The simple approach to asking ChatGPT to generate content produces inconsistent and mediocre writing that is unlikely to be true to your brand. But there are ways to make it a powerful tool that can generate much better ideas and content.
Get the best results by using GPT 4. Better models reduce the amount of post process editing required to polish it up. Your time is worth more than ChatGPT.
In this post I’m going to layer up and explain step by step how I created a complex prompt that can be expanded over time to improve. I’ll be creating a framework to create ad ideas, angles and hooks that are true to brand, likely to generate fresh ideas with re-running it, and can be provided as part of an SOP so everyone can do it.
It starts with the premise that these models need a lot of information about your brand and product before it can provide useful stuff back.
Luckily Large Language Models (LLMs like ChatGPT) are excellent at accepting large amounts of text.
Here’s what I did:
I started with an existing document that defined the brand voice. In my case this document was somewhat incomplete. So I asked ChatGPT to give me some homework about what gaps there were:
I'm developing a brand voice document to help define how communication from the company should be written or spoken. What are the missing details from the following that would help define the brand voice and style? Here's what I have so far:
«COPY PASTE YOUR EXISTING DOCUMENT HERE»I got some suggestions for things that would help to enrich the document. The goal of this is to end up with a large amount of text that describes the brand that can be copy and pasted into future prompts. I expanded the document with examples of emoji usage, story telling elements, language and vocabulary examples, and notes about the use of humor.
With this legwork done (This is probably a good brand exercise to do anyway) I started a fresh ChatGPT conversation with the goal of creating some ad concepts.
Here’s how that chat goes:
Here's the brand voice for a business:
<< COPY PASTE THE WHOLE DOCUMENT HERE >>
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ok. now write a creative brief for a display ad that will be created with static image assets and target new to brand audience.Chat GPT provided a detailed outline of a brief, which basically was a more focused interpretation of the brand voice document. There was minimal wild and crazy ideas here. (You could try asking for an ‘out of the box’ creative brief if you wanted)
You could continue to workshop this back and forth through chat to adjust for your specific goals. But mine was good enough on the first try.
To get some ad concepts I finished this off with the final prompt:
now describe 10 ad concepts that match this briefI got back 10 fresh ideas to review with the team and designers to see if anything was worth moving forward to test!
This tactic of building up a larger and more complex prompt that includes some back and forth is done for 2 big reasons. And I like to provide a ‘why’ because it helps with remembering the tactic, so here the reasons:
Developing the brand voice document in a way that it can be injected into ChatGPT turns it into a more valuable asset. Instead of written and then buried in a Google Drive folder never to be reviewed again, it is now available to be used as part of the processes for writing content. With continued use, it will remain top-of-mind and you’ll have more consistent content.
The multiple steps of a longer chat allows the conversation to deviate in different directions each time and be more likely to provide unique suggestions.
Bonus Tip:
Take this to the next level by copying your top performing angles and language examples into your brand voice document. Let that document evolve and improve as you learn what the audience resonates with.
That’s it for today. Thanks for reading all the way to the bottom.
