What Does AI and the Rapid Usage of ChatGPT Really Mean for Marketers

Lem Park

M Posted 1 year ago

t 8 min read

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) has revolutionized how marketers approach their strategies for a long time. From IBM’s Watson and Google’s RankBrain, AI has revolutionized how search engines work, and how marketers utilize AI-led technologies. The introduction of ChatGPT is now bringing conversational elements of AI direct to the consumer.

Whether we realize it or not, AI touches consumers – running in the background – every day. AI is everywhere, from virtual assistants such as Siri and Alexa, to smart home devices that control lighting and temperature, to recommendation systems that personalize shopping and entertainment experiences.

Today, AI technologies are being used by marketers across all industries to provide insights and business intelligence, automate processes and improve decision-making. The current focus in AI is on developing systems that can think and act like humans.

The evolution of AI and conversational applications

Advancements in natural language processing, data science, and machine learning algorithms have enabled AI to understand and respond to human speech and behavior.

ChatGPT is now allowing people to have a direct interaction with AI

ChatGPT is a language generation model developed by OpenAI. In essence, it is a chatbot based on Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) architecture and is trained on a large dataset to generate human-like text.

For so many, the introduction of ChatGPT is the first time people are interacting with AI directly. So, it is no surprise that the mass adaption of ChatGPT has been record-breaking. In the first 3 months, ChatGPT reached one million users.

What does ChatGPT mean for business and marketers

No marketer will be able to ignore this technology and we anticipate more demand for guidance on when and how to use it. AI is becoming integral for marketing and can help marketers through insights and automation, and when utilized correctly with human supervision, it can also, with help with content ideation and generation.

Businesses and developers have been embracing ChatGPT, with an increasing number utilizing it to streamline their content operations, enrich customer service experiences for clients and prospects, and upgrading marketing strategies with insights and content development.

McKinsey highlights some important use cases for business below:

"Marketing and sales—crafting personalized marketing, social media, and technical sales content (including text, images, and video); creating assistants aligned to specific businesses, such as retail
Operations—generating task lists for efficient execution of a given activity
IT/engineering—writing, documenting, and reviewing code
Risk and legal—answering complex questions, pulling from vast amounts of legal documentation, and drafting and reviewing annual reports
R&D—accelerating drug discovery through better understanding of diseases and discovery of chemical structures"

What are the benefits and limitations to digital marketers

Benefits

ChatGPT provides valuable content-generation capabilities to help build out digital marketing campaigns.

Ideation: It can help generate new and unique ideas for content, which can help differentiate your business from your competitors.
Personalization: Marketers can generate personalized content based on customer data, which can improve the relevance and effectiveness of the content.
Time and Resource: ChatGPT can quickly generate large amounts of high-quality text, improving efficiencies for content marketers.
Multilingual generation: It can generate text in multiple languages, which can help reach a wider audience and expand into new markets.
Versatility: ChatGPT can be used by marketers for digital and content marketing tasks such as emails, blog posts, product descriptions, social media posts, and more.

Limitations

With any new technology, it is important to consider limitations also.

Limited specific knowledge: ChatGPT is trained on a large dataset of text but may not have detailed knowledge of a particular domain. This can lead to inaccuracies or inconsistencies.
Bias in data: Results may contain preferences, which may be reflected in the content generated.
Creativity limitations: While it can generate human-like text, it may not be able to generate truly original content. The output is based on patterns and structures learned from its data sources, which can lead to repetitive or formulaic content.
Quality of the generated content: Although the text quality is high, it is not always perfect. It may contain errors, inaccuracies or inconsistencies, especially when the model is not fine-tuned to a specific task.
Ethics: Using such models raises ethical considerations, such as the possibility of creating fake news, impersonation and spreading misinformation.
Accuracy: ChatGPT is still limited to 2021 data, which means it can't answer current/topical questions. However, this limitation will change over time.

In summary, ChatGPT can help marketers by offering features like text data for generating eBooks, informational content, and infographics – as well as providing the advantage of handling high demands tasks such as FAQs.

What does ChatGPT mean for content marketers

AI and ChatGPT are creating a new content explosion and battleground in the field of content writing. Many large websites are now using AI to write some of their content, such as BankRate.com and CreditCards.com. The latter even added a caveat in the footer of articles stating the content is auto generated.

