Get the Most Out of ChatGPT: Top Prompts for Quality Responses [+ Examples for Marketers]

ChatGPT, the chatbot that has everyone talking and debating, can be a marketer's best friend if used well. However, using ChatGPT entails much more than just giving it prompts on a whim. You need to have a list of well-thought-out prompts on hand to ensure you aren't getting subpar responses that might have a negative impact on your marketing strategy. On top of that, you need to have a plan.

In this comprehensive guide, we'll show you how you can get the most out of ChatGPT. Read on to make your job easier, more efficient, and ultimately more productive. 

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is an incredibly powerful chat-based AI tool that generates human-like responses from prompts. It uses natural language processing (NLP), a subfield of AI, to process and comprehend the text prompts it is given similar to how we humans understand it. 

To produce responses, ChatGPT then utilizes natural language generation (NLG), another subset of AI that allows humans to generate text the way a human might write it. OpenAI's website even states that it can "answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests."

The Benefits of ChatGPT for Marketers

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How can a marketer take advantage of ChatGPT? This powerful AI tool is notable for one main advantage—it automates tedious, repetitive tasks. You can use it to streamline content creation, content curation, and research. The automation frees up time and resources, letting you focus on more strategic activities.

Other potential merits of using ChatGPT include:

Saves Valuable Time

Rather than providing users with a series of links to sift through, ChatGPT provides the user with a quick answer. If the answer is too complicated, ChatGPT can explain it in simpler terms if you ask it to. Having quick access to information allows you to channel your precious time to the tasks that truly matter. You'll no longer have to spend hours on end generating new ideas or analyzing data for your marketing needs.

Enhances Productivity

Unlike humans, ChatGPT is supremely focused and doesn't get distracted easily. Assigning high-demand, but low-level work to it can free up time for the higher-value work where human knowledge, intuition, and empathy count. By removing menial tasks from the equation, ChatGPT allows you to productively spend your time solving complex problems, improving customer experiences, and planning strategies. This, in turn, boosts your bottom line in the long run.

Fills Skill Gaps

ChatGPT analyzes big data to identify crucial trends and insights. By acting as a trusted data analyst, the tool helps you achieve something you might not have the skills for.

Similarly, you can use ChatGPT to develop high-quality content for your social media or email marketing campaigns. Generating personalized content for your digital marketing is one way to provide value to your customers without spending more time and money. Even if your content creation skills are not up to par, you can count on ChatGPT to do a great job on that front.

Improves Decision-Making

ChatGPT doesn't just analyze huge volumes of data, it does so in real-time and with great accuracy. The incredible analytical power can help marketers make informed, cutting-edge, data-driven decisions quickly. More information on consumers can also spark creativity in your team, allowing them to stay ahead of the curve with new ideas that your customers will love.

The Importance of Choosing Effective ChatGPT Prompts 

Even though ChatGPT is trained on human-generated data, it is still a machine. You always need to instruct it using a prompt to get the work done. A prompt is a short piece of text used as input for AI tools and it's needed to generate responses. It is a way to tell the AI what you want and how you want it.

Choosing a perfect ChatGPT prompt can result in:

Accurate Responses

ChatGPT is only as good as the prompts you give it. Providing the AI system with the necessary context and information yields relevant, high-quality content that matches what you're looking for.

Targeted Content

Without a targeted prompt, AI tools can only generate generic responses at best. Selecting an effective prompt allows you to guide ChatGPT more closely. For instance, you can ask it for information about specific themes, topics, or audiences.

Opportunity for Meaningful Conversations

A fluff-free, well-directed prompt opens the doorway for conversations that are meaningful and engaging. For instance, you can learn more about a particular concept by asking the chatbot follow-up questions and using these responses effectively.

Tips for Choosing Effective Prompts

It's clear that effective ChatGPT prompts are extremely important and, at this point, creating them may seem a little intimidating. There's a lot of pressure to get it right, but the following tips can help ensure you don't fumble along the way.

Ask Open-Ended Questions

Open-ended questions are questions that can't simply be answered with Yes/No, True/False, or multiple choice. Instead of fixed responses, they require the AI tool to provide free-form responses, in its voice.

The advantage of open-ended questions is that, unlike close-ended questions, they provide much deeper, more thorough, and often subjective information. This means there's no limit to your data collection and research capabilities.

You can also utilize open-ended questions to gain new, often unexpected, insights. Because there's no limit to possible responses, you're likely to receive information and opinions you hadn't previously even considered.

Take these open-ended questions, for example:

• What do you think about the current state of artificial intelligence?
• How can marketing change the world?

These questions compel ChatGPT to contemplate its responses more thoroughly and drive it toward more discussion rather than the hasty conclusion of a close-ended question.

