Like it or not, artificial intelligence is changing up content marketing. AI writing generators are churning out content faster than I can type this one sentence, and AI chatbots are flipping traditional SEO methods on its head.
These changes alone would make it easy to cry "the robots are coming for our jobs." But if you know how to leverage AI, it can actually make you better at your job. Take ChatGPT, for example. With the right prompts, you can get it to help you with all aspects of your marketing strategy so you can scale your efforts.
Here, I'll share different ways you can use ChatGPT for copywriting and content ideation.
How to use ChatGPT for copywriting and content ideation
ChatGPT can do almost anything—in a completely terrifying, uncanny valley kind of way. But when it comes to copywriting and content ideation, here are the main categories of tasks ChatGPT can help you with:
Generate content ideas
ChatGPT can be a pretty good brainstorming partner—it's like having another person to bounce ideas off of. This is especially helpful if you're better at executing ideas, rather than coming up with them.
Here's an example of what ChatGPT told me when I prompted it to come up with "innovative ideas on how a small education-focused AI startup can use social media to increase brand awareness among teachers and professors."
Another interesting way to use ChatGPT to help you generate content ideas is by first prompting it to do a little market research. You can have it identify a list of top competitors in your industry, along with any market opportunities, and then generate a list of unique selling propositions.
For more prompt examples, check out Zapier's list of ChatGPT prompts to support your entire customer experience lifecycle.
Brainstorm copy
ChatGPT can also spit out some snappy turns of phrase and help get those creative juices flowing. For example, the team at Zapier used ChatGPT to help write their OpenAI integration landing page. It did an overall mediocre job (Zapier humans made it sound better), but it did come up with the line that says you can use OpenAI and Zapier to "combine the power of AI with the flexibility of automation." That's a pretty catchy line.
ChatGPT is particularly helpful if you feel more skilled at writing long-form content than short-form bits like product descriptions, email subject lines, or ad copy. That's me, so I used it to generate some headlines to promote my newsletter.
I took it a step further and asked ChatGPT to also give me a few taglines and calls-to-action (CTAs).
ChatGPT came up with these suggestions in a matter of seconds, and they're on par with the kinds of things I'd come up with—only, it would've taken me 30 minutes of brainstorming before coming up with them.
It's worth mentioning that ChatGPT probably won't provide the perfect copy from the jump—you'll have to tweak your prompt a few times to get the results you want. For example, you might have to ask it to emulate your writing style or go easy on the exclamation points. I recommend asking it for a bunch of suggestions each time. This way, you can pick a few and A/B test them.
Repurpose your existing content
Coming up with a content marketing strategy is one thing; creating the content to support that strategy is another. With all the effort you've put into creating that content, you want to be sure to share it far and wide. But you can't just take a blog article and post it word-for-word on social media. There's an art to repurposing your content to meet the specific needs of each platform.
This is where ChatGPT can do the heavy lifting. For example, it can summarize your article and pull key quotes that you can then share on LinkedIn, X, or any other platform you use.
You can also prompt ChatGPT to output AI images to go with your post. Fair warning: ChatGPT still struggles to generate accurate text in its AI images. So if you were hoping to create an infographic or text-based visual, for example, you're better off using graphic design apps.
Write SEO meta descriptions
Let's be honest: most SEO meta descriptions already sound like they were written by a bot, so why not make your life easier and actually get a bot to do it?
You can feed ChatGPT with your entire article and prompt it to write the metadata. Or, if your article already lives online and is accessible to anyone (it's not behind a paywall), you can paste the URL in your prompt.
In some cases, you may have to tweak the suggestions to incorporate your primary keyword. But you have to admit—it's a good jumping-off point.
One note about giving character limits: in my experience, ChatGPT doesn't consistently adhere to these limits. So be sure to check the word count of your winning copy lest your CMS aggressively flash a red "exceeds character limit" message at you.
Create rough outlines for blog posts
ChatGPT hasn't come far enough (yet) for me to trust it to write entire blog posts. But it can generate rough outlines to work from.
Here's what it gave me when I prompted it with "In the style of an opinion piece in The Atlantic or New Yorker, answer the question, should writers be scared that AI will take their jobs?"
Its take on The Atlantic and New Yorker's style was decent. The opening lines are an excellent pastiche and it makes a lot of good points, but it still wouldn't make it to print as is. It's dry and formulaic. The conclusion starts with "in conclusion." And I don't know the last time I read "moreover" in something that wasn't an academic paper.
