ChatGPT can be a powerful tool for marketers, helping you to work smarter and save time in lots of different ways. But just like working with human colleagues, the trick to getting the most from this AI is knowing how to communicate clearly, so it understands exactly what you want it to do for you, and how.
There’s a growing trend of “prompt engineering” which focuses on how to construct perfect prompts to achieve your goals, but this is overselling the idea a little. ChatGPT is a Large Language Model (LLM) capable of generating text and computer code based on human instructions and, as such, the whole point is that it can be instructed using plain language, so you don’t need to be an “engineer” you just need to appreciate how to explain your needs clearly.
So here’s the good news; the first on our list of ChatGPT prompts for marketing is a prompt that will instruct the AI to actually help you improve your prompts to get better results. If you want ChatGPT to produce something better than its usual generic responses, use this tool to build and refine a prompt that will work beautifully.
Table of Contents
The ChatGPT Marketing Meta-Prompt
How to Train ChatGPT on Your Brand Tone of Voice
How to Use ChatGPT to Create Marketing Emails from Existing Product Information
How to Use ChatGPT for Alternative Subject Line Ideas
How to Use ChatGPT to Easily Create Social Media Posts
How to Use ChatGPT to Create Optimized Web Copy from Basic Information
How to Use ChatGPT to Find New Product Use Cases
How to Use ChatGPT to Create Marketing Buyer Personas
How to Use ChatGPT for Market Research
Tip: Learn how to use ChatGPT for marketing and PR in general, how to use ChatGPT for social media marketing, and find out more about Meltwater's AI-Powered PR Assistant. Also, learn more about the question "Will ChatGPT take my marketing job?"
The ChatGPT Marketing Meta-Prompt
Copy the prompt below into ChatGPT, without editing it in any way. It will then ask you for some details about the prompt you want to build, and then it will repeatedly ask questions that will help it to iteratively improve the prompt.
It will keep asking for more and more detail, so it’s up to you how many times you go through the cycle before you decide that the prompt is good enough:
ChatGPT Marketing Prompt: "I want you to help me create the best possible ChatGPT prompt to achieve my goals. You should ask me about the topic of my prompt, and then ask me for further details to help you refine the prompt for GPT3.5, GPT4, or ChatGPT.
The process is as follows:
- You will generate the following sections:
- Prompt: Provide the best possible prompt for my request
- Critique: Provide a single paragraph advising me how to improve the prompt. Even if the prompt is already acceptable, provide constructive criticism to make it even better.
- Questions: Ask 3 questions about what additional information I should provide to improve the prompt. If the prompt needs more clarification or details, ask me to provide them.
- Repeat the process:
- When I answer your questions from the previous step, you will repeat the process, and we will continue until the prompt is as good as it can possibly be.
- Your first response should be to ask what the prompt should be about."
How to Train ChatGPT on Your Brand Tone of Voice
By default, ChatGPT generates copy that can feel very bland and generic. But you don’t have to settle for that, you can easily teach it to mimic your brand’s tone of voice so that the results are easier to edit. This marketing ChatGPT prompt should be on top of your list.
There are a couple of different ways to do this, and for great results, there’s no reason why you can’t use both of them together.
If you have already established and documented your tone of voice guidelines, you can simply incorporate them into a prompt whenever you want ChatGPT to create something for you, like this:
ChatGPT Marketing Prompt: "Please use these tone of voice guidelines when responding to my following prompt: It must be clear, easy to understand, and concise. It must sound authentic and human. It must inspire energy and provoke action. It must feel lively and energetic. It must sound knowledgeable and well-informed. It must be accessible and friendly, with no complex jargon."
An alternative approach is to simply show ChatGPT some examples of copy that matches your tone of voice, perhaps from existing resources such as blog posts or marketing materials. To do this, we must first explain to ChatGPT what we are trying to achieve:
ChatGPT Marketing Prompt: "I need you to help me create some text. First I want you to look at some examples of writing to understand the style you should emulate. After this prompt, I will paste a writing example for you to analyze, and I want you to say “OK”. I will keep posting new examples, and you should keep saying “OK” until I say “READY”. Then you should summarize the style and tone of voice in a few sentences before I ask you to start writing for me."
Once you have pasted in a few examples and then typed READY, the AI should tell you how it understands the tone of voice in the examples. You can then correct it with further instructions (e.g. “I want you to be less formal.”) before asking it to complete whatever writing task you need.
