ChatGPT burst onto the scene with little warning. Few knew what the Microsoft and Elon Musk-backed artificial intelligence startup OpenAI had developed or how quickly it would become one of the most impactful technology stories of the day.
Public response to the multipurpose chatbot has been overwhelming, with over a million people signing up to use it within five days of its release. By January of this year, that user base grew to over 100 million, generating untold numbers of school papers, song lyrics, blog posts, computer code, language translations and marketing content for individuals and businesses worldwide.
Marketing With ChatGPT
How could AI copywriting affect your practice? For many financial advisors, the clear answer is that it will help with content marketing. Because ChatGPT can quickly generate content for a range of audiences and marketing objectives, its work is already reaching investors and growing businesses.
Think of it this way: Using ChatGPT is not unlike hiring a new copywriter with an uncanny ability to write anything you want within seconds. They’ll be a bit green and will need plenty of help to do their job well, but they’re also available around the clock and at virtually no cost.
Ready to get started? Navigate your web browser to chat.openai.com/chat and create an account. Your new assistant is ready and waiting.
1. Introduce Yourself: The best way to get to know ChatGPT might be the same way you’d get to know any new employee. Introduce yourself and talk about your practice and marketing objectives. If you’re curious, ask the program questions about itself and its capabilities. ChatGPT is persistent (unless instructed to forget previous instructions), meaning that everything you teach it influences how it interacts with you. When you spend time with ChatGPT, not only are you developing a model of how it works, but it’s also developing a model of you and what you want.
2. Ask ChatGPT to Analyze Your Marketing: You might have a “brand book” on hand, especially if you’ve conducted any exercises with a marketing consultant or a similar expert. Such documents establish your branding elements—your tone, mission statement, market position, identity and values. It’s a resource designed to ensure your brand consistency and quality and attract clients to your practice.
If you’re like most financial advisors, you might not have a brand book or an interest in developing one. Even so, you still likely have some marketing examples that represent your identity and goals. So take some of that material, whatever you feel represents you, and then copy and paste it into ChatGPT. When that’s done, ask the program to analyze it for your brand guidelines.
Then look at what the chatbot gives you back. You’ll likely get back an excellent example of the ways the interface understands your content. This is the beginning of a relationship with the software, and these first instructions will be the basis for similar material in the future. In short, if you want ChatGPT to help you with your marketing, teach it to mimic your best work.
3. Iterate, Iterate, Iterate: Again, think of this first set of instructions as just the starting point. What if you didn’t get what you were hoping for the first time? Don’t worry. One of the most powerful elements of ChatGPT is that it is coachable, meaning you can ask it to refine and improve on each result. If the first result is too short or formal or otherwise not what you’d hoped for, simply ask the chatbot to rewrite, addressing the aspects you want to change. Sometimes it gets things perfect on the first try, but many times, it needs a few iterations to get closer to the point at which you can move off-line and edit the work to a final stage. Here’s a simple example: If you ask it to write you a social post for Father's Day and it produces a paragraph that has a formal tone, you can ask it to rewrite the post in a more casual, fun tone and also to include emojis or add a fun fact. Bottom line, it takes feedback really well, and the more feedback you give it, the better the outcome.
4. Repurpose Marketing Content: As excellent as ChatGPT is at creating new content, it is even better at repurposing existing content. Repurposing is as old as content marketing, and it’s one of the most powerful tools in a marketer’s arsenal.
Here are some things you can ask ChatGPT to do to this end:
• Summarize a popular news article for a podcast script;
• Analyze a high-performing blog post and write a social media comment or picture caption to promote it on LinkedIn, including hashtags;
• Rewrite a new client welcome letter in a warmer tone;
• Generate new landing page content;
• Add a conclusion paragraph summarizing key points to an unfinished blog post.
5. Beware of These Shortfalls: Your new artificial intelligence copywriter isn’t perfect. It has several performance issues you should know about.
• It isn’t good at fact-checking. In ChatGPT’s enthusiasm to write everything you ask for, the program tends to misstate facts, misunderstand content and sometimes make things up entirely.
• It isn’t up to date. The official ChatGPT training library cutoff is September 2021, meaning it “knows” very little about anything that happened within the last year and a half.
• It doesn’t provide sources or understand any of the guidelines set by the SEC or Finra, so you must be careful to use it with caution to ensure you adhere to all copyright rules and compliance regulations.
• It doesn’t know marketing best practices. There is a skill to writing social posts, emails, blogs, etc. that drive engagement with your target audience, calm clients’ nerves, or pique the interest of prospects.
Dos And Don’ts
There are a number of things you should do or keep in mind when working with this new technology to help you get the best results.
• Ask the platform to edit content you’ve already created. ChatGPT excels at customizing existing content to your voice and can provide pithy summaries of longer pieces. As a bonus, this approach also eliminates many of your fact-checking risks, since you’ve already worked on the content before.
• Don’t expect to get it right the first time. A good output usually requires some back-and-forth refinement and editing.
• Fact-check everything! ChatGPT tends to generate statistics and other information that might not hold up to closer scrutiny.
• Edit your content for compliance as well as marketing. ChatGPT doesn’t understand compliance rules, even when prompted, and might sneak in promissory language or some other wording that just doesn’t pass muster.
• Watch for new integrations. Companies across multiple industries are rushing to develop software integrations that make up for ChatGPT’s shortfalls, and these will make it easier to use this powerful tool. Keep an eye out for the latest and greatest.
Conclusion
I hope these tips help you better understand ChatGPT’s strengths, weaknesses and powerful potential. This isn’t the first time a disruptive technology has promised important changes in our work and lives (think of pocket calculators and the internet). You’re going to hear some people talk about the downsides of ChatGPT or say we shouldn’t use it. But eventually the benefits will outweigh the drawbacks, and we won’t be able to imagine a world without it.
I recently emailed Bob Veres, the well-known author and industry thought leader, who summed it up nicely. “It’s funny; I looked at ChatGPT and found absolutely nothing to worry about,” he said. “It seems to do a good job of pulling a lot of data together from sources on the web and organizing it pretty well into a plausible communication structure.”
Still, he added, “I don’t think AI is very good at interviewing people, asking relevant questions, combining their answers with the needs and interests of an audience, and then producing content that doesn’t exist anywhere on the cloud.”
If you’re interested in jumping in with other early adopters, remember to use the technology for what it’s good at. Be cautious and aware of what it isn’t good at.
Whatever it is, whenever you seek out technology, you should make sure it’s something that’s helping you with the business processes you already have.
Susan Theder is the chief marketing and experience officer at FMG Suite.