How to use generative AI for marketing strategy
Generative AI is revolutionizing consumer marketing. The technology is empowering marketers to craft relevant and timely customer experiences quickly and easily while providing equal or even greater value to their target audiences.
As gen AI gains a foothold in marketing processes, there are two major changes underway. The first involves the tactical executions that go to market like emails and artwork, blogs and social media graphics. The second involves the work that goes on behind the scenes – the bread-and-butter strategy work that marketers invest their time in to inform all those public-facing communications.
In the last MHz Design AI Insights article, we looked at some of the ways marketers could use gen AI tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E to complement their creative teams. Now we’re going to look at the other side of the coin and some of the ways gen AI can make your marketing strategy more creative, contemplative, insightful and laser focused.
If you have any questions about the approaches listed below, contact MHz Design today or call 416.626.1777. We’re excited about today’s AI-empowered world and would be delighted to explore it together with you.
Why use generative AI for marketing strategy
Market research can be a slog. You sift through piles of data, parse surveys, and fast-forward and rewind through focus group tape to identify the consumer insights upon which you’re going to base your next marketing plan. Even so, there’s always some guesswork involved and your job or even your livelihood could be on the line.
Suddenly, miraculously, we now have gen AI to help with a variety of marketing strategy tasks. SWOT analysis, competitor analysis, market positioning and more can all be performed in a fraction of the time with help from a chat tool like ChatGPT or Google Gemini. Here are some of the chatbot prompts you can use to up your marketing game.
How to use generative AI for SWOT analysis
Let’s begin by looking at how to use AI for SWOT analysis. This insights-building technique is extremely useful for providing a comprehensive view of the internal and external factors required in strategic planning. It gives you an overview of your own company, an objective assessment of your competitors and shines the way forward for new market opportunities.
There are two ways to use chat for SWOT analysis and we recommend you try both: (1) use a single, loaded prompt or (2) work piecemeal.
Option 1 – Go into your chat tool and try a prompt like this: “Analyze the competitive landscape of [insert details on your industry] using a SWOT framework. Identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of the key competitors [insert a list of key competitors or alternatively leave this detail out and see who the chat identifies]. Highlight potential areas for differentiation and strategies to gain a competitive advantage.”
Option 2 – Break down each of the SWOT pillars into separate questions for your chat tool. For Strengths, try: “What unique capabilities or resources does [insert company name] possess that the competitors lack?” Weaknesses: “What are the most common complaints [insert company name] receives from its customers?” Opportunities: “What are the emerging trends in [industry] that my company could capitalize on?” Threats: “What emerging competitors or disruptive technologies in [industry] could challenge the marketplace?” Next, ask and ask again using different nuances on each of your SWOT questions. For example, for Strengths: “How can [insert company name] leverage its current strengths to create new market opportunities and mitigate threats?”
How to use generative AI for competitor analysis
You can use ChatGPT or Google Gemini to not just pick apart your competitors but possibly identify unknown or emerging competitors as well. Here are some sample prompts you can use:
Identify competitors: “Who are the competitors for [insert company name]?”
Identify each competitor’s unique features: Follow up the question above with a prompt such as “Create a table listing the unique features of each competitor just listed.”
Identify each competitor’s target audience: Next, follow up and ask, “Create a table listing each competitor’s primary audience.”
Keep the questions going until you’ve exhausted every angle. You can even use your chatbot to research online reviews with a prompt such as “Research [insert company name] customer reviews and identify the most common positive and negative comments.”
How to use generative AI to define your competitive advantage
Using the insights you’ve gained from your SWOT analysis and competitor analysis, you can now start using your chatbot to define your competitive advantage and even brainstorm new market opportunities. Get granular and ask, “What does [insert company name] do better than [insert company name] or go global and continue the line of questioning above using a prompt such as “Create a table listing the competitive advantage of [insert company name] against each competitor just listed.”
How to add personas to your chatbot search
When conducting any of the searches suggested above, try adding personas to your chatbot query and prefix your search by telling the chatbot who you are (or who you are pretending to be). For example, tell the chat “I am a digital marketing manager with [insert company name] and I need new ideas to present to the senior management team”; or “I am a small business owner in [insert industry] and I need low-cost ways to out-sell my competitors.” Then follow your persona with whatever you wish to ask the bot.
There is a surprising number of ways you can twist and flex Chat GPT or Gemini to give you different sets of results based on the instructions you give. We will be digging deeper into gen AI’s mind-blowing search versatility in our next MHz Design AI Insights article.
A note on privacy
While chatbot developers typically have measures to reduce data retention, you should be aware that your conversations can be stored temporarily or for longer periods. Be mindful when entering any personal or proprietary information in your searches. If protecting your privacy is a major concern, Claude.ai by Anthropic automatically deletes user data (usually within 90 days) and does not redirect any user conversations toward training its AI models.
Generative AI is a powerful new tool marketers should take to the limit… while weaving their own human insights and business instincts into whatever strategic direction they take. At the end of the day, we are all humans marketing to other humans. All the great work we’ve completed over our company history combines sure-handed market research with breakthrough creative and messaging that is personally relatable.
There is still no substitute for that personal touch – which is why if you have any questions or want to learn more about how to get the most out of gen AI, contact MHz Design online or give us a call at 416.626.1777. We look forward to speaking with you soon.
Angelo Perri is the founder and CEO of MHZ Design Communications, a customer engagement agency located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Connect on Linkedin.
