How To Use ChatGPT for Marketing: The Do’s and Don’ts

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is an AI-powered chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched in 2022. It’s not your average chatbot that follows the scripted flow and provides generic copy-and-paste responses. ChatGPT can engage in conversations that feel natural, like you’re talking to a real human, and an expert in any given area, marketing included. By January 2023, this AI chatbot became the fastest-growing consumer app in history, gaining over 100 million users in just two months. 

As of September 2024, ChatGPT’s website is the 11th most visited in the world, with 3.1 billion monthly visits.

While many have raised concerns about the potential downsides of the tech (“it dumbs us down,” “it steals our jobs,” “it spreads misinformation,” etc.), the app’s popularity just keeps growing. From students writing theses to lawyers preparing for court cases, people are using ChatGPT in ways that were hard to imagine just a few years ago. Marketers, in particular, are appreciating its potential for tasks like content creation and idea generation.

Love it or hate it, ChatGPT and AI in email marketing or any other marketing is here to stay. OpenAI’s recent $6.6 billion funding round — the largest in venture capital history — puts its valuation at an insane $157 billion. And this lump sum seems like a good start for “reshape-the-future-of-work”.

7 ways to use ChatGPT for marketing (with prompts)

A Salesforce study found that 51% of marketers are already using generative AI, with another 22% about to get started. This means that every three out of four marketers are embracing this technology. While many people are using AI, a good number of marketers feel like they’re still fumbling in the dark when it comes to using it. According to another Salesforce research, 39% of marketers don’t know how to use generative AI safely, and 43% aren’t sure how to get the most value out of it. 

If you share this sentiment you’ve come to the right place. If not for full-scale training, but at least for inspiration and ideas about what’s possible. So, how can you effectively use ChatGPT for marketing? To get you started let’s dive into seven practical ways, complete with prompts.

Content creation and ideation

One of the most obvious but also valuable uses of ChatGPT for marketers is in content creation and idea generation. 

Companies are already leveraging ChatGPT for content creation and have proven success with it. For instance, CarMax used Azure OpenAI Service to produce content for its car research web pages. According to CarMax, “using OpenAI Service, we hit that goal in just a few months, and the quality was even better than we anticipated, with an 80% editorial review approval rate”.

Another example is Havas. They used the best AI tools to create personalized marketing solutions for their clients. For instance, they helped launch AI-based marketing campaigns that deepened customer engagement, resulting in a 23% increase in brand consideration.

How ChatGPT can help in content creation

The potential is limitless. But here are some prompt ideas you can use to get started:

• Creative сampaign сoncepts: “Think of a ‘Content Crossover’ strategy that combines our business with something completely different, like fashion or astronomy. Come up with ten unusual topic ideas that will help people see our goods and services in new ways.”
• Storytelling scripts: “Use the ‘Problem-Agitate-Solve’ framework to write a video script that identifies a common problem, makes the reader feel bad by showing the bad effects, and then shows our answer. To make the material more interesting, use stories and pictures.” 
• Blog post ideas: “Please create a calendar of blog postings for the next month for my website using the keyword research attached. I would like to post two keyword-optimized articles every week. Please include an enticing title and hook for each post.”

Keep in mind, though, that ChatGPT is only a tool and not a replacement for human creativity. Use it to enhance your skills instead. It helps you get past writer’s block, come up with ideas, and write your first drafts (and also gives you a chance to learn how to detect AI writing when you see it in the future). You will still need to read it over, make changes, and add your brand’s voice.

Next time you are facing a deadline and are out of ideas, try ChatGPT. If you give the chatbot the right questions, you might be able to change the way you make content. Who knows? Your next viral blog post could be just a prompt away.

Lead generation

ChatGPT can provide insights that help you understand your target audience better, create more compelling marketing campaigns, and thus generate more qualified leads. 

Let’s look at some real-world results: for instance, a European telecommunications company used gen AI to change its customer outreach. They went from blunt messaging to four macro-segments to hyper-personalized messaging for 150 specific segments. Then, they used machine learning models to recommend the optimal product, marketing channel, and the right timing to communicate with each customer. That change resulted in a 40% increase in response rates and a 25% reduction in deployment costs. They did it and you can do it too. 

How ChatGPT can help with lead generation

• Creating customer personas: “Create a detailed customer persona for my [type of business], including demographics, psychographics, pain points, and buying behaviors. Then, craft a targeted value proposition and 3-5 compelling marketing messages to attract this ideal customer.”
• Designing lead-nurturing campaigns: “Design a multi-step lead-nurturing campaign for [product/service], including email subject lines, body content, and call-to-action suggestions for each stage of the buyer’s journey (awareness, consideration, decision).”
• Generating engaging questions: “Generate a list of 20 engaging questions we could ask our website visitors or social media followers to spark conversations and gather valuable insights about their needs and preferences related to [product/service].”

