AI has taken the whole digital marketing world by storm, and the world for that matter. Nowadays, so many of your favorite apps and tools have some AI component to them now or service you can get if you pay a premium.
And now with Chat GPT 4 and 5 and other iterations to come, there’s gonna be many exciting changes to the digital marketing landscape.
In this post, I provide my perspective on ChatGPT and similar AI tools and how it’s made my life as a digital marketer even more productive than ever, while also criticizing people who think that it’s a cure all for all their problems and an excuse to not learn the fundamentals of marketing, copywriting, human psychology and buyer behavior, and other things that only a human being can have the creativity to produce wonderful outcomes for lead generation.
So with that said, let’s dive right in.
Why is AI So Useful to Marketers?
We have to understand that a lot of marketing used to take a lot more time. I remember when I first started as a digital marketer how repetitive a lot of the tasks could get, whether it be making 20-30 location pages for a client or creating meta descriptions for very similar products over and over on a Shopify or WooCommerce store.
It’s not that these things are difficult or anything, but the amount of time you spend on these tasks adds up and there are so many other things to spend time on in digital marketing to get good results for your clients.
Here comes ChatGPT on the scene late last year, and it takes everything by storm.
There’s a reason why it became one of the most popular applications in such a short amount of time.
All the years of big data research and machine learning rolled into this super convenient tool that anyone can have access to.
And if you pay a small fee of 20 bucks a month, you’re able to send the latest model up to 50 messages before you reach the limit and must wait a while to use it again.
Various Marketing Things You Can Do with ChatGPT Right Now
Not only that, but there’s so much you can do with it too such as:
1. Generating ideas for new blog posts and keywords
2. Data analysis where you paste data from Google Search Console, Google Analytics, etc and instantly, ChatGPT analyzes the data for you and gives you incredible insights that would have costed a fortune to get just a few years ago, kinda like how Apple came out with their series of M1 chips back in late 2020 and how that has also changed the game in their respective industry.
3. You can talk to ChatGPT about literally any question you might have about marketing and it will give you an answer. Think of it like Instant Quora, but at your fingertips. You no longer need to search far and wide for the answers to your questions you might have that day. You can even ask it some of the weirdest questions ever and viola! Answer received in seconds.
4. You can post ad copy and blog post copy you write and it will also give you more ideas for future blog posts in a similar vein.
5. And my favorite thing about ChatGPT in context with marketing is that you can bounce different ideas you have about marketing strategies with it and it feels like you’re talking to someone in the room. This makes such a huge difference because you might have an idea for a new marketing campaign but you just need reassurance that what you have in mind is the right way to go. ChatGPT will guide you in the right direction if you’re on track and make other suggestions you might have overlooked. It can be a big confidence booster when used in the right ways.
So yeah, ChatGPT can do a ton of amazing things. It’s literally like a human calculator you can use to get ideas when you’re stuck or just go over some marketing and content strategies you have and see what else it suggests.
What ChatGPT Reminds Me Of
You wanna know what it reminds me of specifically?
The first thing to come to mind is the computer that Courage from Courage the Cowardly Dog would talk to whenever he had problems. Sure, the computer on that show was always mean and snarky to him but it was able to automatically generate answers for him right on the spot. Not bad for 1999! They say The Simpsons predicted a bunch of trends, but I dunno. They got some competition from the lovable pink dog!
And another thing this reminds me of is Galileo from the classic TV show Recess. Gretchen, one of my favorite characters on the show and also voiced by the incredible Ashley Johnson (you might have also heard her as Terra from Teen Titans back in the day), would turn to her PDA and Galileo would appear, complete with his own personality and voice, ready to assist her with whatever she needed.
It was really cool seeing that sort of stuff as a kid, and now I feel like all the fantasies I had about talking computers is kind of a reality now.
And it’s not like any of this is new.
We’ve had virtual assistants and tools like that people used to make their lives a bit easier, but never anything where you can actually get a precise answer to whatever you need right there!
I think that’s the main difference and why this program took off the way it did. The functionality and speed of ChatGPT are what make it work so well.
But enough praise. Let’s talk about the downsides of ChatGPT and how it can be used wrong!
The Downsides of ChatGPT and AI Tools for Digital Marketers
ChatGPT and AI tools aren’t perfect. You can’t just tell it to spit out a blog post that’s anywhere near as good as how a human would have written it. Somehow you can always tell that it was generated by AI unless you do some heavy editing to make it your own.
A lot of times, the sentences won’t sound natural enough and you still end having to write quite a bit anyway to get what you want. The proofreading process has not changed much in this regard.
You still need to understand best copywriting and content writing practices in order for ChatGPT to really benefit your workflow if you’re going to use it for that purpose.
Otherwise, your marketing efforts are going to fail. It’s no different than a pay per click advertiser thinking that Google’s Smart Campaigns are gonna do all the work for them.
Google doesn’t have any rules against using AI generated content, but the users who go to your site are very picky with how things are written. They can tell when something was obviously written by AI and wasn’t edited to make sense for the end user. Your engagement rates could drop and less people might come to your site anyway, so Google will definitely take notice either way.
The Silver Lining
However, I think because of AI tools, there are going to be many more opportunities for would be marketers to come.
It’s the same old story I’ve seen time after time in this space.
Some fancy new tool comes along, everyone says it’s the best thing since sliced bread. And inevitably, someone tries to game the system and use it for nefarious purposes. Remember all the horrible spun content that was everywhere on websites in 2017?
I think even then, people were using tools like this to generate content but nowhere near as powerful, so it was a lot more obvious this was being done, so Google would crack down hard on these people breaking their terms of service.
The people who expect quick and easy shortcuts from ChatGPT are the same people who will get blown out eventually, and then the folks that actually studied and learned marketing from the ground up will actually benefit.
I surmise that there’s gonna be lots of job openings for people just to fix poorly written AI content. Maybe there will even be a rise in Editor jobs just to make sure that the content is good and ready to go.
Who knows what the next few years are gonna bring?
All I know is that we’re in for a wild ride.
Thank you for reading today. If you like these insights, check out my blog for more content! I appreciate it.
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