Monica Kumar is chief marketing officer at Hitachi Vantara.
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There’s so much noise about ChatGPT. Everybody is talking about it. But what do ChatGPT and other generative AI technologies such as Auto-GPT, Bard, Bing AI and DALL-E really mean for marketing organizations? How can you decide whether and how generative AI might be useful for your marketing efforts? And how can you get started?
Our marketing team’s current ChatGPT efforts focus on personal productivity, business apps and training. We have prioritized three personal productivity uses: persona development and enrichment, content creation, and translation/localization. ChatGPT will help us expedite translation and expand our marketing content to more languages. We are also looking to use ChatGPT across such areas as chat, copy creation, data analysis, data storytelling, presentations and visual creations. And we’re creating a best practice guide for marketing employees.
Based on my experience, here are five tips for how to think about—and move marketing forward with—generative AI.
Educate yourself on what ChatGPT is and what it is not.
ChatGPT reached 100 million monthly active users in January, two months following its launch. Plenty of professionals are using and exploring generative AI, and marketing is atop the generative AI business use cases.
But before joining the crowd, step back and educate yourself. Form a workgroup within your marketing organization to investigate what generative AI is and what it’s not, and the impact it can have on marketing roles and productivity today and in the future.
Most importantly, don’t be afraid to start experimenting with generative AI. This will help you determine its accuracy, abilities and potential uses.
Don’t be afraid, but do get prepared.
There is a lot of talk about how ChatGPT may be coming for our jobs. And new survey data from ZipRecruiter indicates that 62% of job seekers are concerned that AI could derail their careers.
A similar conversation occurred when cloud was on the rise. IT professionals worried the cloud would take away their jobs. That hasn’t happened. What did happen is cloud tools and services became an important mechanism to help IT pros do their jobs more strategically. My point? Don’t be afraid of generative AI. ChatGPT is not going to replace marketers. It’s just going to make us more strategic.
However, it does come with privacy and security concerns. And marketing people don’t typically think about such issues. Form a small task force and make one or two people responsible for working with the marketing, legal, security and product teams to figure out what best practices you need to ensure privacy, governance and compliance. Then create a marketing best practice guide for generative AI.
Use generative AI to make marketing more effective.
Marketing is always in the position of having to prove its value. In addition to having to pay attention to metrics like how much we spend per marketing qualified lead (MQL), marketing professionals are also on the hook to get campaigns and offers to market ASAP.
Customers are making decisions rapidly about the products and solutions they want to adopt. Marketers need to get to customers as fast as we can. But existing marketing systems and the number of people in a marketing department can limit the number of campaigns you can run.
Consider using generative AI to enhance the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. With technology like ChatGPT, you can experiment more. You will still want humans in marketing to do quality assurance checks, but automation can help you get campaigns to market faster.
Consider launching a contained experiment with a campaign that’s completely built with ChatGPT, a campaign that pairs ChatGPT with a human and a campaign that involves humans only. Then look at the accuracy of each campaign, how much time it took to launch a campaign in each scenario, and the return on investment for each of the three scenarios.
Explore how ChatGPT could enable you to learn more about target personas and run micro-targeted campaigns. If you could quickly and easily create super-personalized campaigns, you could potentially amplify the number of campaigns you run. And those campaigns would be more value-oriented toward the people your marketing efforts are working to reach.
Avoid playing the game of quantity over quality.
Content creation was one of the first use cases that helped fuel interest in ChatGPT. When it demonstrated its ability to write essays, an onslaught of stories explored how generative AI will transform academia. Columbia Journalism Review has pondered ChatGPT’s implications for journalism. And Reuters says ChatGPT has led to a boom in AI-written e-books.
It is easy for marketing teams to produce a lot of content very quickly using generative AI. With ChatGPT, you can generate so many more blogs than you used to. In doing so, you can inundate your channels, customers and partners with such content. But don’t overdo it. Focus on the quality of the content and make sure the value proposition in your message is right for your personas. Just because you build the content, doesn’t mean they will come!
In addition to quality, focus on driving readership and engagement. Generative AI tools can also help you with ideation and research as you embark on a new content piece.
Embrace innovation.
Innovation and engineering are part of my company’s DNA. We are focused on innovation for our customers, but we also adopt innovative technologies for faster time to market, productivity and other benefits. In fact, we are working on a marketing campaign fully built using ChatGPT.
Rather than resisting new innovations in our domain or taking a wait-and-see approach, we are embracing new technologies early on to see how we can take advantage of them. This keeps our marketing organization on the leading edge. This approach can work for your business, too.
Adopting new technologies like ChatGPT can provide a competitive advantage by enabling you to move faster and forge stronger, ongoing connections with customers and prospects. You can either disrupt or be disrupted!
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