15 best prompts for using ChatGPT for digital marketing

15 practical examples of Generative AI prompts to support content marketing, email marketing, search and social media marketing for ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude

I originally created this article when ChatGPT first launched to support my article How can I use ChatGPT for marketing?  with some practical examples. I showed how you can use ChatGPT for learning more about digital marketing and marketing planning by creating plans. It’s proved popular, so I’ve kept it updated since and we’ve added a free Google Sheet download to give more examples.

Here, I will explain some practical use cases of how marketers can use ChatGPT for content marketing to support different digital marketing channels. We’ll see that knowing how to prompt ChatGPT is a key skill, so I’ll show different prompting techniques before reviewing specific applications for the different digital marketing channels.

Some of the key digital marketing channels that I’ll describe are summarized in this visual from my book Digital marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice. In the prompt examples I focus on organic and paid search and social media marketing, but start with email marketing.

ChatGPT and other GenAI tools can be used across all these channels and for more strategic marketing activities. I agree with Dylan Roberts from KMPG who told Business Insider :

“It’s going to automate select tasks that knowledge workers are engaged in today so that they can focus on higher-value tasks“.

I agree, although in my other post I show how GenAI can support those higher-value strategy and planning tasks too. (Support is the key word there, not replace!)

Another oft-quoted way of looking at the impact of AI on marketing is

“You won’t lose your job to AI, but to someone who knows how to use AI.”

I also agree with this, for now, but in the longer term, many are calling BS as we move towards the scary world of AGI and the singularity where the number of marketers and other business professionals are decimating.

Recommended Smart Insights resources

To help our members make the huge personal and business changes need to make better use of AI for marketing, we have developed many learning modules and templates. I recommend starting with these:

Download our premium member resource – AI for Marketing playbook and governance policy template

Create your own AI marketing strategy and governance policy using Smart Insights simple template and use-cases for improving use of AI within your business to increase productivity, maintain brand trust and reduce costs.

Access the AI for marketing playbook and governance policy template

Why understanding ‘Prompt Engineering’ will help your marketing

A lot of the excitement amongst marketers about ChatGPT and similar GenAI tools is that across all the media and channels shown, it can act as a ‘hands-on’ productivity tool for analysis and creating content and visuals for marketing. I certainly don’t think it will replace marketers just yet, but I see it as a great collaborative tool to improve the quality of creative and to create more effective content.

So, before we dive in and look at the examples for different channels, it’s helpful to learn some basic principles of prompt engineering so you can efficiently prompt ChatGPT and other GenAI tools.

Understanding Zero, One and Few Shot prompts for ChatGPT

ChatGPT is an advanced natural language generation (NLG) model that doesn’t require prompts (known as ‘Zero shot‘ amongst AI professionals). However, it’s useful to know and we will see it works much better if you can be more specific, i.e., you give it specific context through examples and more detailed instructions, (‘One shot‘ or ‘Few shot‘).

Prompting is a simple new skill that we will have to learn to improve the quality of ChatGPT results. We can’t just rely on the AI, we have to apply our experience and intelligence as what some are calling ‘Prompt Engineers’. It’s a skill just like learning Google in the way that some people are better at getting answers from searching Google because of their experience. However, there are no defined ‘Advanced search’ prompts or syntax, since like Google the Chatbots have dispensed with those because it’s natural language.

We’ll start with some examples of useful prompting rules for email marketing. Then we’ll look at search and social media marketing.

ChatGPT prompts for email marketing – example

The obvious application here is email copywriting, but emails don’t exist in isolation. They often work best in a series of communications such as a Welcome sequence, so we will take an example of this to put ChatGPT ‘through its paces’. Although this example is email-focused, many of the techniques can be applied to other channels, which will be explored below.

For me, effective marketing copywriting boils down to creating relevance for particular, audience, engaging them, and persuading them to take action to the next step. So, within these examples of Email marketing, I won’t just ask ChatGPT to generate a copy, I’ll look to understand why that copy has been created. Here is a simple checklist which shows the prompting approach I have developed.

1. Set the context for your email creation

It’s an essential practice to start a new conversation to clear previous dialogue and once you have set the context, this is retained through the course of the conversation and you can return to it if you save the dialogue.

Here, you can see I’m specific in my prompt explaining the context. The product I’m promoting is an office cleaning service.

I’m not impressed by these subject lines TBH, they are ‘marketing happy talk’, which I’ll explain how to improve upon below.

2. Define the task and goal

What do you want the AI to do for you?!  Here, the goal is that these are for marketing and welcome emails for new prospects, for example:

• “Generate a compelling email to increase attendance at this upcoming event”
• “Generate a follow-up email following this meeting”
• “Generate a thank you email for customers who purchased this product”
• “Generate a promotional email to introduce this new service”
• “Create a reminder email for this upcoming meeting”

3. Define Chatbot’s tone of voice for in-house email style

It may be sufficient to set the context as shown above, but some have recommended you can improve the quality of the prompt by asking ChatGPT to act as a defined role or with a particular tone of voice. So, for example: “Act As an Email Marketing Copywriter”. I didn’t find this useful in my use – you can set the context in other ways, no need to over-prompt!

4. Ask follow-up questions to improve your WIP email generation

The first subject lines shown above are OK, but are quite generic. They reminded me of what Steve Krug called ‘Marketing Happy Talk‘ in his book ‘Don’t make me think’,  i.e., quite bland and generic fluff which is not engaging for the audience. I don’t think an experienced copywriter will write: “Say Goodbye to… Top-Notch”. Doesn’t work for me.

