When the first wave of AI hype started to unfold I was pretty smug.
“HA! Have you seen what it produces? Absolute garbage, it’ll never replace real copywriters.”
But then, ChatGPT hit the scene.
This AI writing tool is far from perfect, but the advances it has made are quite astonishing compared to other similar tools. While it still has major limitations (get it to write anything long-form and it’s a mess) this tool really is proving to be worth the hype, but not for the reasons you might think.
Most copywriters mock AI writing tools because they see how bad it is at writing whole pieces of copy or content, but that’s not the point of AI right now.
Its power lies in use cases beyond producing copy and I’m going to show you just 5 of those most powerful use cases.
Table of Contents
1. Writing Market Research Questions
One thing I’ve seen copywriters push back on when it comes to the benefits of AI is how it doesn’t incorporate VOC data into copy. Personally, I think it’ll be pretty simple for AI to scrape VOC data based on interview transcripts and leverage that data to generate copy using basic copywriting formulas like PAS (pain, agitate, solution).
I think it’ll also be able to merge that VOC data with information about a company’s offers, brand voice, and other relevant pieces of data.
But that type of capability probably won’t be around for a while yet.
However, there is an AI application that can apply directly to VOC which you can leverage today: writing market research questions.
We know the importance of interviewing real people in the target audience to help us with our copy and ChatGPT can quickly generate a list of pretty solid questions based on someone’s title.
I used a VP of Sales as an example as that’s the main ICP of one of my B2B clients. You can see how these aren’t just generic questions, but are actually tailored to the role I’ve given in the prompt.
The answers to these questions would be copywriting VOC gold and it took seconds to generate them.
2. Content Ideation
Sometimes we have the kernel of an idea for some cool content, but it needs a hook to make it even remotely interesting and your poor brain is a little fried.
Enter content idea prompts.
ChatGPT will generate content ideas for you to help you hone in on a specific hook or angle for your article. This is an example I did about headless CMS and SEO.
Are they mind-blowingly amazing?
Nah, but be honest: are your initial ideas much better?
I know that many companies worry about the impact a headless CMS might have on their technical SEO and idea number 8 can help me jump-start an article about that specific topic. I also know that many are comparing the solution with a traditional CMS like WordPress so a comparison article would be a very helpful piece of Middle-of-funnel content.
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3. Understand What Questions Your ICP Might Have About Working With You
This one I discovered by accident.
I was curious to see if ChatGPT could spin up a list of questions from [ROLE] about [SERVICE] to see how useful it would be to prepare for a sales call.
I asked it to produce 10 questions that a Head of Marketing might have before hiring a copywriting and content marketing agency. As I read through them though, I realized these were pretty good prompts about what information should be included on a service’s page such as:
- Portfolio & examples
- Pricing
- Information about the team and their qualifications
- How they measure success on their campaigns and set KPIs
- How to ensure the copy aligns with the brand’s voice and USP
These might seem obvious at first, but it’s easy to skip over some crucial pieces of information in your services page in favour of paragraphs about their pain points, future pacing, etc and not even answer the fundamental questions they want to know about working with you.
Not to mention there are a bunch of content ideas in there.
Try it out: you can make it more fun and engaging by getting ChatGPT to write it as a dialogue rather than a list of questions as I’ve done below.
4. Headline Ideas
Right, I know “headlines are the most important part of content/copy….”
I get it – I write endless headlines before I settle on one, but if AI can shorten the path to writing a good headline, why not take it? Why spend more time coming up with headlines from scratch or prompts where you still need to do 90% of the work?
Here’s how to maximize the creative potential of using ChatGPT to generate headlines
First off, start broad with your topic. Here I just used AI and copywriting as my prompt.
Next, get more specific. From this list what stood out to you as an idea worth pursuing? For me they made me think about how writers need encouragement to embrace this new technology rather than focus on copywriting and AI in the abstract.
So my next prompt was generating headlines about how copywriters need to embrace AI. You can get specific about the target audience and the aim of the article to get really specific headline ideas. In my example I told the tool that the article’s aim is to assuage the fears and anxieties writers have about the use of AI in the copywriting industry.
Now you want to start introducing specific headline formulas for ChatGPT to leverage based on the topic you’ve chosen. Here I’ve gone for headlines that start with “why you can’t”, “You should”, “You Could”,
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5. Keyword Clustering
I believe that the role of SEO copywriters will need to completely adapt to this emerging technology, but what I didn’t expect was ChatGPT to be useful for SEO beyond producing “SEO friendly copy.”
I wish I discovered the use case of ChatGPT for keyword clustering, but I found it on Twitter by Joe Davies.
Using AI to do some KEYWORD CLUSTERING and determine keyword intent (all in 2 minutes! )🤯⬇️
— Joe Davies 🥑 (@fatjoedavies) December 5, 2022
In a nutshell, Joe had a bunch of keywords that he wanted to categorize into topics so he simply copied and pasted them into ChatGPT and asked it to cluster the keywords by topic. ChatGPT then organized his messy list of keywords into tidy categories.
But what happened next really blew my mind.
He was able to then get ChatGPT to not only organize them in list form, but as a table! It struggled at first, but he tried the request a second time and voilá! He got his table of clustered keywords organized by topic, keyword, and intent.
Fan-fudging-tastic.
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How will you Leverage AI in your Copywriting Workflow?
I hope these examples show the potential of AI go far beyond producing mediocre articles and sales copy which is what most copywriting experts are using to beat it down with.
Right now the point of AI in copywriting is not to simply whip up articles and copy without any human intervention (although that’s definitely the long-term goal). Right now its main aim and focus is to be an aid to writers, to help us shave more time from our workflows so we can work more efficiently and I think it’s obvious from these examples just how well it can do that.
Has this article made you any less sceptical of AI?
Do you see any new uses for it that you didn’t consider before? I’d love to know in the comments. And if you found this article useful do me a solid and share it on the socials?
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