‘AI Chatbot’ is the buzzword these days after the most widely known conversational AI, ChatGPT was launched in November 2022. It made quite a splash on social media and in the digital marketing community.
Digital marketing is an indispensable part of any business. There is no scaling up for brands without a strong digital presence. And AI definitely has a part to play in it.
Given the speculation that ChatGPT can replace humans, its presence in the industry has caused unease.
But is it really coming for your job as a digital marketer?
First things first, what is ChatGPT?
Before we get to the nitty-gritty, we need to understand what ChatGPT is.
Let’s ask the Chatbot to explain.
In layman’s terms, it is a conversational AI tool that gives human-like responses to your queries.
The company OpenAI owns this AI tool, which is accessible to the public for free use. As of February 1, a paid subscription is available as well, called ChatGPT Plus.
ChatGPT was trained on an extensive collection of data gathered from various sources on the internet, including Twitter, Reddit, Wikipedia, and more to make its responses human-like. Besides this, they used a technique called Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback.
Now, why does it seem like a possibility that this Chatbot can replace traditional digital marketing?
What can ChatGPT do in the digital marketing space?
It is uncertain how far this Artificial intelligence tool can be developed further but some of its uses are quite clear already.
Content creation
Writing an article, blog, or Ad copy takes research, fact-checking, writing, and editing before it’s ready to go online. This process can be sped up considerably with ChatGPT. The chatbot can take care of the research and writing tasks.
Even editing and proofreading fall under its range of capabilities although with limitations. Content creators and Social media marketers can use it to create content calendars, write captions for social media posts and produce content optimized for search engines.
By analyzing search queries and user interactions, ChatGPT can identify popular topics and provide relevant suggestions for content.
Customer support and engagement
Users can effectively use ChatGPT for tasks that can be automated like responding to customer reviews, or queries about shipping status. This is especially helpful for small teams. Customer support executives can attend to important tasks while ChatGPT handles common customer inquiries.
It can take over repetitive tasks, reducing the workload. Also, it can provide 24/7 customer support, outside business hours. As it can handle a large number of customer inquiries, it also helps to scale up the customer service function.
Another benefit is the possibility of personalizing customer interaction. By feeding customer-specific data to ChatGPT, tailored responses according to customer preferences and requirements can be generated.
Customer or audience research
Users can use ChatGPT to automate the collection of feedback and opinions from customers. They can also segregate customer data based on customer responses with this AI tool.
Collecting data from unstructured data sources like social media posts, and customer reviews for trend analysis also comes under the purview of ChatGPT. Digital marketing agencies can use all these to come up with targeted marketing campaigns.
Researchers can use ChatGPT for A/B testing which involves comparing two versions of a website or landing page to determine which performs better when shown to website visitors. They can use it to improve website design, copy, and layout.
Simplification of SEO-related tasks
From writing titles for blog posts, podcasts, or YouTube videos, to keyword research, ChatGPT is a very useful Artificial intelligence tool. A digital marketing agency can benefit from using the Chatbot to gather potential seed keywords for SEO writing.
It can also help you write optimized content for social media and websites. This can be utilized to improve the ranking on search engines. It is also an ideal tool for keyword clustering used to optimize or create a website.
Data Analysis
ChatGPT can be described as a Jack of all trades, a master of none when it comes to data analysis. While an effective tool to sift through tedious amounts of data, it is not an expert that can handle high-level analysis tasks.
It is very handy when it comes to creating data visualization and report generation. It can also function as a tool for customer analysis as it can provide information pertaining to customer behavior and preferences.
When given the right data like customer demographics, website traffic, customer feedback, etc, it can give a fairly accurate report. Analysts can use this data to optimize marketing campaigns by identifying potential customer segments.
Are these benefits enough to replace digital marketing specialists?
ChatGPT is undeniably an innovative tool that can assist digital marketing agencies. But it has limitations.
On taking a closer look, these are the issues that come up.
The AI tool does not assure the accuracy of information.
ChatGPT assumes no responsibility for the accuracy, reliability, or completeness of the information it gives. The results are not plagiarism-free either.
The Chatbot itself says that users need to fact-check and fine-tune its responses to make them usable.
Lack of human insight and creativity
This AI tool can only make sense of the context based on what is given in the prompt. If the context is vague or limited, it can generate text that is inaccurate, inappropriate, or makes no sense.
It is unable to add the human element to texts and lacks original viewpoints.
It can only process the prompt given to it based on the data fed to it and completely lacks emotional intelligence.
Lack of comprehension of changing algorithms
ChatGPT lacks the ability to understand the regularly changing algorithms used by search engines. This is because it uses an expansive data set that was fed to it and not real-time information. Hence there is a high chance that the text provided by the chatbot may not adhere to the latest SEO guidelines and algorithm updates.
It may give biased results
Results from ChatGPT are only as good as the data that it was trained on. If it includes biased information, these biases may also appear in texts generated by it. This can lead to the generation of text that may potentially contain offensive content.
Lack of SEO analytics
It can produce SEO-friendly content but the text still requires a lot of editing. Besides that, it is unable to provide information about important SEO parameters. To do that, other analytics tools need to be utilized along with ChatGPT.
Privacy and security concerns
When users type in prompts to generate required text, they might unknowingly put out sensitive information into the public domain.
ChatGPT is a tool, not a replacement
It is clear that digital marketing involves a lot of strategies and approaches that go beyond the capabilities of ChatGPT at this point in time. At the end of the day, there is no marketing without appealing to the emotions of the target audiences. And as things stand, ChatGPT can’t bring the human touch that is so essential in the industry.
However, the truth is that it has the ability to revolutionize digital marketing. With 100 Million users within 2 months of launch, it seems like ChatGPT is here to stay. The newer versions of ChatGPT are likely to address its current limitations as seen in the case of ChatGPT 4, which was recently released. The Chatbot is far from perfect but its utility will only grow from here on out.
Instead of looking at things from a negative point of view, the ideal thing to do is to understand the technology. Harnessing it may be the key to taking on challenges that have proved difficult in the past. It is important to augment your expertise with the right skills so that you are not left behind as AI transforms the industry.
The difference between being replaceable and being indispensable may just depend on you adapting to AI tools and deploying them the right way. So what will your choice be?
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