So next I asked it to refine its suggestions to give improved alternatives relating to someone in B2B switching to another service. These are much more specific.

5. Ask for alternatives you can select from

The prompts above show how you can specify the goal, but you will end up with more effective creative if you ask for a number of alternatives.

I initially asked the AI for alternative subject lines as above and then alternatives for the body copy as shown below. Then you can choose from the best or use A/B testing to see which works best for your audience.

6. Specify your email copy limits

The subject lines above are perhaps a little overlong, but could be OK for an initial test.  You can also usefully specify the number of characters. It’s cool that for Google Ads, for example, ChatGPT knows the limits (although it was only trained up to 2001, so bear in mind they could be out-of-date).

7. Learn from your AI

As you use ChatGPT, use it as an opportunity to learn best practices by asking it why it has done things in a particular way and what they are based on. Don’t just treat ChatGPT as a black box, ask it why it has chosen particular approaches. Here I ask it why it has structured the email as it has. This is the type of explanation you would get in a book or course on email marketing from an expert. This is great since it can help inform your own copywriting approach.

8. Find the source of the recommendations

You can take this one step further by asking to learn from experts in this field. Here we see some good recommendations. Not sure about Neil Patel as an email marketing expert specifically though…

On LinkedIn, email copy specialist Chase Diamond shared some more ChatGPT prompts for email copywriting.

We’ll now look at some of the best recommendations of prompts for other digital marketing channels. Some of the best compilations are from those curated and shared by Alex Velinov, the CTO of Tag Digital based in Glasgow in his two popular prompt lists on LinkedIn (ChatGPT for Marketing List 1 and List 2) , linking to different specialists in their field. I’ll highlight which I think are some of the most useful of these grouped by digital marketing channel.

Organic search ChatGPT prompt examples

9. Generate relevant topics for growing organic search presence

It’s not surprising that GenAI is well-positioned to generate keyword topics for writers.

Renowned SEO consultant Aleyda Solis has the best organic search summary here, with her blog ChatGPT for SEO: 20 Ways to Leverage ChatGPT in your SEO Activities.

These include prompts to create alternative titles and meta descriptions for posts. I also recommend these two Chrome extensions which will find you the best prompts:

She reminds us that using ChatGPT to support content generation for organic search will be OK if people check the quality and improve – as I have said – a collaborative approach.

10. Classify new/existing keywords based on defined success factors

Aleyda’s recommendations also include keyword analysis and keyword clustering tools. Here are some examples:

• “Classify the following keyword list in groups based on their search intent, whether commercial, transactional or informational: …”
• “Cluster the following keywords into groups based on their semantic relevance: ….”
• “Translate the following keywords from <Source Language> to <Output Language> and generate the results in a table with two columns, with the keywords in <Source Language> in the first one, and their translation to <Output Language> in the second:”

I’m not a fan of these since they don’t give the relative volumes of search or impressions for different search terms which Google’s Keyword Planner or Search Console do. So I won’t be using these.

If you’re using GSC, then this is a cool technique for grouping or clustering keywords neatly:

Paid search prompt examples

11. Refine paid search positioning and targeting with AI research prompts

Social media marketing prompt examples

12. Generate social media campaigns and assets

Jon Loomer has specialized in Facebook ad strategy for a long time, so interesting to see his take:

If you’re more focused on LinkedIn, take a look at these:

Other marketing and digital marketing applications

13. ChatGPT for market research generation

This handy Using ChatGPT to automate Market research video by Andy Gray starts by asking ChatGPT to “Write a list of the top 10 Danish fashion brands and include their website url, instagram url, facebook url and tiktok url”. This is then formatted into a table and exported into Google Sheets for reference.

14. ChatGPT for eCommerce product descriptions

This video on how to Automate writing eCommerce product descriptions with OpenAI by Elliott Davidson shows how to integrate ChatGPT responses with Google Sheets which is powerful for marketers managing a large number of product descriptions.

15. Advice on ChatGPT prompts for marketing

Unsurprisingly, our free A-Z ChatGPT Prompt cheatsheet for marketers was created in collaboration with ChatGPT! We started by prompting ChatGPT to create a glossary:

Prompt: “Write a glossary of terms for features and techniques for using ChatGPT titled: The A-Z of Prompting with ChatGPT for copywriters”.

This was a great starting point, but didn’t include some of the less obvious, more advanced features of ChatGPT we wanted to pass onto you, such as custom instructions, templates, temperature and TLDR.

So we took the original list, used ‘Regenerate’ to get 26 more ideas and added to it to with our own ideas to include some of the more advanced practical techniques too, including:

• Adaptive learning: Prompt ChatGPT to improve copy for SEO using E-E-A-T, or to recommend emojis to increase interaction with social posts
• Custom Instructions: Save personalized prompt templates to inform ChatGPT about your business requirements
• Grammar check, Headline suggester, Information sources… and more!

Download this marketing prompt cheatsheet for free and keep it bookmarked for quick reference.

So, that’s my compilation of ChatGPT prompts that can be used by marketers. I hope there are some you can apply to your marketing.

To help our members make the huge personal and business changes need to make better use of AI for marketing, we have developed many learning modules and templates. I recommend starting with these:

Download our premium member resource – AI for Marketing playbook and governance policy template

Create your own AI marketing strategy and governance policy using Smart Insights simple template and use-cases for improving use of AI within your business to increase productivity, maintain brand trust and reduce costs.

Access the AI for marketing playbook and governance policy template