Give ChatGPT Context

In any real human conversation, context is everything. Unfortunately, today's AI tools aren't smart enough to recognize or understand context on their own. Without it, they can't accurately mimic human levels of intelligence. Writing effective prompts is a great way to provide ChatGPT context, and the result is nothing short of quality responses.

When giving context, include who to sound like and who the content should be written for. Tell the AI chatbot something like, you are a <persona> writing for <audience>, write me a <content piece> to accomplish <goal>.

Example of a context-rich prompt: You are a B2B marketing expert writing for marketing managers, write me a promotional email getting users to sign up for our new AI+SEO Cohort.

Personalized Prompts

When speaking to someone, how do you prompt them to give a personalized response? You ask a personalized question. The same applies to ChatGPT. Personalized prompts are usually direct, and fluff-free, and aim to give tailor-made responses about a specific concept, audience, or place. This helps you save precious minutes and steer clear of generic responses that add little value to your research.

Example of a personalized prompt: Can you provide a list of the top B2B marketing agencies in Los Angeles?

Thought-Provoking Statements

Just as in humans, making a thought-provoking question or sharing an interesting fact prompts ChatGPT to generate insightful responses. It encourages the chatbot to dig deeper into its database, possibly uncovering unique truths that might be of incredible value to your research. In addition, intriguing questions stimulate engaging conversations and create a more exciting atmosphere.

Bland, poorly thought-out prompts cannot achieve this kind of outcome. The best they can give you are flat responses devoid of substance or character. 

Example of a thought-provoking prompt: Did you know that humans have been using fire for over 1 million years? 

Clear and Concise Prompts

ChatGPT finds it difficult to understand the intended meaning of a prompt if the words used are unclear, redundant, or outright lengthy. The quickest way to generate relevant responses is to be straightforward and succinct from the get-go. Avoid long sentences with many sub points. Instead, use short sentences that are easy to understand.

While you might be tempted to throw in jargon and slang, don't. Terms like smart content, top-of-the-funnel, and lead flows might be familiar to you but not to ChatGPT. Or each one may have several different meanings depending on the context. In the end, you'll get skewed responses that barely reflect your initial intent.

It's also important to watch out for acronyms. Top-of-the-funnel, for example, is frequently written as TOFU. You can see why that would be confusing for the AI system. 

Example of a clear and concise prompt: Can you explain the difference between B2B and B2C marketing in 100 words or less?

Open-Minded and Neutral Prompts

Because ChatGPT depends heavily on the user's guidance and context, giving it close-minded or misleading prompts will only yield misleading results. It is a bot, after all. Avoiding biased or leading language can help ChatGPT generate responses that are more objective and impartial. Ultimately, you get the full picture of a particular topic, not just a portion of it, which can galvanize your research and marketing strategy in incredible ways.

Example of an open-minded and neutral prompt: What are three advantages and disadvantages of using AI in marketing?

The Benefits of Asking Sequential Questions to ChatGPT

Simply put, sequential questions are those that can be influenced by previous questions and by the answers given to those previous questions. 

These questions embody what ChatGPT is all about; they enable you to have a real, fruitful conversation with the tool, just like you would with a real human. Instead of merely throwing around random questions, you ask strategic questions that follow each other clearly and logically. This makes it easier for the tool to arrive at robust answers that are not only detailed and well-fleshed-out but also deeply relevant and meaningful. 

Other benefits of asking ChatGPT sequential questions include:

• Deepened understanding - The more context and examples you provide, the easier it'll be for the tool to understand what you truly want. This speeds up the research process significantly and adds value to the final output.
• Refining the conversation - Given that ChatGPT thrives in making a human-like conversation, asking random questions defeats its purpose. Sequential questions provide a quick way to cultivate free-flowing, highly engaging conversations with the bot. 
• Creating a more engaging experience - With a set of sequential questions on hand, you won't have to constantly seek clarification from the bot or vice versa. Everything flows from start to finish, providing a more seamless and human-like interaction that is difficult to find elsewhere with AI.
• Personalization - When interacting with ChatGPT, you certainly want answers that are tailored to your unique needs and preferences. Sequential questions can help you generate those responses faster, with minimal input.

When crafting sequential questions for ChatGPT, it can be tricky to know where to start. For inspiration, here is an example-based ChatSonic ChatGPT prompt that follows the sequential approach to a tee:

1. Here is a recipe review of <example recipe>
2. <example recipe review>
3. Now write a similar recipe review for <recipe name>

8 ChatGPT Prompts to Save Content Marketers' Time

The whole point of using ChatGPT instead of search engines like Google or Bing is to save time. For marketers, time is money. With these succinct, well-structured prompts, you'll get to save plenty of minutes on your research and have more time for the activities that support your bottom line. Have a look:

Prompt for Backlink Strategy:

"What are some tips for a backlink strategy to rank for <keyword> and can you provide a list of relevant sites to reach out to for backlinks?"

