Marketing teams are constantly searching for innovative ways to streamline processes, optimize campaigns, and drive business growth.

Well, what if I told you there was a way to do all of that?

Please welcome, 🥁ChatGPT and the AI Revolution! 💥

As a growth marketer, ChatGPT is an incredibly powerful tool that you can use to help drive engagement and conversions. By crafting the right prompts, you can create personalized experiences that speak directly to your target audience. 

In this post, we’ll explore the art of crafting effective prompts and walk you through tips and best practices for writing prompts that will help you take your growth marketing strategy to the next level.

Importance of crafting thoughtful prompts

In the age of AI-powered marketing, crafting thoughtful and precise prompts is critical to unlocking the full potential of generative AI tools. 🤖As growth marketers, it’s important to remember that AI is the doer, not the thinker. 💡Our role is to be the strategic masterminds, guiding the AI with well-constructed prompts to help us streamline processes, optimize strategies, and achieve growth goals.

AI is the doer, not the thinker.

The importance of prompt writing has become so apparent that companies are now hiring dedicated ‘AI prompt engineers’ and offering up to $335,000 a year. 💰💻

To write an expert prompt, start by being clear and specific about your intentions. Remember that AI will do what you want it to do, as long as you explain it thoroughly and accurately. Avoid using ambiguous language or overloading the prompt with unnecessary details, which can lead to confusion and subpar results. 😕 Instead, focus on providing concise and direct instructions to maximize the AI’s ability to understand and execute the task.

Ultimately, the success of AI-driven growth marketing strategies hinges on the collaboration between humans and machines 💻🤝 – sounds like we’re in a Sci-Fi movie, right? We’re certainly getting closer… 

Let’s dig into certain types of prompts and how you can interact with generative AI.

Open-ended vs close-ended prompts

Open-ended prompts encourage more creative and extensive responses, while closed-ended prompts typically yield brief, specific answers. Choose the type of prompt based on your desired output.

Example:

Open-ended prompt

“Can you suggest some ways to improve our marketing strategy?”

Assuming you’ve provided detailed specifics on your marketing strategy prior to asking this question. 

This prompt encourages ChatGPT to generate its own thoughts and ideas on how to improve the marketing strategy without limiting it to a specific set of options or ideas. The response may be more varied and generate broad suggestions that may or may not be what you’re looking for.

Closed-ended prompt

“Which social media platform is the most effective for reaching a younger audience?”

This prompt provides a specific set of options for ChatGPT to choose from and limits the response to one choice. This type of prompt is useful when seeking specific information or opinions, but may not provide as much insight or variety in responses compared to open-ended prompts.

Role-based Priming

Define a specific role for ChatGPT to adopt during the conversation.

If you leave this up to chance, the AI will make too many assumptions.

e.g. “You are a world-class software developer.”

By tailoring prompts to my specific role, ChatGPT can provide more relevant and accurate responses. This approach helps to ensure that the conversation stays focused on my needs and interests, ultimately leading to more productive and effective interactions.

Knowledge & Task-based Priming

Specify the knowledge level or expertise you expect from ChatGPT. As you can see in the example prompt above, I specifically asked for beginner-friendly, step-by-step instructions. I combined knowledge and task-based priming by asking for specific tasks – the names of the files, which files to paste which code into, and how to export and upload the code into WordPress.

I’ve defined AI as the world-class expert and me as the beginner. The roles and tasks are very clear and as things progress and I start to ask more questions, the AI will remember its role as well as mine. 

Utilizing personas in prompts

Defining a Persona. Provide a specific persona to ChatGPT to enhance the conversation’s depth and consistency.

Persona: 🙋Jennifer, a 35-year-old marketing manager at a B2B SaaS company.

Prompt: As a marketing manager for a B2B SaaS company, Jennifer needs to generate high-quality leads for the sales team. Can you suggest some strategies that are effective for reaching decision-makers in the tech industry, particularly those who are actively researching solutions in our market?

In this prompt, the persona “Jennifer” is clearly defined by her role, company, and target audience. The prompt is specific to the challenges she faces and the desired outcome, which is to generate high-quality leads. By utilizing this persona and providing specific context, ChatGPT can generate more relevant and effective strategies for Jennifer’s specific situation, leading to a more productive and valuable conversation.

Segment your asks

Most requests in ChatGPT fall into 1 of 3 buckets:

• Research
• Creation
• Improvement

Research prompts can have less context.

Creation prompts need the most context.

Improvement prompts require the most back and forth.

Break your request into smaller parts

If you ask for a whole blog post at once, it won’t be as good.

If you break the request into parts, you can get great content.

A good rule of thumb?

Ask for a max of 150 words at a time.

Make AI ask you the questions

Maybe the most underrated tip here.

If you’re stuck or want to look at a problem from different angles…

Make AI think of all the angles for you.

