How to Use ChatGPT for Marketing Your CPG Brand

Millions of people have dabbled in AI for fun or personal use. But small businesses and Fortune 500 companies alike are beginning to see the potential of ChatGPT for marketing. Here’s a look at what AI can do for your advertising efforts, driving success in everything from customer engagement to conversion rates.

Understanding ChatGPT for Marketing

ChatGPT is a game-changing conversational AI model that generates text, images, and other assets in response to human prompts. When you ask ChatGPT a question, it responds by leveraging special algorithms that find patterns in existing data across the internet.

But ChatGPT is also an underutilized resource for owners and operators in the CPG space who want to upgrade and streamline their marketing efforts. With ChatGPT, you can:

• Ask for keywords and content strategies to fuel SEO

• Generate copy for advertising campaigns, social media posts, your website, and email marketing

• Come up with variations on a marketing initiative for A/B testing

• Analyze market research to identify trends in customer behavior

• Tailor messaging for specific audiences or to incorporate a particular style or voice

• Conduct competitor analysis

• Automate repetitive tasks

For businesses with small or nonexistent marketing departments, ChatGPT can act as a programmable assistant. With the right plan and prompts in place, using AI for marketing strategies and implementation can save you time, reduce human error, increase bandwidth, and help boost your brand’s market foothold.

Key Marketing Applications of ChatGPT for CPG Brands

Using ChatGPT for CPG brand marketing opens the door to various applications and benefits.

Some quick examples of use cases include:

• Generating content outlines based on uploaded documentation, including your brand guide and source documentation

• Using the same uploaded assets to build blogs, social media posts, and video scripts

• Asking AI to tackle essential SEO blog artifacts, including URL slugs, meta descriptions, and SEO-optimized titles

• Creating writer-ready content briefs

• Training ChatGPT to edit and provide feedback on uploaded content based on your required voice and brand and style guides

• Using Midjourney to create a personalized design vision board

If you've set specific goals, such as upleveling your marketing to include more personalization or collecting more data as you engage with customers, ChatGPT can help with that, too.

Enhancing Customer Engagement

While using ChatGPT for marketing makes quick work of tedious administrative tasks and helps you break through writer’s block, AI can also help you build rapport with your customer base.

Superb customer experiences are the cornerstone of any brand’s success. ChatGPT can reinforce the connection between you and your audience via:

• Chatbots: Custom bots boost customer engagement by providing answers to frequently asked questions about shipping and ingredients or troubleshooting issues with payments and returns.

• Personalization: ChatGPT applied to e-commerce platforms allows AI to access each customer’s browsing history and past purchases. You can adjust the tone (new users vs. returning customers), offer tailored promotions, and suggest products based on purchase history.

• Proactive engagement: ChatGPT itself may be programmed to respond to queries, but it can also be taught to initiate conversations on your behalf. You can have ChatGPT reach out to customers to remind them about abandoned carts, send tracking information, and follow up post-purchase.

• Feedback analysis: ChatGPT can conduct customer satisfaction surveys and analyze the resulting data to identify areas where you excel and those in need of improvement.

Data Analysis and Insights

One of ChatGPT’s greatest strengths is its ability to collect, assess, and act on data with remarkable speed. What might take a human days or weeks to accomplish can be performed by AI in mere minutes.

When you use ChatGPT for CPG marketing, you can grow faster and reach your goals more efficiently by using AI to:

• Create specific audiences: Use ChatGPT to review your customer data and create segments based on buying history, flavor preferences, or even household makeup.

• Explore social listening: ChatGPT can monitor social media for any mentions of your brand, mining feeds for user-generated content and any emerging trends.

• Audit content: Give ChatGPT access to your online content and it can figure out which topics are most popular and where you’ve left gaps that need to be filled to stay competitive.

• Conduct review mining: Analyze online customer reviews to pinpoint common issues, preferences, and sources of friction.

• Track analytics: Monitor key performance indicators, compare them against your own history and that of your competitors, and create new benchmarks to drive marketing campaigns.

Implementing ChatGPT in Your Marketing Strategy

The first step in implementing ChatGPT as part of your overarching CPG marketing strategy is to identify specific use cases that best align with your goals. In other words, how or where can you use ChatGPT to offer the biggest ROI?

For some companies, content is a major pain point. For others, social media management or data entry has been long neglected, and ChatGPT could be the key to turning things around. For CPG companies with limited in-house resources and a small customer service squad, adding chatbots into the mix could have immediate positive results.

Along the way, stick to these best practices for ChatGPT implementation:

• Start with one or two applications to test the waters and use as a real-time training ground for your team.

• Dig into your existing tech stack to see which tools (e.g., your CRM software or marketing automation platforms) are already set up to incorporate ChatGPT.

• Always create prompts from scratch or tailor templated prompts to reflect your brand voice, style, and goals.

• Test your prompts and programming from your customers’ POV to spot pain points early. ChatGPT can backfire if it’s used incorrectly or fed faulty information — your output is only as good as your input. 

Choosing the Right Tools

One crucial element of mastering ChatGPT for marketing is choosing the right tools for your needs, infrastructure, and plans. Evaluate each option according to three criteria.

• Functionality: Some tools are nifty but don’t align with your current needs. Put those tools on the back burner and opt for ones that match the use cases you identified and prioritized earlier in this process.

• Ease of use: Tools should be user-friendly with a minimal learning curve. Those with a steep learning curve should offer bigger dividends, so your investment in training and scaling pays off in efficiency, increased productivity, and/or more conversions down the road.

• Integration capabilities: Does the tool work with your existing setup? Can it handle ChatGPT as well as other integrations you need now or might want to use in the future?

Some of our favorite tools include:

• ChatGPT: We love ChatGPT for a multitude of reasons, including the simple fact that it’s one of the best and most flexible large language models on the market. Spring for the paid version to access advanced features, high-level data analysis tools, and other perks.

• Midjourney: Support text assets with AI-generated images based on your text prompts. This is how you come up with bespoke graphics without relying on stale stock photos.

• Canva: This is a powerhouse of AI-generated assets. You can design everything from a logo to brand guidelines and conduct competitor analysis for the perfect finishing touch.

Training Your Marketing Team

It’s vital to train your marketing team on the proper uses and best practices for ChatGPT. Build a program that includes hands-on training, online courses, and vendor-led workshops to increase comprehension. The more your team understands what each tool is capable of, the more empowered they’ll be to leverage ChatGPT and brainstorm creative new use cases.

Sandbox environments, where your team can play with ChatGPT without impacting live campaigns or affecting real customer transactions, can be especially helpful. You can also simulate scenarios and offer self-paced learning materials for those interested in continuing education down the line.

As your team works, encourage them to:

• Share and celebrate success stories

• Share failures and collectively brainstorm solutions for the future

• Offer feedback to upper management regarding AI and how implementation is going

Maximizing Marketing Success With ChatGPT

In many ways, the concept of utilizing ChatGPT for marketing is still in its infancy. But even at this early stage of AI implementation, you can use ChatGPT to advance your mission and bring your marketing goals to life.

Marketing strategies work best when they’re built for an individual brand. At Balanced Business Group, we provide personalized marketing consulting services that help CPG businesses optimize their marketing strategies and implement the latest AI-driven solutions. Reach out to our team to explore your next steps.