And these are just some ideas. Generating leads is very important for any marketing strategy, so using ChatGPT can let you attract and engage potential customers easier by creating personalized content, developing targeted campaigns, and optimizing the efforts.

Social media marketing

AI can easily generate creative ideas for posts, captions, and entire campaigns, saving time and resources. It helps marketers draft messages that resonate with their audience and align with current marketing trends. 

According to Capterra’s research published in July 2024, businesses expect that in the next 18 months, an average of 48% of their social media content will be AI-generated. Additionally, 73% of businesses reported increased engagement and impressions on social media with the use of generative AI, with 22% noting a significant increase. 

But using AI can go way beyond drafting content. 

How ChatGPT can help with social media marketing

• Design a gamification system: “Design a gamification system for our social media followers that rewards engagement and brand loyalty. Include point systems, achievement levels, and exclusive perks or discounts tied to social media activity.”
• Behind-the-scenes content series: “Create a concept for a ‘behind-the-scenes’ documentary-style content series on YouTube that showcases our company culture, product development process, and customer success stories in an authentic, engaging way.”
• Twitter spaces strategy: “Develop a strategy for using Twitter Spaces to host live Q&A sessions, product launches, or industry discussions. Include ideas for promoting the events, engaging listeners, and repurposing the content across other platforms.”
• Social media scavenger hunt: “Design a ‘social media scavenger hunt’ that encourages followers to engage with our content across multiple platforms. Include clue ideas, prize suggestions, and a plan to collect lead information from participants.”
• User-generated content campaign: “Create a concept for a user-generated content campaign that challenges customers to reimagine our products and services in unexpected ways. Detail how to incentivize participation, curate submissions, and showcase the best entries.”

Whether you’re developing a new advertising campaign or managing daily posts, ChatGPT can be a valuable tool. By integrating it into your social media marketing, you can increase engagement, expand your reach, spend way less time on tedious tasks and achieve better results.

Email subject line brainstorming

ChatGPT for email marketing has numerous uses. For instance, it can generate dozens of subject line ideas in seconds, helping you to find those perfect few words that will make your recipients click on the right link faster and ultimately open your emails more often. 

How ChatGPT can help with subject line creation

Here are some prompts you can use with ChatGPT:

• Curiosity-inducing subject lines: “Generate 20 curiosity-inducing email subject lines that use the ‘Zeigarnik effect’ to create a sense of incompleteness and compel recipients to open the email. Include examples for product announcements, sales promotions, and newsletter content.”
• Incorporate memes or viral trends: “Create a list of 15 subject lines that incorporate current memes or viral trends related to our industry, ensuring they’re clever and on-brand without feeling forced or outdated.”
• FOMO principle: “Use the ‘Fear of Missing Out’ (FOMO) principle to come up with 10 subject lines that are relevant to our goods and services and our target audience. Offers that end soon and sneak peeks of exclusive material should both be included.”
• Sensory language: “Write 12 subject lines that use sensory language to make people feel certain feelings or physical sensations that are connected to our product. Pay attention to unusual ways and words used for describing sensations that will stand out in a crowded inbox.”
• Interactive teasers: “Come up with eight subject lines in the style of ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ that hint at different content inside the email and force people to open it to see which ‘adventure’ they choose.”

ChatGPT can help marketers save time and resources by automating the brainstorming process, allowing them to focus on other aspects of campaign management and advertising.

Customer service chatbot

ChatGPT can generate natural, engaging responses, making your chatbot feel more personable and helpful (nobody likes to talk to robots!). This not only boosts customer satisfaction but also allows your team to focus on complex issues requiring human attention. 

Will that work? In one case study a publicly traded B2B SaaS company implemented LivePerson’s conversational AI platform to upgrade their customer support chatbot. They saw a 70% deflection rate (up 30%), 44% first contact resolution (up 30%), and a 50% reduction in bot deployment time. And most importantly, the customer satisfaction score went from -25 to 50. That’s like going from “I hate this bot” to “I want to be friends with this bot.”

How ChatGPT can help with customer service

Here are some prompts you can use to optimize your chatbot:

• Sentiment analysis: “What was the overall sentiment of chat conversations related to our product based on the past month’s chat history, see attached (attach the file with the data you want AI to analyze)”.
• Keyword identification: “What are the top five keywords that people who were asking about our new service used most often in chats between September and October?”
• Virtual product tours: “Build a ‘virtual product tour’ tool for the chatbot that uses text, pictures, and GIFs to show customers what our product can do. Include tips for how to make this tour more personal and interactive.”
• Mood-adaptive responses: “Come up with a ‘mood-adaptive’ chatbot flow that can tell how a person is feeling and change how it talks to them based on that. Give examples of how to deal with angry, confused, and happy customers in a variety of common service situations.”

