“Don’t underestimate your own knowledge, your own expertise, [when using AI]. Don’t overlook how much you need to brief AI or write your prompts in a very thorough way in order to get the best out of it.”—Pam Didner
In this #ContentChat recap, Erika Heald is joined by Pam Didner, sales enablement expert, to discuss how content marketers can write great AI prompts for a range of marketing use cases. Pam shares effective prompts you can use today and learnings from her two new books:
Watch the entire conversation on YouTube or read through the highlights below.
Driving Business Value with AI: Key Use Cases Explored
AI is an essential business tool moving forward because of the benefits it can provide when used strategically.
“AI is here to stay. This is not going away. It’s not like some very novice technology, and it’s actually very useful. Think about it: When ChatGPT was launched back in November 30, 2022, within five days, they reached 1 million users.”—Pam Didner
“AI can do so many marketing jobs. If you ask AI SEO questions [it gives a] great answer. If you are a campaign manager and you want to ideate a campaign, AI can do that. If you are an event manager and you want to create pre-event invitations, AI can do that.”—Pam Didner
AI can streamline and optimize many content creation and distribution tasks.
“The business value [of AI] is looking at the efficiency gain. AI can help us in terms of writing blog posts. AI can help us write social media copy. AI can even generate images. So a lot of the content creation part of it, AI can actually do some of the writing for you [and] also create images, or even tell you the optimal times that you can post.”—Pam Didner
“The business value comes from three different perspectives. One is, can you measure the efficiency gain? The second thing is [does AI] actually impact your revenue? And the third, can they actually impact whatever AI tools that you use? Can that reduce cost?”—Pam Didner
AI is especially helpful for defining your brand voice and enforcing your style across content.
“My favorite use case is around brand voice. If you have that defined brand voice, you’re able then to use AI to ensure that everything everywhere reflects the brand voice.”—Erika Heald
“You can use AI to make sure that when it’s giving prompts to your customer service reps when they’re doing phone consultations, it’ll take what they put in and give them a brand-appropriate response. [And] you can do the same thing with chatbots and all that, too.“—Erika Heald
“You want to make sure whatever content you create is on brand. That’s very important especially for enterprise clients, because they create a lot of content, and a lot of agencies or internal people, even freelancers, are creating content for them. So they want to make sure they have a sense of consistency in terms of a tone and manner”—Pam Didner
AI can accelerate content creation and help create new versions of existing content.
“One of my favorite uses is rewrite. I will write something and if I like it, I kind of let it go. If I don’t like it, I will ask AI to give me a couple of rewrite options. And again, that comes back to does that reflect my voice and my personal style?”—Pam Didner
Overcoming the Challenges of AI-Generated Content
Marketers need to give AI the necessary information about their audience and goal for it to generate useful content.
“There are prerequisites that need to happen before AI can do a great job for you. You still need to tell AI who your audience is. You need to tell the AI why they need to write something. What is the why? What is the objective? You’ll still need to tell AI your products and your services. You still need to tell AI the call to action.”—Pam Didner
“Anything that you are telling AI to do, AI possibly can do it for you, to some extent, but you are the one who needs to write the prompts to actually tell AI what to do, and you still need to guide them.”—Pam Didner
Treat AI like an intern, and provide documented content governance elements.
“I have long been advocating for the fact that you have to have all of those defined and documented governance elements in place that you then give to the AI. And, then, you treat the AI like an intern. They’re smart, they’re excited, but they still need to understand all this context. They don’t have your human experience in the job.”—Erika Heald
The Importance of Data Quality and Governance in AI-Driven Marketing
Marketers rely on a lot of data to inform their campaigns, but that data can quickly become stale without proper cleansing practices.
“In one of the chapters, I talk about the importance of data. It’s actually important for all of us who are doing marketing; we want to understand the touchpoints from our prospects, we want to understand the people who actually come to our website, who they are, and possibly why they come, and what they are searching for. All those are just data points that will give us a clue in terms of what we can do to further engage with them. And because data is so important, the accuracy and correctness of data is critical.”—Pam Didner
“If the data is not clean, and then you use the data to make a decision, then you will end up making the wrong decision. That’s the biggest risk.”—Pam Didner
Large organizations can use data enrichment and data cleansing tools.
“For big enterprises, I always suggest that you need to correlate your data with data enrichment tools.”—Pam Didner
Remove data once it is confirmed to no longer be relevant, like if you receive an email bounce back.
“You can look at bounce rates. If the email bounces, automatically delete it so it’s no longer in your CRM database.”—Pam Didner
Empower your customers and prospects to update their data for you.
“I don’t have the budget to do data enrichment and data cleansing. So a lot of time I will ask my subscribers to not necessarily update the information, but I will ask them to kind of update their email addresses as they see as they see fit, or create some sort of question to get additional information.”—Pam Didner
Tips for Writing AI Prompts for Content Marketing
Provide context to inform the AI’s response. Pam’s book provides templates you can customize across 12 categories.
“The second book I wrote is really about AI prompting. This is very niche sales and marketing prompts in 12 categories, if you will. And the way I write a lot of those prompts is to be very specific in terms of your asks.”—Pam Didner
“I provide very specific examples for you to copy and paste and then tailor for your need. And I made it very clear in the very beginning, I say, don’t take any of these examples and run with them as is. You need to take what I have and then modify it.”—Pam Didner
Pam shares an example and background below:
“I am researching SEO keywords for my organization which specialize in this type of products and services, and we target this type of customers with this specific type of demographics. Our client target keywords include XYZ. Provide me provide a list number of additional high volume keyword list with a low competition and relevant to my products and services.”—Pam Didner
“I’m very specific. I even give them a list of keywords I am using now. Then I said I want additional keywords. Not only additional keywords; the keywords with low competition and relevant to my products and services. So I’m very specific. When you write a log of the prompts, that’s how specific you need to be.”—Pam Didner
Additional Content Marketing and AI Tips:
Listen to the full recording to learn:
- How AI failed to write Pam’s books and why Erika won’t trust AI to write full-length content (7:17)
- What sales teams should know about using AI (17:11)
- Why governance is critical to successful AI implementation (28:27)
- Key takeaways and a-ha moments from Pam’s books (31:05)
Need some help getting started with using AI within your content team? Get in touch—we’d love to help.