Working from a list of questions helps you generate more ideas yourself.

Reference books or well-known marketing frameworks and tell it what to avoid

Priming ChatGPT with references to reputable sources or well-known marketing frameworks can significantly enhance the quality and relevance of its output because you’re guiding it to generate insights that align with established theories and strategies.

Fun fact. When one of our SEO strategists thought that the invoice from their CPA was unreasonably expensive, they asked ChatGPT to write an email using principles from “How to Win Friends & Influence People” and they were able to get a reduced fee! 🫰

Go heavy on context

Bad prompt, bad result.

Simple as that.

The more context you give, the better your responses will be.

Trying giving basic context like:

• Tone
• Length
• Target audience
• Desired outcome
• Where the content will go

Build this all into a repeatable template

The last step is to bring it all together and build a repeatable template that you can use time and time again. 🔁

Creating a repeatable template with these suggestions streamlines the interaction process, ensures consistent, high-quality results, and saves you time on future tasks.

Key Takeaways

Leveraging ChatGPT’s full potential requires thoughtful and strategic interactions. 

Use effective prompts that are explicit, concise, and specify the desired output format. Priming AI with context, such as “You are a world-class content marketer,” can guide responses toward a desired expertise. 

Employing personas can further refine AI-generated content by instructing it to emulate a specific tone or style, for example, “You are an enthusiastic fitness coach.” 

By mastering these techniques and continuously refining your approach, you can significantly streamline marketing processes, optimize campaigns, and drive business growth. 

Derek Coleman

Derek is a digital marketer based in Boston, Massachusetts with almost a decade of hands-on SEO experience. He finds it meaningful, challenging, and exciting to develop, test, and implement new SEO strategies. When he’s not auditing websites and optimizing content he’s usually backpacking and exploring new cultures.

The post Level up your growth marketing strategies with ChatGPT: how to write AI prompts to get the best results appeared first on Tuff.

We’re in the early stages of exploring how to integrate new AI in digital marketing. We’re infusing it into our workflows to do our jobs better and smarter. We think we’re going to see a lot of testing and exploration this year and in the years to come.

These technologies are poised to evolve things – like search engines and photo editors and development but that’s natural. We see our job, as a growth marketing agency, to understand the limitations and new changes and then evolve, adapt, and grow with them. 

Here are some of the ways our team is experimenting with and thinking about AI technologies: 

Ad Creative 

There are BOUNDLESS ways AI technology can positively impact the ad creative process. At this point, the tools we’ve discovered mostly just crack open opportunities for efficiency. For example, we can use ChatGPT to create code to use in After Effects and Jasper to write ad copy, but both these (and myriad other use cases) are just a starting point. There is no AI tool out there (yet!) that can develop materials that can seamlessly populate ad campaigns. So, especially in the creative realm it’s imperative that we adopt the perspective that these efficiency finders can get us ~50% of the way there. And it’s going to take subject matter experts to do their due diligence and make tweaks and modifications in Figma, After Effects, and in Google Docs that sharpens the AI output to become creative that actually hits the mark. 

There’s also an important ethical conversation to include here – AI does not have the capability to develop a novel idea. That means that every output originates from somewhere else. This becomes especially problematic when AI borrows from other artists’ styles, methods, and approaches and does not compensate or credit them. 

Paid Media 

So far, for paid search, we’ve been leveraging ChatGPT and other AI technology, in the following ways, as we continue to utilize the platform on a daily basis:

• General Research for Campaigns (e.g. location, geo assistance)
• Keyword Research Assistance (e.g. gathering ideas, synonyms, and search volume)
• Competitor Research (e.g. comparing keywords within website copy, search volumes)
• Ad Copy Experimentation (e.g. creating new ad variations to split test)
• Google Ads Script Creation (e.g. creating new scripts to help automate tasks and reporting efforts)
• Technical Questions (e.g. assistance in solving tracking issues within Google Tag Manager)

In addition, Microsoft announced a new AI-powered version of its Bing search engine and we’ve been monitoring it closely.

Here’s what we know: 

First, what we do know so far is that the tech will augment search results with an AI generated response to queries. This will also allow the user to open up a further dialogue with the bot in a chat style. Verge has a great article and video here showcasing an early look at Bing’s integration.

Right now, it looks like the chat integration will surface on the sidebar of search results, at least on Bing desktop. On mobile, it will probably take the top spot of search results, similar to rich snippets do now. How or where paid search results will surface, we are not yet confirmed, but considering these companies make most of their money from paid advertising programs, we are doubtful that they will look to cover them up.

Second, not everyone has access to this currently, but can request access by joining the waiting list on Bing (we have already). Google is not there yet, but we expect both Bing and Google will have these rolled out in the next weeks to everyone.

