I think it’s safe to say that most marketers are pro-tech. Plenty of us use tools like Grammarly, MarketMuse and, now, even ChatGPT in our daily work. Since the generative AI hype cycle has mostly run its course, content marketers who may have felt a little shame about using GenAI initially are beginning to take advantage.
Brafton both builds and encourages technology that helps make our and our client’s lives easier. Some of us, for example, have spent time experimenting with ChatGPT and have unveiled a few valuable truths that I believe are highly useful.
Before your next blog (or even landing page), consider the following lessons we’ve learned about ChatGPT: What works, what doesn’t and why I think you shouldn’t be too stressed about whether or not your livelihood is on the line (it’s not).
1. You Get Out What You Put In
Generative AI is fussy. That was especially the case a couple of years ago when ChatGPT first made waves. Even though the technology is better today and becoming increasingly refined, it’s still finicky.
By that, I mean that it rarely does exactly what you want it to on the first try. This is especially true when prompts are vague or lack any sort of depth or specificity. For the best possible results with ChatGPT — which are still unlikely to come on your very first press of the enter key — prompts have to be rather sophisticated. If your net goal is to save time, this is mostly fine since spending a bit longer on your input is still quicker than writing a blog from scratch. But that brings us directly to point No. 2 below.
2. Generative AI Can Absolutely Save Time on Writing, but …
… Only if you’re already a skilled writer. Let’s explore this a bit by unpacking what the tech is really good at as well as a few things it struggles with or simply cannot do.
ChatGPT can:
- Give your article a solid baseline structure.
- Include a list of terms that you tell it to include.
However, it cannot properly or deftly:
- Expound on complicated or nuanced subject matter in a way that makes sense (like tips for memorizing the different types of amino acids, or an article about SEO analytics).
- Weave in examples and anecdotes that artfully provide a well-rounded narrative.
- Choose the best information for a particular subject reliably.
Still, it gives a skilled writer a jumping-off point to work their magic.
Brafton alumnus and writer Dom Sorrentino did a little experiment with this. Here’s what he discovered:
“ChatGPT can reliably help me write a 1,000-word article in 1 hour 45 minutes. That’s 571 words per hour. Over the course of 8 hours, that’s 4,571 words on average. For context, a skilled Brafton writer can get ~1,800 really good words out the door in 8 hours. ChatGPT can more than double that output.”
To bring the point home, this is how Dom divided his time on the tool:
- 15 minutes: Developing the prompt.
- 2-5 minutes: Re-prompting.
- 30 seconds: Watching ChatGPT write.
- ~1 hour and 25 minutes: Re-writing, editing, fact-checking, adding imagery.
From prompting to polished, Dom’s articles were nearly unrecognizable compared to the initial output. There was lots of editing, imbuing voice and personality, and general quality and syntax changes. But the clock doesn’t lie. On average, he was able to “edit” what ChatGPT spit out faster than he could write the article from scratch.
(Caveat: there was one occasion where it was faster for Dom to research and write the article himself than it would have been to salvage ChatGPT’s output.) So, it certainly can’t do everything, but we knew that already.
3. Crucially, All of This Only Applies to Blog Posts
Brafton writers (and likely plenty of others) have realized that ChatGPT is mostly suited toward informational content, like blog articles. Marketing collateral and the product messaging on commercial landing pages, for example, are more nuanced than informational-intent blogs.
While ChatGPT can churn out a general “FAQ” section to help get more topic coverage on a landing page for SEO purposes, I’m uncertain of its pure writing value beyond that for more technical or high-value pieces of content. When your conversion landing pages are the heart of your inbound SEO, you need to proceed with caution.
So, Should You Avoid ChatGPT When Writing Non-Blog Content?
Not at all! ChaptGPT offers users far more value than simply generating copy to build a blog post with. There are plenty of other creative ways to use ChatGPT beyond that straight-up copy generation that you’ll end up editing anyway — especially for non-blog content — that are highly useful for all your other marketing and SEO applications.
When it’s time to kickstart your next project — especially if it’s something other than an informational blog, I implore you to think of creative ways to use ChatGPT to your advantage that go beyond simply generating copy.
4. AI Is Categorically Not a Replacement for Writers
We’ve talked about what generative AI can do when it comes to informational blogs and even more significant, revenue-generating projects like landing pages. But what about what it can’t accomplish? First and foremost, myself and most writers using ChatGPT know the following to be unequivocally true:
Generative AI does not excel at telling the right story, the right way, with the best information to support the point and achieve your goal.
Honestly, it’s a big copycat with access to a milieu of older data. Even with ChatGPT’s new search functionally that gives it access to real-time results, it’s still mostly regurgitating what it finds on the web.
If your goal is to write professional-grade copy that has value, you 100% still need a skilled writer on your side — especially on topics that require a high degree of subject-matter expertise. Not to mention, it takes a skilled writer to recognize great writing. The untrained eye can probably assess whether it’s “good enough” by their standards, but that doesn’t mean a whole lot.
I like — nay, love — Betty Crocker boxed birthday cake and think it tastes pretty great once a year on my birthday. (Cherry chip, anyone?) But I bet every baker would beg to differ and be keen to show me something a million times tastier. Would I still pine for BC’s cherry chip every year? Probably. Would the freshly baked cake be objectively better crafted? Without a doubt.
Where Does That Leave Us?
The marketer in me says that, in pure time-savings, it makes sense to use ChatGPT wherever possible for informational content. That’s your SEO and non-SEO blogs and articles. But the writer in me says it makes writing feel a lot less like writing and more like editing. (It’s also just not as fun.)
On the whole, I and other writers have a lot more experimentation left to do. And, the tech behind generative AI is getting better by the day. But I hope that what I and other Brafton writers have learned so far can give you a better sense of when to use generative AI for content marketing, as well as how to use it effectively for other types of marketing content.