But remember, while ChatGPT can help create an amazing chatbot, it’s not a set-it-and-forget-it solution. While integrating ChatGPT into your customer service, don’t forget to consider AI ethics. Make sure that your chatbot provides accurate information and respects customer privacy. Regularly monitor chatbot interactions to maintain quality and compliance with industry standards and laws. And you’ll need to keep training and updating your chatbot based on real customer interactions.

Market research and analysis

ChatGPT can provide detailed analysis of market trends, customer behaviors, and competitor activities. By automating parts of the research process, you can save time and resources, and focus on strategic planning. ChatGPT can quickly and efficiently enough generate summaries of industry reports and analyze customer feedback, and even to some extent predict market movements based on historical data.

Bayer’s Australia team used AI to predict cold and flu trends. They combined Google Trends data with weather and climate information, using Google Cloud machine learning technology. As a result, they were more proactive with their marketing planning, improved coordination across departments, and better optimized product distribution during peak times. 

How ChatGPT can help with market research and analysis

Here are some ideas of prompts you can use to maximize ChatGPT’s capabilities in market research:

• Trend convergence mapper: “Create a tool that identifies intersections between emerging trends in our industry and adjacent markets. Develop a scoring system to evaluate the potential impact and relevance of these convergence points for our business.”
• Alternative data synthesis: “Develop a model that combines unconventional data sources to gain unique insights into market demands for our products. Include methods for integrating this data into our existing analytics.”
• Competitive empathy mapping: “Design an exercise where we analyze our top three competitors from their customers’ perspectives. Include questions and frameworks for understanding emotional drivers, pain points, and unmet needs.”
• Customer segmentation model: “Develop a customer segmentation model using uploaded purchase history data. Identify key variables for clustering, create distinct customer personas, and suggest tailored marketing strategies for each segment.”
• Digital ethnography framework: “Design a framework for observing our target audience’s online behaviors across social media platforms. Include methods for ethically collecting data, categorizing behaviors, and extracting actionable insights specific to our products and services.”

But remember: while ChatGPT can provide valuable insights, it’s not a replacement for human intuition and expertise. Use it to augment your team’s skills, not replace them. Also, keep in mind the importance of data quality and ethical considerations. ChatGPT can only analyze the data you provide, so make sure it’s accurate, up-to-date, and ethically sourced. 

Personalized product recommendations

ChatGPT can help you create a recommendation engine. 

A retailer specializing in paper and plastic products implemented a Generative AI-powered personalization platform to improve their product recommendations. The effort resulted in a 28% increase in conversion rates, a 19% rise in average order value, 32% boost in customer satisfaction and a 25% year-over-year increase in sales revenue. 

How ChatGPT can help with personalized recommendations

So, how can you use ChatGPT to turn your product recommendations from “meh” to “shut up and take my money”? Here are some prompts that might inspire you: 

• Multi-factor recommendation engine: “Make a recommendation engine for our type of product that takes into account past purchases, browsing history, demographic information, and yearly patterns. Explain how this method would take these things into account and change over time.” 
• Complementary product suggestions: “Come up with a recommendation system that offers ‘complementary products’ that are often bought with items in a customer’s shopping cart or wish list. Include ways to cross-sell and offer without being too pushy.”
• AI stylist feature:
  “Come up with an ‘AI stylist’ feature for our clothing shop that gives customers outfit suggestions based on their body type, color preferences, and the event. List the most important parts of this method.” 
• Style profile questionnaire: “Make a ‘style profile’ quiz for our business that turns the answers from customers into a list of product tags. Then, make a system that uses these tags to make personalized groups of products.”

ChatGPT can generate personalized recommendations that align with individual customer preferences. Automating the recommendation process saves time and resources, letting marketers focus on strategy and analytics.

But while ChatGPT can help create amazing recommendation systems, it’s not a mind reader (yet), so you still need to feed it high-quality data about your products and customers. And that is what ultimately impacts the output.

Things not to use ChatGPT for in marketing

ChatGPT is a tool, not a replacement for your marketing team. It’s great for generating ideas, analyzing data, and automating certain tasks. But when it comes to understanding nuanced human behavior, making strategic decisions, you might want to keep humans in charge. 

So it’s important to recognize the tool’s limitations and marketers should be cautious about over-relying on ChatGPT for certain tasks. Let’s look at some of them. 

Designing complex marketing funnels

Creating a complex marketing funnel is a nuanced task that requires deep understanding of customer behavior, market trends, and strategic planning. Think about it — ChatGPT can’t conduct customer interviews, analyze qualitative feedback, or pick up on those subtle market signals that experienced marketers can easily recognize. AI might get some of it right, but miss crucial nuances. ChatGPT also lacks real-world context and doesn’t have real-time access to proprietary customer insights.

