What does ChatGPT mean for the future of marketing?

When I asked ChatGPT to describe itself, it responded with: “ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) is a large language model developed by OpenAI. It is trained on a massive dataset of text from the internet and is able to generate human-like text by using deep learning techniques.”

Pretty cool, right?

Launched at the end of November 2022, ChatGPT has been the talk of the town, especially among marketing professionals on LinkedIn. The sentiment about this tool is mixed, but the opinions are strong. Some believe it will replace the need for marketers, while others see it as an extra tool they can use to deliver an even better service.

So, is ChatGPT a marketer’s friend or foe? Here’s what this marketing professional thinks.

AI will make us more efficient

Efficiency saves time, and time is money. Marketing agencies will likely rely on ChatGPT to scale and become more efficient when researching, briefing, teaching and writing. While Google has been the golden child of the information age, you can’t deny how time-consuming it can be to sort through search results and try to find the information you need. 

Mediocre marketers will need to level up 

Should marketers feel threatened by ChatGPT? Not if they’re creative thinkers. While many are worried that ChatGPT will damage the marketing industry, it will probably do the opposite.

The divide between the ordinary and the extraordinary will only get bigger. To ensure they become irreplaceable, mediocre marketers will be forced to become more innovative and more creative and embrace the skills that make them uniquely human.

As more businesses and agencies adopt these kinds of tools, there will be an increase in roles requiring skills in AI. By embracing it and becoming experts at briefing, extracting and using what ChatGPT spits out, marketers can future-proof their careers.

AI will help give customers a better, more personalised experience

Gone are the days when customers would need to sit on hold to speak to a customer service representative. Using chatbots with ChatGPT will allow customers to receive instant, human-like replies to their queries, enhancing their experience and leaving them satisfied. These experiences can be provided 24/7 and across all your marketing channels, so you can be helpful to your customers wherever they are in the world and on whatever platform they use to engage with your business.

Brands will need to humanise themselves

ChatGPT evens the playing field, giving everyone access to an assistant that can write informative blog content in a few seconds. The trouble with this? The web is already saturated with duplicate information, so brands looking to stand out won’t be able to rely on ChatGPT for content marketing success. They’ll need to humanise their content because there’s one thing ChatGPT will never be: human. 

If businesses want people to skip the search engine or AI and come straight to their website, they’ll need to focus on producing opinion pieces, telling stories, embracing video content and anything else that will make them stand out in a sea of very similar, very boring AI-generated content.

There are still a few things brands and marketers should all be aware of before going all-in on ChatGPT. The tool has been known to respond with inaccurate but plausible-sounding content, can’t provide references to facts and can only provide information it has been trained on. Even Open AI CEO Sam Altman recently tweeted that “it’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now. We have lots of work to do on robustness and truthfulness.” 

Google has also updated its Webmaster Guidelines with a warning that websites could be penalised if found to be producing automatically-generated content ‘without regard for quality or user experience’.

Whatever your opinion is, you can’t deny that AI will change the future of marketing forever. So when it comes to ChatGPT, I say, if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.