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Can ChatGPT Boost Your Marketing? It Depends What You Mean by “Marketing”

Last week, I used ChatGPT to interrogate whether it could be used to help your marketing efforts. Of course, this was slightly disingenuous, but I was interested to see what it might suggest.

For small and medium sized business owners, content marketing has been a revolution. It has provided a strategic and tactical opportunity to build brands, generate leads and provide options for growth. But content marketing requires content – and a not insignificant amount of it.

As you will see from the article generated, there was precious little in terms of insight or direction offered. The article felt like a report on the topic of marketing rather than an investigation of marketing and its potential for business. The article also focused more on the customer support side of marketing rather than brand or demand generation side.

There are ways to address these – including developing more precise prompts or iterating and refining the generated content by responding to content.

But what is clear is that ChatGPT’s understanding of “marketing” as a discipline or profession is limited. This means that to get value out of ChatGPT, we need to be not only more specific, we need to create context for the ChatGPT engine to respond to. And this already starts to feel like something akin to work. 

What we have at the tips of our fingers is a new tool that can help us get our work done. But at this stage it is far from a silver bullet. We’ve got work to do to understand where and how ChatGPT and other AI tools fit within our martech stack.