Key Takeaways from our Chat about ChatGPT for B2B Marketers

Want to get the most out of ChatGPT and didn’t have a chance to attend our online event? Here are some key takeaways and best practices shared by Marc Cousineau, Senior Content Marketing Manager at Fiix and our participants on February 23, 2023:

Think Beyond Writing

For Marc, the writing is not good enough yet. ChatGPT can’t plan, it doesn’t speak with a brand voice, and it’s not really conversational. What does it offer? Amazing draft functionality as an idea and discovery engine.

It’s a great sounding board, a place to collect different ideas and points of view. It works well to bounce ideas around. It’s also great for generating options. It can spit out multiple versions of a text, all with slightly different tones and approaches, ideal when you need to finalize a draft.

One participant shared a cooking analogy: ChatGPT is like using canned diced tomatoes, instead of growing your own tomatoes, peeling them, then cooking them yourself. It’s great for when you’re at a loss for words, or if you know what you want to say but you’re not happy with how you’ve said it. It’s like your shortcut to get dinner on the table quickly. You still need to add the spices – but it gets you to the finish line much faster and it saves your creative energy for other tasks.

Get More from your Prompts

If you’ve had good results in the past from specific prompts, keep using them! There’s an art to prompting ChatGPT to get what you need out of it. Crowdsourcing prompts is a good way to disperse some creativity. It’s also worth remembering that the best content shares expertise, so use ChatGPT to identify experts and track down quotes. Here are some strategies with prompts that can get you started:

• Identify the information you’re looking for. Be as specific as possible.
• Think about tone, and make sure the prompt matches what you’re looking for in the finished piece.
• Create the initial prompt. Keep it clear and focused and avoid open-ended questions.
• Refine your prompts as needed. Depending on the results you get, you might want to try shorter or longer prompts, add or remove detail, or change up the phrasing.

Conceptualizing Intent

ChatGPT also excels at taking one topic and identifying different viewpoints about that topic. Let’s say you’re writing an article about gating content. You might ask ChatGPT, “Give me different opinions about whether B2B content should be gated, with sources to go with each point of view.” You can also ask it to identify several different viewpoints on gating content, along with recommending a (human) expert for each one. Used for research in this way, ChatGPT can help you come up with different angles or approaches that might not have been done before – essential when you’re competing for eyes and attention.

Translation

Marc let everyone know that informal testing suggests that ChatGPT has stronger translation abilities than Google Translate for German and Spanish. It also seems to do a good job at localizing the translation, generating different versions of Spanish for Latin American and European audiences.  Tests produced relatively clean translations, with few revisions needed.

Duplicate Content and SEO

If different brands use ChatGPT to generate marketing content, it’s highly likely that the pieces are going to sound the same. Marc recommends having a documented and strong understanding of your brand voice. In addition, your point of view on any given topic will be essential if you want to differentiate this content from what your competitors produce.

Google and SEO probably aren’t going away anytime soon, but in a few years, it’s likely that page one results won’t be nearly as important as they are today. Besides, ChatGPT, TikTok, YouTube and Instagram are all essentially search and “discovery” engines. Since SEO doesn’t play as big a role on many platforms, we might start to see a new strategy replacing page one results.

Establish Guidelines

Guidelines are important to put into place so that your team knows when they can use ChatGPT, and when they shouldn’t. Will they use it to do research, to find quotes, or to produce content? How will you check that the content it produces is accurate, and that it matches your brand guide? Rewriting AI-generated output so that it matches your tone and style is going to be an essential step for every marketer.

And remember, while ChatGPT is great at answering questions, it doesn’t always answer them correctly. If you’re using the AI to find expert quotes, always check the credentials of the experts it identifies!

As Marc Cousineau points out, what’s cool about this next chapter of AI and automation tools for content is that we’re just at the beginning, at the edge of exploration. Over the next few years, AI will likely show up in many more systems. But while bots might excel at following a customer service script, they’re not so great at having real conversations, asking the questions that generate new insights and compelling stories.

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Photo source: Tara Winstead