What Marketers Need to Know About ChatGPT

If you’ve been on the Internet for the last few months, chances are you’ve heard about ChatGPT. The new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot has become so popular that it’s even faced site outages as recently as this month. But that hasn’t stopped users (Vibrant included) from utilizing the tool. ChatGPT is quickly becoming a handy asset for marketers—offering copywriting, market research, language translations, and more. However, there’s a lot more to the platform that could be utilized. So, I decided to take a deeper look at the AI language model to see what marketers need to know about ChatGPT and what we can expect in the future.

Rather than conducting the typical research I usually do for blogs, I went straight to the source—ChatGPT itself. I asked the chatbot a series of questions about the program to see how honestly it would answer. To my surprise, ChatGPT gave me answers to all my questions and more. Let’s take a look at what I discovered.

What does ChatGPT do exactly?

ChatGPT is a large language model created by OpenAI. It’s designed to interact with humans conversationally while using advanced language processing capabilities to understand the nuances of our communication. The AI bot can understand and respond to anything from text and speech to images and engaging conversations. ChatGPT mentioned its most impressive feature is its “ability to learn and improve over time” as it interacts with more humans and receives different types of inputs. That means it can engage in interactions like customer service, educational training, and more. 

How consumers are using ChatGPT

Everyday consumers are using the platform much differently than a marketer would. However, it’s important to understand how ChatGPT is most commonly utilized so you can adapt your marketing as such. Most people are using the platform as a virtual assistant to help with productivity. For example, users can create reminders or to-do lists by interacting with a chatbot powered by ChatGPT. Simply put, ChatGPT is automating everyday tasks for users.

One thing that stuck out to me is how individuals are using the AI tool for personalized recommendations. Once ChatGPT gets an understanding of the user’s preferences and past behaviors, it can generate recommendations for products or services. But does this mean ChatGPT will be the next search engine? According to ChatGPT, it’s not likely to become a standalone search engine option. However, it could be used to enhance the capabilities of existing search engines and provide a more personalized and conversational search experience for users. We’ll talk more about this in a bit.

How can marketers use ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is proving to be a useful tool for marketers in any industry. From writing blogs and social media posts to language translations and research, the chatbot can help you save time and resources. It’s important to note, however, that ChatGPT is not intended to replace a human marketer—it’s meant to streamline mundane tasks so we can focus on the important stuff like strategy and branding.

The AI tool can best be utilized for delivering the initial structure of a blog post or for ideas on taglines or advertisements. It can essentially streamline your research and create an effective baseline for the content you’re creating. For example, you can tell ChatGPT to write tagline options for a community-focused credit union in Albany, NY, and it will provide a handful of general options. From there, you can tell the chatbot to get more specific or even have it write a mission statement based on a tagline that you like.

ChatGPT and the future of SEO

Earlier we talked about personalized recommendations and how ChatGPT will affect search engine optimization. Though the AI language model isn’t intended to be a standalone search method, it can be integrated into existing search engines to improve their natural language processing capabilities and provide more personalized search results for users. So, a search engine could use ChatGPT to generate more conversational and natural-sounding responses to use queries, or to provide more personalized results based on a user’s search history and preferences.

With this in mind, marketers should consider using ChatGPT to help improve their organic SEO in the following ways:

1. Voice search optimization: ChatGPT’s natural language processing capabilities can help search engines understand spoken queries more accurately. 
2. Featured snippets: ChatGPT can help businesses optimize their content to be more “snippet-friendly,” using clear, concise language and providing answers to common questions.
3. Long-tail keyword optimization: ChatGPT’s ability to process complex language inputs means that search engines may start to place less emphasis on exact match keywords and more emphasis on long-tail keywords and natural language queries. This means that brands will need to optimize their content for long-tail keywords and use more conversational language in their content.
4. Content optimization: ChatGPT can help businesses create more engaging and personalized content, which can improve their SEO rankings. By using ChatGPT to create content that is tailored to their audience’s interests and needs, businesses can increase their chances of appearing in the top search engine results.

ChatGPT pitfalls and concerns

Marketers should be aware of the pitfalls of ChatGPT, too. The language model doesn’t have access to real-time or current market research data, but it can provide stats up to its knowledge cutoff date of September 2021. This means the information you’re pulling for content or market research may not be entirely accurate or reflective of current trends. That’s why double-checking sources could be important for certain types of projects. 

Ethics is another concern for ChatGPT users. Though, the AI language model did make it a point to share how it is making efforts to prioritize ethics. For example, it is working to mitigate bias in ChatGPT and other AI tools by addressing issues related to data selection and representation. This includes working to improve the diversity of the data used to train the tool and implementing techniques to identify and address biases in the language outputs. Not to mention the tool made it clear that transparency is important when disclosing data sources and how it processes and generates language outputs.

What should we expect next?

One of the big takeaways from my chat with ChatGPT is that more integrations are on the horizon. Not only will it have a role in search engines, but it will likely be used to power more virtual assistants and customer service communication tools. Especially as the AI tool learns more about the nuances of human language, we should be seeing more companies utilizing this to streamline transactions and customer chats. However, as ChatGPT puts it, “It is important that we continue to use these tools ethically and responsibly, to ensure that they are used for the benefit of society as a whole.”

At Vibrant Brands, ChatGPT is not the only AI tool we’re utilizing and evaluating. As a marketing agency, we prioritize learning the latest in technology and trends so our clients can be ahead of the curve and the leaders in their own industries. Want to learn more about how AI can be used in your marketing? Contact us today!