AI is the most powerful tool marketers have ever had, but it’s not a magic button. To get the best results, you need smart prompts, iterative refinement, and a human touch. In this column, we’ll explore where AI excels, where it falls short, and how to shape its output into marketing that truly connects.
ChatGPT was originally a text generator, so we’ll start with written content - web pages, emails, blogs, and social posts - before exploring how AI can repurpose these into other media formats.
The best place to start using AI in marketing is brainstorming. Human marketers run out of steam after half a dozen ideas for, say, a blog. But you can instruct your LLM to produce 50 or 100 and cherry-pick the best. It helps to specify that you want “original”, ”attention-grabbing“ or even “shocking” ideas for your content.
Once you’ve settled on an idea, don’t ask AI to generate the full article immediately. Instead, instruct it to flesh out the concept first, before asking it to create the finished piece. The purpose here is two-fold. The machine will produce better results if you instruct it to reflect on its previous outputs. It also gives you the chance to iterate - to nudge your AI towards an ideal result over multiple short prompts.
You must then humanise the result. This is an indispensable skill in an AI age where authentic human voices become increasingly scarce. Review the AI’s output and identify where it reveals itself as machine-generated. Giveaways of AI-generated copy include the lack of clear authorial perspective, repetition, a lack of emotion, noncommittal and tentative stances and verbose output.
Ruthlessly cut these out. In your edits, apply the time-honoured rules of good writing. Be clear, concise and direct. Favour short words over long ones, the active over the passive voice and positive over negative formulations.
You can maximise the impact of your humanising efforts by focusing on a few high-value targets. Lose the bullet-points beloved of LLMs. Make bold, confident statements and remove AI’s tendency to hedge. Insert your personal experience where you can.
With your written copy in hand, you can now repurpose it to create content for any other format. This is another AI superpower. AI intuitively understands the conventions and audiences of social media, so that you can simply upload your piece and prompt: “Convert this into posts optimised for Facebook, Instagram and X.”
Then use your copy to generate pictures. Ask your AI to recommend 15 impactful images to illustrate your piece. Pick your favourite and instruct it to create a prompt for a text-to-image generator. Again, this extra step improves the output while also giving you the chance to refine the prompt. Then go ahead and copy and paste it back into the instruction box. You can further improve this output by asking your model to “perfect that image” a few times.
Ready to break into video? Apps like Synthesia and Runway ML can take your written content and convert it into clips. Upload your text into ChatGPT or Gemini and ask it to convert the text into prompts for a text-to-video generator, then paste the output back into the app.
AI-generated content can be mediocre - don’t let yours be. Follow the above advice and profit from an endless trove of marketing material on a par with the best human output.
Joe Smith is Founder of the AI consultancy 2Sigma Consultants. He studied AI at Imperial College Business School and is researching AI’s effects on cognition at Lancaster University. He is author of The Optimized Marketer, a book on how to use AI to promote your business and yourself. Contact joe@2Sigmaconsultants.com.