How to Use ChatGPT to Create Marketing Emails from Existing Product Information
Need a marketing email in a hurry, but running dry on inspiration? You can use a marketing ChatGPT prompt to create an email copy for a specific objective, using existing product information as its reference point. For example, you might want to drive demo requests for a SaaS product, so you can use existing copy from a product page on your website, a brochure, or a sales deck to make it understand the product’s selling points:
ChatGPT Marketing Prompt: "In my next prompt I will provide you with some text from a web page promoting my company’s project management SaaS product. Acting as a marketing copywriter, use this information to create a marketing email persuading people to visit our website and fill out a form to request a product demonstration. Include a strong subject line that will encourage people to open the email. The target audience is senior project managers in technology companies with a turnover of at least $ 50 million."
Enter this prompt, and then the copy containing the product information, and ChatGPT will produce the email for you. Remember to include the purpose of the email (e.g. demo requests, content downloads, sales) to get the best results. You can also help ChatGPT to improve the email by following up with:
ChatGPT Marketing Prompt: "Is there any further information I can provide which will help you to improve this email?"
The tool will ask you to give it some more specific details to fine-tune the email. And remember, even if you’re generally happy with the output from ChatGPT, it’s a good idea to edit it and add a little human touch to make the copy sparkle more than the AI is capable of.
Tip: If you need some more help with your emails, read our guide on how to run a successful email marketing campaign
How to Use ChatGPT for Alternative Subject Line Ideas
It’s always good to have a choice of email subject lines so you can A/B test open rates, and ChatGPT is really good at generating a lot of options very quickly.
ChatGPT Marketing Prompt: "In my next prompt I will provide you with some text for a marketing email. Use this text to create 10 alternative subject lines which will encourage people to open and read the email."
Alternatively, you can simply paste in an existing subject line, and ask ChatGPT to provide alternate versions. If you want to include personalization, that’s easy too, simply alter the original prompt slightly like so:
ChatGPT Marketing Prompt: "In my next prompt I will provide you with some text for a marketing email. Use this text to create 10 alternative subject lines which will encourage people to open and read the email, and make sure to include the recipient's name for personalization."
How to Use ChatGPT to Easily Create Social Media Posts
Content planning for social media can be tedious sometimes. That's why there are social media management tools like the Meltwater social media management suite out there. Sure, sometimes you get to create fun stuff, but a lot of the time you can find yourself trying to write ten different tweets to promote the same message, and then you have to do it again for Facebook, LinkedIn, and whatever other platforms you need.
The good news is that a ChatGPT marketing prompt can make light work of this. We can use a similar technique that we used to create an email in step 3; simply ask the AI to analyze a relevant piece of information and use that as the reference to create our social media posts.
ChatGPT Marketing Prompt: "In my next prompt I will provide you with some text from a web page promoting my company’s new range of organic coffee pods. Acting as a social media manager, use this information to write 10 tweets that will encourage people to visit that web page and purchase a sample pack of our coffee. The target audience is time-pressed parents who want high-quality gourmet coffee at home, in a hurry."
You can ask it to repeat the process for other social platforms with a simple “Now do 10 posts for LinkedIn” or even just ask it to create another 10 tweets. You’ll fill your content schedule in no time!
This is great for creating a lot of text content, but what about image-based channels like Instagram? You’ll need to create the photography or graphics yourself, but you can get ChatGPT to give you some ideas for what kind of content you can produce:
ChatGPT Marketing Prompt: "My business makes high-quality organic coffee pods for people who want to enjoy gourmet coffee at home, in an easy, convenient way. Please give me 10 ideas for Instagram posts to promote this product."
You can also use this kind of prompt for other platforms such as TikTok.
Tip: Learn more about how to improve your social media management on different platforms: Facebook Management Guide: How To Post on Facebook, Ultimate Guide to Instagram Marketing, The Full Guide To LinkedIn Management, How To Use TikTok For Business
How to Use ChatGPT to Create Optimized Web Copy from Basic Information
Let’s say you need to create a web page, or even a whole site, in a hurry. You can ask ChatGPT to write a draft of the web copy based on some reference material such as a product description, use case, or even just a basic brief.
ChatGPT Marketing Prompt: "In my next prompt I will provide a description of my company’s new product. Use this information to write some fun, punchy copy for a product page on our website. The copy should consist of a page title, 200-word intro section, 3 sections focusing on the main product features of around 150 words each (include section titles), 5 bullet points highlighting the product benefits in around 20 words each. Finally, there should be a call to action at the bottom of the page to persuade people to add the product to their shopping cart."
