Is ChatGPT The Answer To Your Content Creation Challenges?

Many of you who read our articles know that one of the secrets to lead generation and demand generation in 2023 is content creation. You need to create compelling, educational and entertaining thought leadership content.

This content has to take many different forms, including videos, whitepapers, e-books, explainers, tip sheets, research, webinars, checklists, podcasts and more.

Some people have even advised you to start thinking like a magazine publisher. Create editorial calendars and crank out as much content as you can. Make sure that content is aligned with your keywords and, most importantly, your prospects’ questions, pains and challenges.

But many of you also know that keeping up with a publisher’s schedule can be expensive and time-consuming for your team when they often have other responsibilities.

Enter the new easy button that has been around for a few months – ChatGPT.

• “OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3 may be the biggest thing since bitcoin.” – Forbes
• “AI language model ChatGPT can summarize long texts in seconds.” – The Next Web
• “OpenAI’s ChatGPT is an incredible AI that can write essays, answer questions, and more.” – ZDNet
• “ChatGPT can now answer complex questions like humans.” – VentureBeat
• “ChatGPT is making natural language processing more accessible than ever.” – Wired

I think it’s worth noting that before giving me these results, ChatGPT gave me this: “As an AI language model, I do not have the capability to browse the internet and search for all the headlines about ChatGPT, but I can provide you with a few recent headlines about me and the sources that published them."

It’s an interesting response considering it gave me what I wanted anyway.

But herein lies the issue – it’s still a work in progress and very much dependent on what you tell it to do. Let’s look at this more closely, as ChatGPT can help you with some areas of your marketing efforts right now.

Writing Blog Articles

Your blog articles should be full of thought leadership. I don’t think you want to take a quantity over quality approach to blogging, and ChatGPT might have a difficult time delivering highly informative, educational and positioning blog articles.

However, ChatGPT can help make blogging easier. For example, the other day I wrote an article on lead scoring, and I used a straight and standard definition of lead scoring to get the article started. This came directly from ChatGPT:

Lead scoring is a process used by sales and marketing teams to evaluate and rank the likelihood of a lead becoming a customer. It is a system of assigning points or scores to leads based on various criteria, such as their level of engagement with a company's website or marketing materials, their job title, company size and behavior patterns.

Not bad right? It’s accurate, well written and concisely describes lead scoring and how it adds value to businesses.

But it’s not going to help deal with the challenges, the technology or the potential outcomes of applying lead scoring that we’ve learned over the past 20 years. It did help me write more efficiently, and that’s helpful in its own right.

Writing Emails And Email Subject Lines

The creative process is interesting. It always starts with that empty page or whiteboard. Not anymore. In just seconds you can have ideas that get the creative juices flowing, and sometimes those ideas ChatGPT generates might be enough to get the job done.

Here are three email subject lines generated by ChatGPT from the following prompt: “Write me three subject lines for an email campaign around the HubSpot CRM.”

Here’s what the ChatGPT returned:

• Transform Your Sales Process With HubSpot CRM – Get Started Today
• Say Goodbye To Spreadsheet Hell – Discover HubSpot CRM
• Close More Deals In Less Time With HubSpot CRM – Try It Now

Not bad. Not the most creative, but the copy is short and to the point. Interestingly, two of the three had decent action-oriented copy at the end.

I then asked it to write me the email copy for the first subject line it created, and here’s what it produced.

Subject: Transform Your Sales Process With HubSpot CRM – Get Started Today

Dear [First Name],

Are you tired of wasting time manually tracking your leads and deals in spreadsheets? HubSpot CRM can help you streamline your sales process and boost your productivity.

With HubSpot CRM, you can easily manage your pipeline, track customer interactions and automate your sales tasks. Plus, it integrates seamlessly with other HubSpot tools, giving you a complete view of your marketing and sales activities.

Ready to transform your sales process? Sign up for HubSpot CRM today and start closing more deals in less time.

Best regards, [Your Name]

First, to get subject lines and email copy in under 10 seconds is impressive on its own. I actually think email copy creation is one of the best applications for ChatGPT.

This is short, to the point, relatively well written and while not very creative it even knew to ask for a sign-up at the end.

There’s an application here for marketers that shouldn’t be overlooked.

Writing Ad Copy

Without going into the same details as email, the same experience held true for ad copy. We used ChatGPT to write ad descriptive copy and ad headlines that are currently being tested against the ad copy our copy team created.

I found the same value. ChatGPT created several concepts in seconds that could easily be used as is if you wanted or used to help your copy team create better, more creative ads that they didn’t have to spin up from scratch.

It will create as many ideas as you want or need. Sometimes coming up with additional concepts for people to review is a challenge. Not anymore. If you have three good ideas and need three more, let ChatGPT do the rest of the work.

Just like the examples above, in this scenario, it’s a time savings tool as well.

Writing Website Copy

We had a slightly different experience with this one, but my feeling is it’s because of how we write website copy and not a reflection on how effective ChatGPT might be in creating copy for website or landing pages.

The website experience we all expect today is a lot more complicated than it used to be. When we visit a website, it should create a feeling and an emotional response to words, images, offers and even interactive experiences.

The days of your website being an online brochure are long gone, and if your current website looks and feels like an online brochure, get in touch with us immediately.

If you want an online brochure website, ChatGPT will deliver the website copy you need. But if you want to create an experience for your visitors that turns them from anonymous visitors into leads and eventually into sales opportunities, this isn’t going to do it.

There’s just too much thinking that goes into how to use the limited real estate of a website page to make that emotional connection and bring that prospect into your ecosystem. There are too many options for that real estate, like video, imagery, interactive elements, personalization and more.

I am sure that one day AI will be able to do it correctly, but that’s not ChatGPT today.

Writing HTML Code

I’m going to mention this because our technical team has been experimenting with ChatGPT and code creation. Honestly, this is a bit over my pay grade, but as an application for this AI tool, it’s interesting to consider it might help developers create code as much as it helps marketers create copy.

This article goes into detail on how ChatGPT created code for a website, and the outcome is similar to some of the copy experiences outlined above. It did a pretty good job but not a complete job.

Again, this might be a nice “fast start” for a website developer. It might provide a better starting point than a blank piece of paper, and it might save time on the overall project. Don’t underestimate the value this shortcut provides – it’s significant.

But it’s still going to require the web developer and designer to work on taking the ChatGPT code and turning it into a highly effective, well-designed and lead-generating website.

Prompts Are The Key

Today, AI does what we tell it to do. Yes, it does it quickly. Yes, it does a pretty good job without tasks. But it still relies on us to ask it the right questions or tell it to do what we want it to do correctly.

As you start to experiment and test this out on your own, take more time to ask and prompt it several times. Even if it provides you with great email copy on the first pass and you’re impressed, ask it to try again.

Then ask it the same task but slightly differently or give more details around what you want. This is going to help you get better at using it and it’s going to produce better results.

Finally, this is AI, so it’s learning every time someone uses it. Right now, it’s probably getting millions of prompts every day.

By the way, I asked ChatGPT about the prompts and got this answer:

As an AI language model, ChatGPT does not keep track of the number of prompts it receives every day. However, ChatGPT is designed to respond to as many prompts as possible, 24/7, and can handle a large volume of prompts and inquiries.

And with some standard Googling, I found an article that reports over 100 million people are using ChatGPT. It's just a matter of time before it takes over the world. Hello, Skynet.