Third, we’ve been asking how does this affect our paid search strategy? Right now, it doesn’t. That doesn’t mean it won’t soon, but there are a couple of things we will be monitoring, including: 

• Will Bing search traffic share increase? Probably. But that doesn’t mean that users will be searching for our target keywords. Here is a real life example we’ve already received. We have a client that is very interested in ‘going hard’ on Bing search. Why? They anticipate an increase in traffic to Bing search as users try ChatGPT. That is all well and an increase in search volume on Bing overall is very likely, but that does not mean that there will be a sudden increase in users searching for our target keywords like “online bookkeeping” on Bing search. If anything, we anticipate users to try out the search chat bot with questions and there is no indication of where paid ads will show next to these queries. Additionally, a daily budget is a daily budget. If a partner is unwilling to spend more on Bing to capture more of the presumed increase in traffic, they will only get what they’ve always gotten (and maybe less). That brings us to the second point.
• Will CPCs increase on Bing? More competition means higher costs in any auction. Right now, we are not observing any noticeable increase in CPCs, but will keep watching over the next weeks/months and document any changes we see, assuming Bing retains higher search competition than it previously has.
• Are there any new campaign or ad types we can test to take advantage of this new feature? At the moment, no. And we haven’t heard of any yet. Currently, at the bottom of the initial ChatGPT response on Bing, the answer links out to 5 relevant organic articles for more information. This retail space may eventually include ad results, but that is not in the preview.

SEO 

So far, SEO has been leveraging ChatGPT and other AI technology in the following ways, as we continue to utilize the platform on a daily basis:

• Blog post titles & meta descriptions
  • We’ve got a topic or a target keyword but we don’t have the official title or meta description yet and we’ll give AI a prompt to write 3 different blog post title options for a blog post about X with X at the beginning of the title. 
  • We’ve got a title but we want to make it more creative and we’ll give AI a prompt to rewrite the title in three different ways and make it more engaging to increase the CTR in Google.
  • When working on technical SEO we’ll come across two pages that are very similar and have duplicate titles or meta descriptions. There are certainly other ways to deal with this but in rare cases, we need to rewrite them and AI is useful in this scenario. 

• Blog topics and keyword research
  • Similar to tools such as SurferSEO and SEMrush which accept a keyword and spit out a list of blog post topics or keywords, AI can be used as another tool during the keyword and topic research phase. 

• Blog post outlines
  • AI can speed up the process of creating blog post outlines that we deliver to our writers. These are always in addition to original research and never accepted completely as-is.

• Images
  • We’ve tested several different AI stock image websites or image creation websites but haven’t worked any of them into our processes yet. The majority of them are too-novel and still have major flaws. I recently found one that does generate great images with the correct prompts though–https://midjourney.com/home/ 

In addition to the above, we’re also leveraging AI detection tools for blog posts and long-form content. At Tuff, we’ve developed a two primary types of content for our clients: 

• SEO: How can we help our clients rank for the right search? 
  • Common Deliverables: Blog posts, landing pages, and remediations 

• Content: How do we develop high-value content for campaigns? 
  • Common Deliverables: Long-form guides, eBooks, whitepapers, playbooks, and more. 

When it comes to creating a strategy for new content creation and existing content improvement to capture demand and visibility across customer segments, we use a three person team: 

• SEO and Content Expert (in-house at Tuff) 
• Vetted Freelancer Writer (on contract with Tuff) 
• Designer (in-house at Tuff) 

When it comes to finding the right writer for each unique client, we vet, brief, and manage contractors to get the very highest quality output possible. We source writers from UpWork, Composer.ly, our personal network from the last 10 years, and Creative Circle. 

When it comes to reviewing content and confirming every article is human-generated, our internal team does two things on every piece of content we receive: 

1. We heavily edit most freelance writer work, and we give writers explicit instructions not to use AI tools. 
2. We run new content pieces through 3 AI detectors (OpenAI, Copyleaks, and Writer) – and confirm that all say human-generated, not AI.

Right now, these new technologies are fun to experiment with. Whether you think something like DALL-E is an amazing piece of tech or is the worst thing to happen, we’ve been testing and exploring these tools almost daily at Tuff. This is very new, but we think we’re all watching this space very carefully to make sure we leverage it for clients, our own team, and stakeholders.

At the same time, we also think it’s important to know the limitations and be vocal about those: the new A.I. technologies come with a long list of flaws. They can lead to toxic content, misinformation and hate speech. Rapid advancements in AI technology has made it clear that we ensure that AI is used in ways that are safe and transparent. For now, we’ll continue to test, monitor, and experiment! 

Ellen Jantsch

Ellen is the founder at Tuff and one of the team’s core growth marketers. She is a versatile marketer with expertise in multiple channels – from ppc to seo to email to others – responsible for the experiments and testing.  She is happiest when she’s on the ski hill or outside pointing her mountain bike downhill.

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