It’s one thing to play MadLibs with ChatGPT or explore its must-see recommendations for your trip to Bali—and another to tap the bot for valuable copywriting assistance. The stakes are somewhat higher, after all, when it comes to creating standout content for your brand.
To use ChatGPT for help with email campaigns, product descriptions, or keyword research, it’s crucial to know how to prompt the tool to deliver workable results—a.k.a., solid first-draft fodder you can whittle into on-brand content that’s powerful, polished, and persuasive.
Here are some strategic tips from our copywriting team on how to craft AI chatbot prompts for results that benefit your marketing efforts.
Write for your audience.
Audiences can sniff out the slightest whiff of inauthenticity in content. Customers purchase when they feel understood—a big reason why empathy and specificity are so crucial to successful marketing. And since ChatGPT is, well, a robot, its inherent lack of human empathy is perhaps the biggest hurdle to overcome when using it to help you market to humans.
Sure, ChatGPT will kindly apologize when it’s made an error and admit it can be biased or inaccurate—both great features of its design. But when it comes to channeling an audience’s needs and concerns and reflecting those in responsive and compelling copy, our friend ChatGPT needs some explicit help from humans who understand important elements of communication like tone, voice, empathy, and nuance.
For quality content that appeals to your audience—and doesn’t turn them off with repetition, misplaced colloquialisms, or out-of-context phrases—try these tips when creating AI chatbot prompts:
- Tell it who it is. Be clear in your prompt what voice you want ChatGPT to channel. Are you an entrepreneur writing to business leaders about the importance of sleep to productivity? Then start with something like: “You’re a health-conscious entrepreneur who believes quality sleep will help improve workplace productivity and satisfaction.” This will elicit a much more specific and tailored response than simply directing ChatGPT to write a blog about why sleep is essential to productivity.
- Be specific about tone. The right tone is essential to any piece of content. Are you writing a series of friendly, informal sales emails to customers? Or creating a pitch deck to introduce your tech startup to possible investors? Help ChatGPT capture not only what you want to say but how you want to say it. The health-conscious entrepreneur might include in their prompt: “Craft a smart, professional blog for business leaders about how to prioritize employee wellness and encourage healthier habits, like getting enough sleep each night.”
- Give it an audience. Just as you can assign ChatGPT a role to play, you can let the bot know for whom its message should resonate. Consider audience demographics, interests, and geographic locations when crafting a clear prompt. The health-conscious entrepreneur might further specify their blog’s target audience by adding to their prompt something like: “Aim the blog post at an audience of business leaders interested in attracting more millennial and Gen-Z employees who prioritize work-life balance.”
- Preempt the bot’s reliance on clichés. ChatGPT and other large language models were trained on vast amounts of pre-existing text, which makes them susceptible to—and even reliant upon—clichés in their responses. While it’s unlikely that your prompt can coach all the clichés out of ChatGPT, you can direct the bot to avoid them wherever possible. This should save you time during revision and prevent your eyes from rolling too far back into your head as you read the response.
If you’re the health-conscious entrepreneur looking to pen a dynamic post, here’s your winning AI chatbot prompt:
You’re a health-conscious entrepreneur who believes quality sleep will help improve workplace productivity and satisfaction. Craft a smart, professional blog for business leaders about how to prioritize employee wellness and encourage healthier habits, like getting enough sleep each night. Aim the blog post at an audience of business leaders interested in attracting more millennial and Gen-Z employees who prioritize work-life balance. Please do not use clichés or metaphors.
Rinse, revise, repeat.
Even with a strategic prompt, you’ll need to revise ChatGPT’s output for sentence fluency, structure, rhythm, humor, rhetorical flourish, and other essential elements of quality writing. And be sure to weed out repetition, errors, biases, and data hallucinations before attaching any content to your brand. But a clear and detailed prompt will give you a head start!
For content that aligns across projects and departments, it can help to create a master prompt that includes details like brand voice, mission, values, and company history. That way, you can make sure a coordinated and compelling brand message is behind all your emails, product descriptions, and social media campaigns. For consistency across channels, share the master prompt with any employees using ChatGPT to write for your brand.
To improve your ranking in search engines, try out these AI chatbot prompts geared specifically toward finding high-performing SEO keywords:
- List 10 great keywords for [cloud-based analytics platforms].
- What are the best keywords for health insurance plans targeted to small business owners?
- Write a meta description for a blog post using the primary keyword “legal consultation.”
- Find the top 5 keywords related to sustainable real estate.
With AI chatbot prompts that are strategic, SEO-optimized, on-brand, and tailored to your audience, you can help ensure you’re publishing content that’s consistent across channels and aligned with your business goals.
Remember the relationship.
Technology develops and evolves as time marches forward, but one thing never changes: Customers are in a relationship with your brand. Eyes and ears wide open, they’re constantly judging your brand’s authenticity and determining its trustworthiness. And earning your customers’ trust—and maintaining it—starts with words. Words that excite, words that encourage, words that empathize. Words that serve as the connective tissue between your brand and its customers.
ChatGPT’s remarkable processing abilities and speed can impress us into forgetting the basics: It’s a machine that requires clear direction to reach its full potential. Simply put, if you want the machine to produce clear and specific responses you can use to market your brand, you need to provide it with clear and specific prompts.
And to create truly original, strategic content that cuts through the noise and grabs your audience by the hand, enlist the help of a human writer’s hand in crafting it.
Want to create strategic AI chatbot prompts—and pitch-perfect content that propels customers to act? Contact the MarketSmiths team today.
