How Content Marketers Can Use ChatGPT: 13 Examples

Table of Contents

ChatGPT is a game changer for anyone working in content marketing.

It is your companion app supporting your content marketing process, from persona research to content brainstorming, writing outlines, and much more.

Let’s take a look at 13 examples.

ChatGPT can help you create content from scratch or repurpose, rewrite, or expand your existing content.

Here are a few everyday tasks with examples in content creation.

Persona research

Imagine you are confronted with the task of creating personas.
There are, of course, Google forums, social networks, events, … and many more channels and properties you can manually browse.

But ChatGPT can help you to zoom in quickly on an audience.

For this example, we are getting into the shoes of a carpenter business in the New Jersey area.

I run a carpenter business in New Jersey. Our company is specialized in renovating country homes. What are some characteristics of my potential customers? Age range, jobs they have, what hobbies.

What are some basic facts to start with? Some of it I would have guessed right.

Now, I want to know where my potential customers hang out online.

Are there any online places, forums, sites, or local social networks my potential customers hang out online?

This is basic advice for someone doing marketing for a carpenter business already, but for a newbie to the topic, this helps get a fundamental overview. Now, let us generate some topics to create content about.

Content Ideas

Continuing the carpenter example, I ask ChatGPT to create some blog post ideas and expand on one of them.

Can you create a list of potential topics to blog about. not more than ten ideas

I like one of the ideas and asked ChatGPT to write an outline for a potential blog post.

Can you write an outline (headlines plus two sentences) about idea number 2

At this stage, looking for more content on that topic via a search engine to get a feeling for the suggested content is a good idea.

But ChatGPT can help you take some shortcuts. You immediately see what has been written and discussed on this topic. And you know which quality level you’ll need to surpass.

Create blog posts?

Yes, you could create full blog posts from scratch using ChatGPT. While you should never publish the generated content 1:1, it can help speed up the process.
This is especially true for common-use content. Think about listicles.

Let us try an example. I want to create a blog post that lists “the top 5 productivity apps.”

The prompt:

Create a blog post “listicle” with 5 productivity apps, like Asana, Trello, Monday.com, ClickUp, and Microsoft Project. About 200 words about each app. The introduction should be about the fact that new apps like Asana, Trello,… are beating MS Project in terms of usability, web app capabilities, app support. In the list, Asana should be the first to mention. In the conclusion, Asana should be named the winner of the listed apps. The blog post should have 1500 words max. Informal writing style, for a blog about project management and productivity tools.

The result is very generic. But it helps you get a few phrases, titles, and features to start your writing process.

But, from our experience here at Fresh van Root, we suggest a bottom-up approach. Bring your content idea, generate outlines, generate paragraphs, ask for rewriting of content, and so on. We believe there are better approaches than asking ChatGPT to write entire blog posts.

Create social media content

The thought experiment is that I am a content marketer at Trello and need content about Kanban boards.

Here are some example prompts and the results in the screenshots:

First prompt:
Could you suggest a five-part social media post series for LinkedIn. The topic is Kanban boards. Each post max. 500 words. The posts should be closely connected, and suggest using Trello to try out Kanban boards at the end.

The results are not bad, but I don’t like the very neutral (generic) way the text reads. So I post the following follow-up message:

Second prompt:
Can you make the posts more conversational and put them into a typical tone and voice used by professionals on LinkedIn profiles, not company pages?

I like the second result more and would use some of the ideas to continue working outside of ChatGPT.

Update or extend content

Using ChatGPT, you can provide your existing content and ask how to improve or extend it.

Let’s take a look at one of our blog posts.
We published a blog post about the differences between the growth of Clubhouse and Mastodon. It’s short and sweet.

For this blog post, I asked ChatGPT to suggest topics that could be added to extend the blog post.

Note: Always copy-paste the full blog post content into ChatGPT. ChatGPT does not access external links you add to your prompts.

ChatGPT suggests expanding the topic of how the different growth models (community-driven vs. elitist/viral approach) significantly impact how the apps thrive long term. The generated text would work well as an extension of the existing post.

Here is the result:

Repurpose content

Think of all the blog posts and web pages you published but have yet to have time to slice up for other channels. You can use ChatGPT for that.

Social media posts based on blog post

In this example, I ask ChatGPT to slice up a blog post into 5 social media posts that should give away information from the blog post. The posts are not dependent on each other and can be consumed “stand-alone.”

Here is an example from my own experience. I asked ChatGPT to create 5 tweets based on our “Viral vs. Organic Growth: The Differences between Clubhouse and Mastodon” post.

Here is the prompt:
Here is a blog post about the different growth tactics of Clubhouse App and Mastodon app. Can you suggest 5 social media posts (tweets) on how to share it. The tweets should be short and have a strong hook line. The goal is to get a click on the blog post, not give away all info in the tweets themselves.

