Understand ChatGPT for Marketing Content

Can you believe that OpenAI’s ChatGPT is less than a year old? You will no doubt have been swept away since, with many jumping on the bandwagon, a billion ultimate ChatGPT cheat sheets. It’s impossible to ignore. There are people using it, people refusing to, and a whole world of opinions based on it.

I use it and I’m not ashamed to admit it. Why would you not take advantage of the latest technology to make you more efficient? I don’t just give ChatGPT a prompt and then post it. I generally use it for ideas, help to rephrase paragraphs I’m not entirely happy with and to begin research. It does often spout out lies, so it’s always worth double-checking that it’s not trying to make you look silly.

The purpose of this article is to help you understand ChatGPT for marketing content. It isn’t a cheat sheet, it’s designed to help you understand how the OpenAI technology works so you can get better results from your prompts. The problem with the plethora of cheat sheets is that they’re all very similar and if we’re all using them, we’ll end up with the same content.

One final note before getting into the meat of this article. ChatGPT should not replace your own research, surveys and voice of customers. It looks at existing data and if we only use ChatGPT, any originality, innovation, and new ideas run the risk of getting lost. Sometimes you need to blaze your own trail.

How Does ChatGPT Work?

I won’t profess to completely understand how ChatGPT works, I’ll ask the beast itself with this prompt –

Can you explain how ChatGPT works in a paragraph please?

Certainly human overlord (I may have added this part for comedic value), ChatGPT is a language model built on the transformer architecture. It operates by tokenizing text inputs into smaller units, representing these units as vectors, and passing them through multiple transformer layers to understand context and relationships between words. Fine-tuning on specific dialogue datasets enhances its ability to generate coherent responses in conversation. When given an input, it generates a sequence of tokens as output, which is then converted into human-readable text. ChatGPT’s responses are based on patterns learned from vast amounts of pre-training data, and it can be deployed in applications like chatbots, virtual assistants, or any natural language understanding and generation tasks

Unless you are highly technical, that paragraph will make little sense to you. There’s an important word in there that can help you understand a little better and that word is vector.

Vector databases are again relatively new and are a fundamental part of how OpenAI and ChatGPT work. Vectors are mathematical representations that allow OpenAI to work with data in a numerical form. For example, the word reading might look something like –

reading = [0.12, -0.45, 0.78, 0.32, ...]

There may be hundreds or even thousands more numbers, but you get the point. These numbers are learned by a machine learning model during training, and words that are similar in meaning or context will have similar vector representations. This allows the model to understand relationships between words and use them in various natural language tasks.

Using reading as an example prompt, book will have a closer vector representation than penguin. This closeness is what you need to understand. OpenAI and ChatGPT aren’t magic or sentient, they simply have a way to organise lots of trained data into a meaningful relationship-aware format that produces amazing results.

However, context is king/queen!

The Importance of Context in ChatGPT Prompts.

Let us once again look at the prompt reading. I’ll give two examples –

Prompt — Give me a sentence describing reading please (I’m always polite, just in case!)

Reading is the act of looking at written words and understanding their meaning, allowing us to explore stories, gain knowledge, and enjoy the magic of words on a page or screen.

Prompt — Give me a sentence describing Reading in Berkshire please

Reading, located in Berkshire, England, is a vibrant town known for its rich history, modern amenities, and picturesque riverside setting along the River Thames.

The additional context in our prompt provides very different results. Reading the town (how vibrant is it?) is obviously very different from reading a book. But without that context, ChatGPT doesn’t know the difference or what you’re referring to. The more context you provide, the more accurate your results will be.

Tips to Get the Most from ChatGPT

There’s no doubt that ChatGPT is a useful tool to generate marketing content and speed up your efficiency. It should not replace original thought and research, but it can help in many ways. There are several ways to make the most out of OpenAI, here are a few tips that I have found useful –

• Use your own context — Cheatsheets can give you pointers, but your own context is worth more. You know your audience, your products/services, and your unique selling points. Write an overview of your businesses in your prompt to let ChatGPT use your own thoughts within its results.
• Tell the robot about your audience — Explain your audience, who they are, what their pains are, and how you overcome them. If your audience is software developers tell ChatGPT, if it is parents then ChatGPT needs to know so it produces more relevant results.
• Tone of voice — Want something humorous or serious? Let ChatGPT know the tone you want to go for so you have an appropriate tone for your audience.
• Not everything has to be an article or blog — Try a different angle from your prompts. For example, you might say, I’m doing a presentation to business owners who have no knowledge of search engine optimisation, put together a presentation detailing the foundations and what they could do to boost their search performance. I personally like this format as it structures the response really well.
• Get ChatGPT to try a little role play — You can get ChatGPT to impersonate different people, pretend you’re a rocket scientist, pretend you are a top chef or something relevant to your market. Get the machine to walk in your shoes.

The Most Important Takeaway

Your context is worth more than any cheat sheet. By all means, use a cheat sheet to give you ideas, but in order to get the most from ChatGPT, you need your own context and there is no one better to do that than you.

Give it a go and see what results you get.