Meet the marketer’s new friend, ChatGPT

While elespacio’s creative team have been having all kinds of fun with AI image and voice generators, Fabio and Marcel of the digital marketing team have also been doing some experimenting with AI, in this case with ChatGPT. It turns out that it’s not only good for writing resumés and helping students cheat at their essay assignments. It can also help businesses better understand and engage with their customers, improve their marketing strategies and, ultimately, increase sales.

The chatbot that speaks ‘human’

ChatGPT, in case you’ve been living under the sea for the past year, is the AI chatbot released by OpenAI in November 2022. It is a natural language processor that generates human-like, conversational dialogue. 

Originally designed to be integrated into chatbots it’s now being used in marketing, for everything from coming up with newsletter ideas to composing SQL queries, SWOT analysis, SEO keyword research and creating audience personas.

Elespacio’s digital marketing team have been donning the white coats and putting ChatGPT through its paces, carrying out three types of experiments to test how we can use ChatGPT in marketing to benefit our clients.

Experiment 1: The secret of speedy, sparkly spreadsheets

For our first experiment, we used ChatGPT to automate tasks such as creating spreadsheet formulas and optimizing workflows, which used to involve endless copying and pasting and lots of Google research.

Using ChatGPT for these manual tasks not only saved us time but we were also able to perform the kind of technical wizardry that we didn’t previously have the knowledge for.  We even created an API (application programming interface) to connect our email marketing provider with Google Sheets.

The time you save in this way can be spent on reporting and analyzing, gaining insights and optimizing clients’ campaigns.

Experiment 2: Ad copy variations

When it comes to content generation, ChatGPT’s talents are many. Agencies can spend considerable time and resources getting the right words onto the page, optimized and out to the target audience. Handing some of that over to ChatGPT is a game-changer.

When creating ads (Google, PPC, display or social) for example, you need to create lots of copy variations. ChatGPT can help with that – you write an initial version of the ad copy and AI comes up with the different variations. Then you can optimize and test the various versions, and improve the ad’s performance in a much shorter space of time.

Experiment 3: Inspiration for market research and strategy

Looking for market research and strategy ideas usually means Googling case studies and results. But give a marketing brief to ChatGPT and it will give suggestions on who your target audience is, generate ideas for messaging, and even suggest suitable channels.

It means that, when working with a new brand, you can speed up the initial search process and augment your own pool of ideas with AI-generated inspiration. You can then choose whether to implement it, using the judgment and wisdom that you’ve built through your own experience.

What we’ve learned from playtime with ChatGPT

Fundamentally, artificial intelligence is a huge time-saver. It makes you more efficient and allows you to focus on different and innovative ways to serve your clients. It also makes you more creative because in ChatGPT you have another source of inspiration.

And it closes the technical skills gap, allowing you to do things you would have either been unable to do or that would have taken months of research, trial and error.

Our experiments have taught us that AI is not going to take our jobs, or do our jobs. Marketers will not be automated. But automation will make marketers more efficient. The technology behind it will improve, and it will be integrated in advertising tools (as we speak, Google and Microsoft are working on their own AI chat solutions, Bard and Bing). And that can only be good for the businesses we work for and, in the end, good for their customers.

Illustration: Midjourney