How OpenAI Can Help Marketers

Most marketers are using ChatGPT wrong.
They’re treating it like a better search engine, another Google that saves them 20 minutes. That’s
not where the real value is.
OpenAI’s tools can be valuable if you stop thinking of it as your job and instead think of it as your
database for work that does not require you. Here are things that actually work:

1) Research synthesis

If you have 47 competitor sites, 12 industry reports, and 200
interview transcripts from customers – reading all of this would take time and that time is
not available. ChatGPT can read it all in minutes and identify patterns you would not
have. You still get to determine what matters, but you are not swimming in the data.

2) Hypothesis generation

You need to generate 10 campaign angles to test. You can take
two hours to brainstorm and come up with 10 angles or take 10 minutes for ChatGPT to
generate options for you to work through. You still select the winning concept, but you
have more options, and better, bolder options than you originally developed.
3) Data interpretation. You observed a 15% drop in conversion rate last week. Take the
data, put it in chatGPT, and synthesize the changes and ask what patterns it sees. The
patterns it finds do not replace you, but it certainly identifies things faster than your
building dashboard rows.

4) Content repurposing

You wrote a blog post. So now you need it prepared as a linked
post, three tweets and an email. Let AI prepare the first draft. You edit it to sound like
you, but you are editing vs. staring at a blank page.

Here’s what doesn’t work:

1) Asking it to write out your strategy is a bit silly. It does not know your customers, your
competitive position, or your business model. It will give you ideas that sound smart but
are generic enough that they won’t truly apply.

2) Trusting it unquestioned. AI hallucinates. It makes up statistics, makes up sources, and
gets things wrong. You must check.

3) Using it instead of your judgment. ChatGPT offers you options. It cannot tell you which of
the options is right for your circumstances.

The marketers who are gleaning value out of OpenAI are not asking the AI to do their job for
them. They are asking the AI to do the low-value work, so they can spend time on the decisions that are true human decisions.