CNET has done this also, producing over 75 AI-generated articles since November. However, it is now having to review its AI-written articles after being notified of severe errors.

While we will see an increasing amount of machine-generated content on the web, it is important to note that a machine cannot replace the art of human storytelling and emotional connection.

“The best content writers can align business objectives and messages with the needs and wants of the user (the searcher).” – CEO Jim Yu, Mediapost Interview

AI can assist in various aspects of content writing, such as ideation, copyediting, grammar, and spelling. It can also help with formatting and research, but with limitations. Human supervision will always be necessary at the front and end of the content production process.

ChatGPT is not here to replace human roles, but rather to assist and streamline tasks for them, allowing for more creative tasks that require a human touch.

What does ChatGPT mean for search

Recent history has shown that with every transformative change, search has grown. This has happened with mobile, local, video, voice, and short-term formats. The job of a search engine is to make the most relevant and accurate content discoverable.

Google also has an AI chatbot called LaMDA and plans to launch over 20 new AI products and showcase a version of its search engine with chatbot capabilities in the coming months. Google is also testing a chatbot called “Bard”.

Microsoft has announced it will be adding OpenAI's ChatGPT features to Bing search in the coming months, according to Forbes. In addition, according to Reuters, Chinese search engine Baidu is set to release a chatbot in March.

It is expected that all search engines will accelerate their innovation in AI.

What does ChatGPT mean for SEO

The core fundamentals of SEO have not changed

Utilize insights for intent
Focus on website and user experiences and infrastructure optimization
Create content that is helpful and balanced for discoverability on engines and is engaging ad valuable for the human reader
Measure performance and utilize automation technology for efficiency and scale

Same as for content marketers. AI allows SEOs to focus on more creative tasks that require a human touch.

ChatGPT can help small sites create SEO-friendly content much faster. For larger sites, if utilized correctly, it will add an additional level of scaled automation. It can help with writing and suggesting meta descriptions and titles, keyword research, heading suggestions for your pages and posts, article ideation, and writing copy – but be aware of the limitations.

Regarding ChatGPT and AI-generated content, Google's Search Liaison, Danny Sullivan, reiterated on SearchEngineLand that "content created primarily for search engine rankings; however, it is done, is against our guidance." But he added, "if content is helpful and created for people first, that's not an issue."

ChatGPT is now helping marketers see the value in conversational search

ChatGPT is also providing a mechanism for the massive adoption of conversational search. As people are increasingly searching in a more conversational manner, marketers and SEOs must understand and utilize this trend.

At BrightEdge, we recognized the importance of conversational search five years ago, and how it can enhance marketers’ overall search strategy, and made sure to account for this shift in our platform.

BrightEdge recommendations

New technology, such as ChatGPT, is something you should try and experiment with.

It has the potential to help content marketers and SEOs – but the limitations mean marketers should exercise caution and ensure human supervision.

Many technologies, including Google, will be building and up-grading AI detection and spam systems. A combination of eyeballs and brains will be looking for content that is not factual, contains inaccuracies, and lacks human perspective. Always remember - don't produce content that is written just for search ranking.

Ensure you follow Google's E-E-A-T and Helpful Content guidelines when using ChatGPT for content for SEO.

BrightEdge and AI

We have been on a journey to become an Artificial-Intelligence (AI-First) company for over 14 years. We believe that it is essential for every business to have AI-First capabilities. This journey started with Data Cube.

Since then, we have been the first to market with next-generation deep-learning technology, DataMind, using the same deep-learning best practices applied by Google in its voice and image recognition algorithms. AI has been woven into the BrightEdge platform to power search, content, and digital marketing solutions and to enable our customers on their own AI journeys.

BrightEdge Autopilot, used by thousands of large enterprises, has been helping organizations identify and perform SEO tasks that don't require a human touch. BrightEdge Autopilot uses GPT-3 in some cases to help fine-tune natural language tasks.

ChatGPT is being looked into to improve existing and create new platform use cases.

Learn how a leading beauty retailer tripled traffic and revenue for its key e-commerce pages using BrightEdge Autopilot.