It also lacks a point-of-view. Even though ChatGPT is deeply involved in whether AI can take writers' jobs, it doesn't really have an informed opinion. It's just writing content that could be a fair response to my prompt—not something that it truly feels. Because, you know, it doesn't feel.
Still, it offers up a usable framework to start with. By taking the rough outline that it's given me (and even a few lines verbatim), I can write something much sharper, more opinionated, and of course, more human.
Summarize articles and key points
One of my favorite ways to use ChatGPT is to get it to summarize all the really obvious points about a particular subject or argument so I can make sure I didn't miss anything. Because GPT—the AI model powering ChatGPT—is built on top of huge amounts of written material pulled from the entire corpus of human knowledge, it's really good at hitting all the major talking points on most subjects.
A word of caution: ChatGPT can crawl the web and cite its sources, but it's still prone to inaccuracies. So be sure to fact-check everything.
If you're writing a blog post, an answer to a FAQ, or some other informative bit of content for your customers, ChatGPT can do a pretty good job of making sure you address the issues that anyone reading it will expect you to touch on. You obviously don't have to (and probably shouldn't) copy its points word for word, but it's a good bit of insurance to make sure you don't miss anything important.
Simplify a complex topic
When you use ChatGPT to summarize a complex topic—like how retrieval augmented generation (RAG) in AI works—that doesn't guarantee the topic will make any more sense.
In this case, you can use ChatGPT to help you simplify a complex topic in a way that you or your audience can understand. Here's how ChatGPT would explain how RAG works in a way a 10-year-old can understand.
When you prompt ChatGPT to explain a concept in a way a certain audience can understand, it tends to use analogies. Sometimes these analogies are helpful; other times, it muddies things further. Again, it depends on the complexity of the topic. But it's just as easy to prompt ChatGPT to ditch the analogy and go for the literal.
If you ask me, both explanations do a pretty solid job of explaining RAG in an easy-to-digest way.
Automate your copywriting and content ideation workflows
As a writing tool, ChatGPT is a pretty decent time-saver when it comes to generating first drafts. But when you use Zapier to connect ChatGPT with thousands of other apps, you can save even more time by automating the rest of your content workflows. For example, you can get ChatGPT to automatically draft an article outline and populate it in Google Docs, ready for you to edit. Learn more about how to automate ChatGPT, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.
Create email copy with ChatGPT from new Gmail emails and save as drafts in Gmail
Start a conversation with ChatGPT when a prompt is posted in a particular Slack channel
Generate conversations in ChatGPT with new emails in Gmail
Zapier is the leader in workflow automation—integrating with thousands of apps from partners like Google, Salesforce, and Microsoft. Use interfaces, data tables, and logic to build secure, automated systems for your business-critical workflows across your organization's technology stack. Learn more.
How to use ChatGPT for copywriting and content ideation: FAQs
Still have questions about when to use ChatGPT for copywriting and content ideation—and when you shouldn't? Check out the answers to these frequently asked questions.
Can I use ChatGPT for content writing?
ChatGPT still has a ways to go before it produces publish-ready content. Instead, ChatGPT is at its best when you ask for multiple options and tweak things yourself, rather than treating it as a hands-off AI marketing tool.
It's also important to remember that ChatGPT tends to hallucinate, so you should fact-check everything before hitting publish.
Which software is best for copywriting?
ChatGPT is only one of many AI tools you can use to help with copywriting and content ideation. There are plenty of other purpose-built AI writing generators and text generators on the market, many of which offer free trials of limited free plans. I recommend experimenting with a few to find the one that works for you.
Does Google penalize AI-generated content?
No, Google Search doesn't penalize AI-generated content. But it does penalize AI-generated content that's primarily used to manipulate search engines. So long as your content is original and helpful, regardless of how it was produced, it'll do better in search.
Bonus: Build your own chatbot to write marketing copy
You may have noticed that in order to get ChatGPT to generate marketing content, you need to feed it specific prompts every time you interact with it. Alternatively, you can build a custom version of ChatGPT that knows your brand voice and can execute very specific tasks.
You can also try Zapier's free AI chatbot builder. Train your marketing chatbot using your own knowledge sources, restrict it from using outside data sources, and even enter custom responses—all without writing a single line of code. Zapier will then combine your data with the power of OpenAI models to generate on-brand responses, and you can even connect it to all the other apps you use. Learn more about Zapier Chatbots.
Related reading:
This article was originally published in January 2023. The most recent update, with contributions from Jessica Lau, was in August 2024.
