ChatGPT For Digital Marketing: Benefits & Limitations

Within the digital marketing industry, new AI programs like ChatGPT are the talk of the town. Here at efelle creative, we’re always committed to keeping up with the latest technological advances to make sure we’re providing the best service possible to our clients.

That means we spent some time looking into ChatGPT to see ways that it can be used to improve digital marketing initiatives and some areas where it may still have limitations. While we focused on ChatGPT as the most ubiquitous AI, there are plenty of other similar programs that will have similar offerings.

Benefits of ChatGPT for Digital Marketing

Inspiration

One area where we see ChatGPT being most helpful is as a place to get inspiration. If you’re struggling to come up with a way to write a caption for Instagram, you can ask ChatGPT to see what they recommend.

This is true for blogs as well (we promise this one isn’t written by ChatGPT.) You can give ChatGPT some prompts and information to get started on a blog for your website.

When people tend to talk about these options, they say it will do all the work for you. The reality is that ChatGPT can get you started and sometimes can get you to the finish lines, but check out our limitations below for the ways that you’ll still need to adjust your content beyond what an AI can do.

Customer Service

Perhaps the most complete way that AI can help your digital marketing is by handling customer service. That’s because, typically, you’ll answer the same questions to different people all the time. AI is really built for this kind of interaction.

In fact, you’ve been able to set up bots to respond to social media messages for a while now. AI options may make that more interactive, or could even start to learn how to respond by watching how you’ve responded in the past.

Granted, this is just for digital options like emails or social media messages. If your customer service interactions mostly happen in person, it won’t make sense to use AI to replace that.

Limitations of ChatGPT for Digital Marketing

Basic Format

We spent some time testing out different prompts with ChatGPT to see what was possible. While it does come back with some helpful information, you’ll quickly notice that everything follows a similar format.

If you ask for a blog post, it will always include an introductory paragraph, a list of about five points with some details, and then a conclusion paragraph that almost always starts with “In summary.”

As you can tell, this can make content pretty boring.

Even when we tried it out for social media captions, those typically followed a similar format with two emojis at the end of sentences.

If everyone starts using ChatGPT for things like blogs, website content, and social media captions, we’ll end up with a lot of content that looks pretty similar. It might make people start to ignore the content that looks like everyone else’s.

Make sure your brand still stands out by adding some more personal touches to your content. As we mentioned earlier, ChatGPT can still be used for inspiration, but it’s not the finish line if you want effective content.

Void of Personality

As you might expect, an AI doesn’t really have much personality with its content. You could ask that it creates a funny caption or write in a way that’s friendly, but those concepts are vague enough that the AI will sometimes struggle with defining that.

In fact, that’s partially because we have a hard time defining those characteristics ourselves. That’s why in our intake meetings with clients if they say they want an upbeat tone, we ask some follow-up questions to make sure our definition of upbeat matches theirs.

Bias

While we’re not going to do a deep dive into the ethics of AI, it is at least important to acknowledge that there is a bias built into AI programs like ChatGPT. That’s because the AI pulls information from sources that could have an implicit bias or that are not always vetted to exclude bias.

If you’re curious for a concrete example of this, recently, a Tweet went around showing that if you ask ChatGPT for a list of the most influential people of all time, it will give a list that includes zero women. It does include Kanye West, though. Can you imagine the ramifications of your company sharing that information as its own without context?

While humans can also have bias, we can acknowledge it and work to compensate for those issues when we’re creating content.

Misses Details

Another limitation comes from the actual information that ChatGPT provides. While this will improve over time, it is sometimes wrong.

As an example, someone on our team tested it with some specific questions about the world of Scottish Highland Dance. This is information that’s easy enough to Google but that is specific enough that ChatGPT struggled to understand it. When asked about the materials a dancer needed to bring to competitions, it instead described the outfits that bagpipers wear.

A human familiar with that specific world would be able to tell the difference, but ChatGPT misses the mark. Hopefully, it will get smarter over time as it collects more information, but there’s still something lacking with the output of ChatGPT.

Should You Use ChatGPT For Your Digital Marketing?

It will ultimately depend on your goals with using it. If you just need some inspiration for content or a place to start, it’s great for guiding you along. Over time, it will certainly improve. That’s part of what AI does. However, it’s not to a place yet where you’ll want to rely on it solely for your digital marketing content.

Reach out to us if you want a personalized touch to your digital marketing and website design or development.