How to Write ChatGPT Prompts Effectively for Your Marketing

In 2022, ChatGPT burst onto the scene as one of the hottest new apps, reaching 100 million users in two months. It initially caused a stir as business owners and marketers learned how it could impact their operations, and tech companies rushed to create suitable alternatives. However, now that the initial fervor has died down, many marketers and business owners alike have learned how to use ChatGPT to enhance their work. 



The tool, powered by artificial intelligence, is great for generating ideas, developing customer profiles, and more. But to be effective, you need the right prompts. Follow along and learn how to write ChatGPT prompts that will make your job easier. 

What Is ChatGPT? 

ChatGPT is a generative AI tool that uses natural language processing to generate dialogue. With machine learning and deep learning technology, the tool uses prompts to generate written content. ChatGPT is a large language model, which means it’s capable of processing a lot of language.

You use prompts to train ChatGPT, giving feedback and rewarding the program for the best answers to your prompts. Over time, the tool uses this feedback to improve its future responses. 

How Has ChatGPT Made Life Easier for Marketers? 

With a little practice, marketers have learned to harness ChatGPT’s generative AI features to make their jobs easier. It's helpful for SEO because you can write prompts asking ChatGPT to make a list of content ideas that are optimized for keywords and phrases. 

In minutes, or even seconds, ChatGPT can complete tasks that would take you hours. It analyzes search queries and user behaviors to create a list of keywords that are related to your desired topics. You can use this list to generate text-based content, including: 

• Ideas for blog posts, webpages, and articles
• Social media posts, captions, and hashtags
• Marketing email subject lines and body text

Coming up with ideas for search engine optimization is often tedious and requires a lot of research. But you can use ChatGPT to do the research for you and spend your time polishing your content to make it stand out. 

ChatGPT Prompt Best Practices

Writing effective prompts for ChatGPT is key to making the tool work for you. Without high-quality prompts, you won't get results that make your job easier. Follow these best practices to enter prompts that get ChatGPT to work for you. 

1. Be Clear and Specific

Assume that ChatGPT doesn’t know what you’re talking about. Use simple, straightforward language and make it easier for the tool to understand what you want to achieve. Avoid jargon, idioms, or complex phrasing. 

ChatGPT learns by crawling the internet and reading human content samples that already exist. It doesn’t understand these terms; it merely contextualizes them based on different sources of content. 

Provide more details to get the best results. Clearly state the type of information or type of response you’re interested in. For example, if you want to generate a social media post for X, tell it to write a tweet. Or if you’re interested in writing a headline, ask it for something short, snappy, and engaging. 

Consider these sample prompts: 

• Create an email subject line personalized to a potential automotive repair customer in the area who's interested in receiving a limited-time discount on services.
• Create email copy that stresses urgency.
• Mention a fun fact about car repairs and create a social media post about it.

These prompts are clear and concise and can elicit a ChatGPT response that you can use as a starting point for your email campaigns or social media content. 

2. Provide Context

Avoid thinking of ChatGPT as an intern you can train. Yes, you can train the tool, but it doesn’t actually understand what it’s generating. For example, if you want to write a blog post about a certain topic, your prompt should state the specific topic and types of information to include in the post. 

Steer clear of overly generic prompts such as, “Write a sales pitch.” Instead, add clarifying context such as, “Write a compelling sales pitch for car repair services targeted at busy families with young children.”

By giving specific context around what you expect ChatGPT to do, you end up with results that are tailored to your specific needs. Use the results as a starting point and modify them for your target audience. 

3. Consider Your Audience

ChatGPT has access to anything on the internet before 2021, so it can write detailed, flowery prose that might not make sense to your target audience. If you’re writing generic prompts, you risk getting responses that mean nothing to the people you’re trying to reach. 

Set boundaries and include information about your target audience every time you write a prompt. Ask ChatGPT to create multiple posts by modifying prompts for different target audiences. For example, if you’re creating a lead-generating campaign, you might ask ChatGPT to generate an email subject line and copy targeted to busy families in your area and then modify the prompt to target young professionals or business entrepreneurs. ChatGPT will then tweak the response and include language geared at each group. 

4. Give Examples If You Can

When you’re writing vague, overly general prompts, you’ll probably get vague responses. Today’s marketing landscape is all about personalization, so you want your marketing copy to appeal to your customers on a personal level. 

You also need content that sounds like your existing brand. Adding examples to your prompts helps ChatGPT better understand what you’re looking for. Provide examples for: 

• Site-specific content: If you want the ChatGPT response to mirror your own website or to sound like it came from a professional in your industry, add examples. 
• Branded tone: If you’re writing prompts to generate content for your website, add in specific examples to help ChatGPT nail your tone and voice. 
• Fact-checking: Since ChatGPT crawls the internet and compiles multiple results to generate content, it's not always accurate. If you need verified information, add examples from reliable sources. 

For example, if you want help writing meta descriptions, you could say this: “Write three 150-character-max meta descriptions for an article about how to choose the right mechanic. Here is a sample meta description from [website].”

5. Set Boundaries

Since ChatGPT could write a novel if left unchecked, clarify what you want. If you’re asking for meta descriptions, posts for X, or other types of content that are restricted to a certain number of characters, specify this in the prompt. For an X post, you would state, “Write a tweet of 280 characters or less about [topic].”

If you’re asking the tool to write a blog post, you might specify a word count or limit ChatGPT to 20 paragraphs or less. Include as much background information as possible to get a result that addresses your topic in your specified range. 

You could also state, “Write a short blog post about [topic].”

6. Experiment With Your Prompts

ChatGPT is not perfect, and you will likely notice issues with your responses. When you’re first starting out, you and the tool may not understand each other. It takes some finesse to write effective prompts that will guide you in the right direction. 

If you’re not getting the right responses, keep practicing until you get what you need. For example, if you’re asking ChatGPT to write meta descriptions and it keeps going well over 150 characters, ask the tool to edit its previous response. 

After you’ve been working with ChatGPT for a while, you'll start to learn how to phrase and structure prompts that make it work correctly.

Write More Effective Prompts for Your Business

ChatGPT is not a replacement for human marketers. Instead of offloading all your content tasks to the tool, use it as a starting point. Before posting a ChatGPT response online or hitting "send" on an email campaign, thoroughly edit each post. 

Fact-check all of the information to make sure it’s correct. Run a search to make sure the tool didn’t plagiarize one of your competitors. Most importantly, pull out key ideas and phrases from your results and use them to write your own posts. You understand your target audience better than AI, so you can add that human touch to your content. 

Clever prompt engineering helps you generate better results that make your life easier. With the wrong prompt, ChatGPT could end up creating more work for you since you'd have to fact-check and edit more. With these tools and tricks, though, you can create more effective ChatGPT prompts that will guide you in your content creation efforts. Using ChatGPT to create a list of keywords and blog topics gives you more time to sit down and create effective content for your campaigns. 

We’re Here to Help You

If you’re still running short on time for content creation, Optimize can help. We work with multiple clients to refine their online presence. We can help you stand out to potential customers. Learn more about how Optimize can help you. Schedule your free consultation today.