I tried ChatGPT as a marketer. What I learned, and what any business owner should know.

If you know me, you'll know I'm all about experimenting!

If you keep hearing about ChatGPT but aren’t sure what it is (only that it will take all our jobs within 5 years 😅), it's an AI technology (an app) that can understand and write human language.

To take it straight to marketing, it can be used to write social media posts, articles, blog posts, even emails. You can type in a question or ask it to explain something, plus other uses.

I tried it just to see what happens.

Here’s what I did, what I learned, and what any business owner should know.

I asked it to write a blog post on B2B marketing best practices. Basically, I wanted to see how in-depth, comprehensive, and creative the piece would be. Below is what it produced:

Then I asked it to write a follow-up email to a warm sales lead:

Pretty cool, though the outputs were a big generic (to be fair, I only did the free trial, which limited me to 3 uses). I’m sure it can get really smart and more specific the more it’s used (it wouldn't have become so popular otherwise), which is incredibly intriguing for any business!

My takeaways from my first time trying ChatGPT (as a novice, but I’m looking forward to learning more):

1. It’s only as good as the user. If you’re already writing generic/lazy/non-creative stuff, then that’s what you’ll get.
2. It’s not a copy-and-paste activity (though this idea is frightening educational institutions all over!). The results leave a lot to be desired from my brief attempt, but do provide a framework to build on and add your own spin to.
3. You still have to have good ideas going in! And coming up with copywriting ideas is the hardest part requiring the most strategy and skill.
4. The more complicated or truly innovative the subject matter/business, the better you would need to be as the user (and the more questionable the output might be when it comes to technical material)
5. Its widespread use will probably dilute content creation and even search/Google, requiring businesses to push the envelope and be even more original, creative, and authentic to their brand voice than ever before.

I have a lot to learn, but figured this breakdown might be helpful to others who are also new to ChatGPT, including my life sciences business leaders.

The bottom line is that like any new technology, ChatGPT seems scary (creepy?) initially, but it seems like it’ll be more like an extension of an already skilled business leader/marketer/professional than an apples to apples replacement. At least for now!

Would you try ChatGPT for your business? Why/why not?