On top of it, human marketers excel at thinking outside the box, making unexpected connections, and quickly adapting to changes in the market. ChatGPT only makes predictions based on a pre-existing database of knowledge.   

Creating legal documents or contracts

While ChatGPT can generate various kinds of marketing content, using ChatGPT for creating legal documents or contracts is not a good idea. Marketers should be aware of AI ethics and the limitations of generative tools and consult legal professionals.

Laws and regulations vary significantly across different jurisdictions, and they can change very fast too. ChatGPT knowledge base is only updated every so often, so might not keep up with the latest legal updates, potentially leaving you with an outdated contract template that may lead you to a multi-million dollar lawsuit. Moreover, in many jurisdictions, only licensed attorneys can provide legal advice. 

Long-term business forecasting

Things needed for long-term business forecasting include geopolitical events, technological disruptions, economic shifts, and societal changes. ChatGPT is fundamentally limited by its training data, so it lacks the ability to truly understand or predict these unpredictable external factors.

For instance, an AI model trained on historical data wouldn’t be very useful for predicting the global impact of events like COVID-19 pandemic or the rapid rise of transformative technologies like blockchain or, ironically, generative AI itself. 

Automating all customer interactions without human oversight

Customers can often tell when they’re interacting with a bot, and many prefer the option to speak with a human for complex issues or when they’re feeling particularly frustrated.

ChatGPT may not handle complex or sensitive customer inquiries appropriately, potentially harming customer relationships and brand reputation. So all marketing automation efforts should be balanced with human involvement to make sure that responses align with your brand’s values and marketing strategies.

Real-time market data or statistics

ChatGPT doesn’t have access to up-to-date market information or live analytics, that’s why using it for marketing tasks that require current data can lead to outdated or incorrect conclusions. 

So while ChatGPT can be great for analyzing historical data and identifying patterns, when it comes to real-time market data and statistics, it’s best to rely on specialized tools, real-time research, and human expertise. Use ChatGPT to analyze and sort your research, but don’t expect it to be your go-to tool for current market conditions.

Interpreting complex market trends

Understanding and interpreting complex market trends is a job best left to experienced marketers. While ChatGPT can offer summaries or general information, it doesn’t have the ability to analyze any ambiguity in market dynamics. 

ChatGPT can’t synthesize diverse information sources or pick up on subtle industry shifts that don’t fit historical patterns and that’s how it might miss emerging trends. Use ChatGPT as a starting point for your trend analysis. Let it analyze your data and suggest possible correlations. But leave the deep interpretation to the humans. 

What does the future hold for AI in marketing?

Just a few years ago, in 2022, a study by MIT Technology Review found that only 5% of marketing organizations considered generative AI “critical” to their operations, and just 20% were using it widely. Fast forward to 2025, and 20% of marketing executives plan for generative AI to be a critical part of their department’s function, with another 44% planning to use it across various applications. While an impressive 91% of organizations expect their productivity to increase due to generative AI. So, these tools are here to stay and as more people learn how to use ChatGPT for marketing, we can expect an increase in personalized email marketing, and smarter social media management. These generative tools can help marketers save time and resources, allowing them to focus on strategy and analytics.

However, with great power comes responsibility. Organizations are aware of the risks associated with AI. A McKinsey Global Survey in 2024 highlighted that companies are working to mitigate risks like inaccuracy, intellectual property infringement, and cybersecurity threats. For example, concerns about inaccuracy increased from 32% in 2023 to 38% in 2024. But individual marketers should stay vigilant too and make sure that they are not overly relying on anything spit out by AI. 

Despite these challenges, the integration of AI in marketing is set to grow. And one thing is for sure — the marketers who learn to effectively use AI tools like ChatGPT are going to have a serious advantage. But don’t worry, human marketers, AI isn’t going to replace you anytime soon. In fact, the human touch in marketing is going to become more valuable than ever, as more people are trained to recognize AI content and grow tired of it. Businesses are still going to need humans to provide that creative spark, emotional intelligence, and strategic oversight that turns a good marketing campaign into a great one.

Conclusion

ChatGPT is a powerful tool for marketers. It’s great for generating content ideas, drafting social media posts, brainstorming email subject lines, and even enhancing customer service with chatbots. 

But it’s not a magic solution.

1. Use ChatGPT for: content creation, lead generation ideas, email subject lines, and basic customer service queries.
2. Don’t use ChatGPT for: strategic decisions, legal documents, or fully automated customer interactions.
3. Always review and edit ChatGPT’s output to match your brand voice and make sure the facts are correct.
4. Combine ChatGPT with human creativity and expertise.