I like some of the suggestions and ask ChatGPT to create the shortlist, then add them to our social media publishing tool.

But you can always ask ChatGPT to create variations of the suggestions you like.


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Create a YouTube script based on a blog post

Now, what about a video? If you are thinking about creating a video version of your blog post, you can generate the outline or full script for your video via ChatGPT.

The blog post I used is “How to Create a landing page with ChatGPT.” I wrote the post, so all I need to get going to record the video is an outline based on the blog post.

This is the prompt I entered in ChatGPT

And this is the result:

I can save a few minutes compared to preparing this manually via copy-paste and editing.

After making additional tweaks to the suggestions, I can start recording immediately.

ChatGPT can summarize a web page. And you can tell it what format you want. Again, I am providing the blog post content in full in a prompt.

Meta Description

The first suggestion is too long; I have shortened it.

Link Preview text

Same with the link preview text for Facebook and Twitter.

But the suggestions are good enough to continue editing it in the CMS.

Previewing your content

Create social media preview

It happened to all of us: You create the perfect social media post. But once you see how it looks on the platform, you want to change it again.

You can use ChatGPT to create a preview of how a social media post would look on a specific platform.

Prompt example:
Can you create the HTML of an embedded tweet with Tweet idea number 1?

This screenshot shows already an advanced version of the prompt.

You can use a site called CodePen to preview the generated HTML.

The result:

The HTML in preview on CodePen.

Google Search result preview

Another example is the Google search results preview.
Again, ChatGPT creates the HTML, which you can preview on a CodePen page.

This is stuff your CMS can do – giving a preview of what your content will look like on Google or social media. If not, this is a good workaround.

Landing page preview

ChatGPT can generate HTML/CSS code for you. All you have to do is bring the content. Instead of using a page builder or wireframe tool to play around with your content, you can use ChatGPT to create a landing page or any web page really.

Check out the blog post to learn how to create a landing page with ChatGPT.

Variant Testing (A/B Testing)

Or A/B/C/D/E… testing.

ChatGPT offers a speedy way to create variations of your content.

Think of the following

  • Alternative blog post titles
  • Social media copy, like variations of tweets or LinkedIn posts
  • Variations of subject lines for your newsletter
  • Web page copy variations
  • and much more

In all that cases, ChatGPT can be your sparring partner.

More tips about using ChatGPT

Very often, you will get very average answers. But from my experience, you can always take something away from a chat session with ChatGPT. Sometimes it’s only a phrase, a nugget of knowledge, or one out of 100 generated content ideas.

Always think of it as a second brain you can pick that thinks with and for you.

The Year is 2021…

ChatGPT does not know anything that happened after 2021. ChatGPT does know zero about the Russian war against Ukraine, for example.

Differences to other AI-powered writing tools

ChatGPT does not have any pre-configuration or templates for writing. Instead, you have to tell ChatGPT precisely what you want to create.

  • Instead of “Create a blog post on topic XYZ”
  • Say, “Create a blog post on topic XYZ, about 1000 words, informal writing style, with at least 5 headings, from the perspective of ABC”

Do not use the first result.

In our experience, results got better if we asked for variations of answers, asked to expand on a topic, and so on. In short, do not take the first answer to continue your work elsewhere. Think about going down a rabbit hole with ChatGPT.

Ask for short answers

Be as precise as possible to get what you are looking for—the broader your results, the longer the answers, and potentially the more mundane.
The more you use it, the better you will get at writing prompts.

Do not ever publish ChatGPT-created content 1:1

ChatGPT is often wrong, especially when it needs more data on a topic. Be extremely careful when you use ChatGPT to create content about a domain outside your field.

Your published content should always be better than what ChatGPT can generate.

You never get the same result twice

You can ask the same question simultaneously but get different results from ChatGPT. It may be similar, but not 100% the same.

To illustrate this, here is an example in which I ask ChatGPT in two separate chats the same question.

Same prompt – different results

Conclusion

ChatGPT is a tool that can make the lives of content marketers easier; it fastens’ up processes and gives different angles on topics that you would miss otherwise. And it helps to improve your content marketing by showing what is already known. It should be used with caution and consciously.

You often get answers that make you think, “I knew that; this is very mundane stuff.” But you will get one valuable little nugget from every ChatGPT session that would have taken you way longer to find through Google search.

It does not remove the need for manually researching, talking to your audience, and fact-checking. All those things still have to be done in addition.

But it would be fatal to ignore the possibilities of ChatGPT and other AI-powered tools – you will lose out on your competition that utilizes it.


*Want to stay up2date on the latest things in AI across content, social, productivity and more?
Sign up for the curated Fresh van Root newsletter—twice a month, packed with helpful content and apps. Join the most competent people in the room.


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