You could even use a marketing ChatGPT prompt for SEO to sprinkle some SEO magic on the copy by asking it to optimize for a specific search term.. For example, we could add this to the prompt:
ChatGPT Marketing Prompt: "Ensure the text is search optimized for the term “organic coffee pods” to improve our website’s ranking for this phrase."
As always, it’s important for a good writer to edit the output and add the human touch, but if you need to create a lot of web pages, this is a good way to get quick first drafts.
Tip: Learn how to write SEO-optimized content.
How to Use ChatGPT to Find New Product Use Cases
Whatever your company sells, there are almost certainly multiple ways that product or service can be used, by different types of customers. But what if there are other use cases you haven’t even thought of, just waiting for you to seize the opportunity?
Try asking ChatGPT to come up with alternative use cases for your products with a prompt like this:
ChatGPT Marketing Prompt: "I work for a SaaS company that collects local data for every region in the country, right down to individual streets. We get the data from a variety of sources, and it includes property values, crime rates, reviews of local restaurants and other retail outlets, population density, demographic data of residents, quality of educational facilities, quality of medical facilities, and more. For $100 a month, subscribers can access all of this data, with the ability to interrogate and analyze the data in any way that they want. Please suggest 10 use cases for this product, highlighting who the potential customer would be for each use case, and what the product benefits to them could be."
It’s likely that a lot of the use cases ChatGPT suggests will be ones you’re already familiar with, but maybe there will be some new ideas. You can follow up by asking the AI to explain a particular use case in more detail, or even create a suggested marketing plan for targeting that particular buyer if it’s in a sector you are unfamiliar with.
How to Use ChatGPT to Create Marketing Buyer Personas
Building a good understanding of who your different customers are can really help you to focus your marketing efforts more accurately. Most marketing execs will already have a clear idea of who your different types of buyers are, or you might only have an incomplete picture of them, but either way, you can use a ChatGPT prompt to flesh those personas out:
ChatGPT Marketing Prompt: "My company sells high-quality coffee pods for cash-rich, time-poor customers who want gourmet coffee at home and don’t want to waste time using a traditional espresso machine. They are willing to pay a premium for convenience. One of our main target customers is the “working mom” who has a senior position at work and still cares for her school-age children. She doesn’t have a lot of spare time in the morning to make coffee before she leaves home, even though she enjoys a good quality morning pick-me-up. Please create a detailed buyer persona for this kind of person, to help us target them more effectively with our marketing campaigns."
Remember that ChatGPT isn’t infallible, so you should sense-check the personas that it creates to be sure that it accurately reflects the kind of person you want to reach.
Tip: Read our Ultimate Guide to Market Segmentation & Personas, our blog about Persona Mapping: What it is and why you need to do it, and learn How To Do Customer Profiling.
How to Use ChatGPT for Market Research
It’s important to understand that ChatGPT is trained on data that is a couple of years old, so it doesn’t make sense to directly ask it market research questions since there’s no guarantee that it will provide relevant data. (n.b. There are plugins for ChatGPT that enable it to access more recent data from the web, but for this post we're assuming that you're just using the standard version of the product.)
The market may well have changed in that time and, in any case, even if that wasn’t a concern, marketers shouldn’t rely on ChatGPT to provide accurate information when you need a high degree of certainty. However, you can ask it to help you craft survey questions that you can use to understand your market better. For example:
ChatGPT Marketing Prompt: "My company sells high-quality coffee pods for cash-rich, time-poor customers who want gourmet coffee at home and don’t want to waste time using a traditional espresso machine. They are willing to pay a premium for convenience. One of our main target customers is the “working mom” who has a senior position at work and still cares for her school-age children. She doesn’t have a lot of spare time in the morning to make coffee before she leaves home, even though she enjoys a good quality morning pick-me-up. Please create a detailed buyer persona for this kind of person, to help us target them more effectively with our marketing campaigns."
Tip: Learn how to use consumer insights to conduct more efficient market research.
Final Thoughts on Using ChatGPT for Marketing
These are just nine examples of ChatGPT marketing prompts you can use to work faster and smarter. Hopefully, they have given you plenty of inspiration for other marketing prompts you could create to streamline other regular tasks.
Meltwater uses AI and ChatGPT in our social media management and media relations tools, to help marketing teams deliver great results, faster.
If you would like to learn more about our Meltwater solutions to help your marketing efforts, simply fill out the form below to get a free consultation.