You'll see, the more detail you give in your prompt, the better the results will be. In addition, you can ask AI to tell you how many backlinks you should build.

Prompt for an FAQ:

"Write a list of frequently asked questions for the keyword <example>."

Are you a content marketer looking to build FAQ sections? If you need ideas for questions to add, you can use the above prompt to identify smart FAQs for any keyword you have in mind.

Prompt for Blog Title Ideas:

"Write a list of article topic ideas for the keyword <example> for someone in the awareness stage of the buyer funnel."

Someone in the middle of the buyer funnel and someone who has just entered the funnel are looking for different kinds of content. Their needs and expectations are different. 

Use this prompt to generate blog title ideas specifically for prospective customers who are looking for resources to more clearly understand, frame, and give a name to their problem. If you want ideas for a different stage, you only need to adjust the prompt.

Prompt to Generate Buyer Personas:

"Create 2 unique buyer personas for me based on the following executive summary: <example executive summary>."

The executive summary part helps to add an element of specificity and conciseness to the final response. 

If you want to create additional buyer personas, change the figure in the prompt. While at it, it's also best to add more information in the summary so you don't end up with personas that look almost similar.

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Prompt for Content for a Specific Buyer Persona:

"Now create a list of content pillars for each buyer persona mentioned above for each stage of the buyer journey."

The above prompt is a prime example of sequential sentences done right. You're telling the AI tool to generate content pillars based on the previous response, and it will do precisely that. By steadily building up the context, you're deepening the tool's understanding of your prompts, increasing your chances of getting a highly relevant and accurate final response.

Prompt for Target Keywords:

"Generate a list of 10 keyword ideas on the topic <example> for this website (insert URL)"

Creating a list of keywords on any topic is hard enough as it is. At best, you take a couple of hours to come up with something tangible. Not only will this prompt help you generate helpful ideas quickly, but also ensure those ideas align with the content you already have on your website. 

Prompt to Generate Structured Data for an FAQ:

"Create schema markup for this text: ‘Question: what is the best type of flour to use to bake a pastry' and ‘Answer: Pastry flour is best used for pie crusts, cookies, muffins, pancakes, cakes, biscuits, and breadsticks.’"

Using our example above, you can ask ChatGPT to write product or FAQ structured data for you. Structured data is a highly recommended SEO technique that can produce higher click-through rates, greater search visibility, faster indexing, and voice search domination.

However, if you don't know what specific information you need for certain types of structured data creation, you run the risk of creating inaccurate markup. We recommend applying a human layer of analysis and knowledge first. In other words, you still need to do a little bit of legwork.

Prompt for a Guest Post Pitch:

"Please write an engaging, creative, and professional guest post pitch email on the topic of <keyword> as well as 5 creative subject lines."

Upon closer inspection, you'll notice that these are two prompts rolled into one. Use this clear and concise prompt to generate a post-pitch email exactly how you want it to be. 

If you are not satisfied with the subject lines created, you can come up with one or more catchy subject lines and ask AI to improve them for you.

After that, you can instruct ChatGPT to create X similar subject lines and bold or italicize them.

Punctuation to Consider When Using ChatGPT

Like in any other form of writing, punctuation in ChatGPT fills your prompts with silent intonation. Correct punctuation adds clarity and precision to your prompts, allowing the bot to stop, pause, or give emphasis to certain parts of the sentence.

Here are a few punctuation marks to consider when utilizing ChatGPT:

• Question marks - Can help indicate a prompt is a question and prompt ChatGPT to provide a response
• Quotation marks - Can help indicate those terms should be included in the response
• Ellipses - Indicate a pause or continuation in the prompt; helps ChatGPT towards generating a response that flows naturally from the prompt
• Emoji - Adds a conversational or emotional tone

If you want to use special punctuation such as emojis, use it sparingly and only when it enhances clarity or expressiveness. Relying too much on punctuation can be confusing for both the bot and yourself.

Effective Prompts Can Make All the Difference

ChatGPT has the potential to provide valuable insights and information through effective prompts. How well you can utilize ChatGPT ultimately depends on how good your prompt is. It's best to experiment with different types of prompts to find what works best for your needs.

The best ChatGPT prompts are those that are open-ended, succinct, neutral, and thought-provoking. They focus on generating the most accurate answer possible for any topic. Sequencing prompts help to create a human-like, highly engaging environment that makes the whole chat experience fulfilling and worthwhile.

While there are always ChatGPT prompts that are better than others, some are at a whole new level, enabling marketers to save time in ways they didn't think possible. 

At Steel Croissant, we steer away from having AI write our content, but we think AI has a lot of potential to not only increase productivity and efficiency, but also help us increase our authoritativeness, content relevance, and expertise. Contact our marketing team today to learn more about how you can take advantage of AI and take your SEO and content strategies to the next level or explore our services for more insight into how we can help you.