transforming. 

While ChatGPT has already provided some nice suggestions on how to use it for blogs, we’ll take this opportunity to share some ways how marketers can use ChatGPT for content overall. 

Get help brainstorming 

Don’t get stuck on a blank page and let ChatGPT help you generate ideas for: 

• Keywords 
• Titles 
• Product or campaign names 
• Social media captions 
• Product descriptions 
• Content topics 
• Ad scripts 
• Outlines  
• First drafts 

Speed up researching 

ChatGPT can summarise large amounts of information you input to help you learn faster, inform your content and strategy, and more easily share information with others. 

Ask questions to problems 

Get quicker answers to your questions with simple explanations — even on complex queries — and have the bot provide ideas and potential solutions for your unique problems. 

Repurpose your content 

ChatGPT can help you reformat blog content for infographics or email newsletters, summarise video transcripts for carousel or blog posts, and so on. 

Re-phrase sentences 

If you’re stuck on a word or phrasing you don’t like, you can get ChatGPT to generate ideas for alternatives. 

Check for grammar and spelling errors 

ChatGPT can also be used as a basic grammar and spell-checker, but it won’t explain errors like an editor or editing software will. 

Translate text 

For quick translations, ChatGPT outperforms Google Translate and DeepL in given scenarios.  

The list of ways content marketers can use ChatGPT seems to be ever-expanding.  

To get a fulfilling answer from the bot, you'll need to find the right question and create a detailed prompt for your needs — be as specific as possible, provide context, and ask follow-up questions if needed.  

This tool can serve as a great launching pad for your marketing activities and overall productivity. 

The limitations of ChatGPT for content marketers 

In order to use ChatGPT to its full advantage, it’s important to first understand its limitations and the potential risks involved. 

Let’s walk through them together. 

Unreliable information 

ChatGPT became what it is by learning from a wide variety of sources, but it’s unclear where all it gets its information from in specific instances.  

The bot doesn’t cite its sources as a human would, which enriches blog content, creates trust with readers, and can help your SEO efforts through external linking. 

Most importantly — because it pulls information from a wide variety of sources (some out of date), you should keep in mind that some of the information it produces can be misleading, biased, or incorrect. 

In fact, OpenAI admits this: “ChatGPT is not connected to the internet, and it can occasionally produce incorrect answers. It has limited knowledge of world and events after 2021 and may also occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content.” 

With a goal to provide accurate and up-to-date information that genuinely helps readers, this poses a problem for content marketers. Moreover, publishing incorrect or low-quality information will actively harm your SEO efforts. 

It's a good idea to cross-check and verify the information it generates to feel confident in what you’re working with. 

Duplicate information 

Researchers at Google and beyond have long been working on algorithms to accurately detect content produced by AI. 

Google, at least, is no longer against AI-generated content as long as it’s not made to manipulate search engine rankings. 

That said, since ChatGPT builds its knowledge bank based on others’ queries and can repeat aspects of results, there is a very real risk that some of your content could have duplicate information, and your rankings will likely face a decline if Google detects this.   

This is why we chose to publish the chatbot’s article as an image — to avoid plausible penalisation from Google. You can find their guidelines here. 

Engagement and tone limitations 

You may have felt something was a little off as you read through parts of ChatGPT’s piece above; it lacks the human touch.  

Sure, it’s clear, concise, and free of grammatical errors — a fine piece, depending on your purposes — but it falls short in readability and engagement.  

It’s missing a human tone and the sense of flow that goes along with it.  

Take a look at its conclusive paragraph, for example:  

No doubt, it’s dry and a bit monotonous; it could definitely be summarised in a more readable manner. Even just bulleting the points would help. 

It’s worth noting, though, that we didn’t make specifications for the voice it should use. The more in-depth your prompt is, the more likely you are to get results suited to your ear. 

Writers — and brands — should have unique voices, values, and perspectives that align to engage their target audiences. 

While ChatGPT is constantly improving, it can't yet capture this.  

Will it ever be able to replicate emotional intelligence, nuance, and creativity in the way a human can? 

It is still a bot, after all. 

Security risks  

Keep in mind that using third-party language tools, like ChatGPT, could also raise compliance concerns for data privacy laws. 

As ChatGPT learns from the information you input, that information then becomes a part of its knowledge bank and could show up in others’ results.  

This presents a security risk — if any sensitive information is input, it can then become public information. And there’s currently no way to request for data removal from ChatGPT’s database. 

Many companies, such as JPMorgan Chase, Accenture, and Amazon, ask their employees not to use tools like OpenAI’s due to the potential security risks within their organisations — including risks of privacy, data misuse and exposure, and phishing attacks. 

Though Microsoft, on the other hand — as a big partner and investor in OpenAI — is open to their employees using the chatbot as long as they don’t add any sensitive company data into it.  

Final thoughts 

Whether you see it as a friend or foe, this leading chatbot can certainly be used to marketers’ advantage when used right, and it’s only becoming more and more capable.  

In fact, ChatGPT-4, which was released on March 14th, 2023 for waitlisting, can even pass simulated law school exams within the top 10% of test takers and is reported by OpenAI to be “more reliable and creative”, among other advancements.  

So, rather than replacing us, we think AI can be a powerful tool to enhance our abilities and transform our results.  

With the help of ChatGPT for brainstorming and ideation, research, problem-solving, and more, marketers can move quicker than ever before to create compelling content.  

Our recommendation: use it as a starting point to make you more efficient, but don’t use its content as is — the content it generates still needs the human touch. 

If you decide to use ChatGPT to boost your content efforts, just be sure to use it with careful judgement.  

Here are some good things to keep in mind: 

• Don’t upload any sensitive, personal, or company data. 
• Expect that the information you add in the prompt is going to be stored, used, and reused by the AI. 
• Evaluate and fact-check the information it produces. 
• Keep a critical mind and analyse its results from a human perspective. 
• Stay creative. Use your own stellar ideas, research, and empathy to enrich the ideas it generates. 

With AI and marketers moving forward hand-in-hand, we’re entering an era of infinite possibilities. We can move faster, adapt faster — scale faster.  

We’ll remain curious and cautious, but we think the future is bright. 

What do you think?