Background:
Last year we started using ChatGPT to come up with ideas to make our favorite banana stand business really grow. We made Google Ads and a responsive landing page to gain followers on our social media and subscribers for our newsletter.
The banana stand may be popular, but like any business owner we want more. Our new intern suggested we’re not doing enough with our socials. We have this audience but we barely speak with them. If you don’t post frequently on your social media accounts, you will get dramatically less engagement when you post something. It may seem counterintuitive when you first read that, but the companies are assuming that businesses (or people) who post frequently are more invested in the platform. They will then look to see how your followers engage with the content, but let’s worry about that later. First we have to start making some content while we manage our growing business. Luckily, there’s AI for that.
Creating content consistently can be challenging, but AI tools like ChatGPT, Writer, and Copy.ai can help streamline this process, making it easier to generate engaging and relevant content. This recipe will guide you on how to come up with content ideas and use these AI tools effectively to produce high-quality content quickly and efficiently.
Shopping List:
1. Content Creation Tools:
ChatGPT: Tried and true, our old standby. The new voice and mobile interfaces make it really easy to work with this tool on anything from writing long posts to short taglines. It’s a great brainstorming friend, copywriter and more.
Writer: If you already have libraries of content, or even knowledge and information in structured apps, Writer can integrate with it and give you a tool that can create new content from your existing library of information. For example if you launch a new version of a product, Writer can help create the product description based on all of your previous product descriptions.
Copy.ai: This tool can plug into email marketing or newsletter sequences. If you already have marketing sequences, or have wanted to build them, copy.ai can dynamically create content based on the responses and the goals you’ve set. Think of it as your 24x7 Sales Development Rep.
Dall-E 3: Dynamic image creation through a very seamless interface. Dall-E now on its 3rd version creates visually compelling images quickly and easily.
Midjourney: Another image creation tool, many critics rank the capabilities of Midjourney as higher than Dall-E however the interface is not for the faint of heart.
Canva: If you’d like to do the visual creativity yourself, try Canva. A web based platform that has a library and tools to make high quality, visually compelling content quickly.
2. Social Media Management Tools:
Hootsuite: To schedule and manage your social media posts. More enterprise ready and more expensive. Includes a lot more data analytics and features that companies with large audiences and marketing teams will want.
Buffer: A great starting point for social media management. If you don’t have a full time marketing or social media person this is probably the tool for you. Allows the same scheduling and management of your social media in one very simple interface.
Cooking Instructions:
1. Generate Content Ideas:
Brainstorm and collect ideas for blog posts, social media updates, and email newsletters. Use ChatGPT to generate a list of content ideas based on your themes and target audience. ChatGPT can be accessed via its web interface, making it easy to brainstorm ideas directly online.
Example: Ask ChatGPT the best way to announce our summer sales and specials at the banana stand, especially around July 4th.
2. Draft Content Using AI Tools:
Make your life easier by setting aside dedicated time to write blog posts, social media updates, and email newsletters. Put snippets of ideas into the AI tool of your choice to speed up the process.
Example: July 4th is always a blockbuster time at the Banana Stand. Let's use Dall-E 3 to create funny, engaging, patriotic, and sentimental images. Let’s use ChatGPT to create captions and stories.
3. Polish and Finalize Content:
The last thing we want is a bad typo to be the reason a post goes viral. While many browsers and other tools have built in spell and grammar check. Grammarly can plug in to your browser or even into Microsoft Word. If you are still editing the post for content, Grammarly now can continue to help with that as well.
Example: As we take the generated text from ChatGPT and save it on our editor of choice, check to see if Grammarly flags anything. Sometimes text straight from the AI tool is lacking a human touch.
4. Schedule and Publish Content:
Armed with images and text, it’s time to fire up our social media tools and plan our posts. This is where buffer or Hootsuite really come into play, allowing you to schedule multiple sets and series of posts.
5. Monitor and Adjust Your Strategy:
We know summer is going to be hectic. Using buffer or Hootsuite will help as they highlight things that are trending, not doing so well, and any potential issues. We don’t need to spend valuable time scrolling our feeds to see what our posts look like.
When the dust settles, look back and see what performed well and what didn’t do so well. See what we can learn and how we can improve. If it’s not clear, paste it back into ChatGPT and tell it what did well and what didn’t, it may surprise you.
By leveraging AI tools for content creation, you can streamline your workflow, produce high-quality content more efficiently, and maintain a consistent online presence. This approach will definitely save you some time, but it’s not perfect. It’s very important to proofread the content and double check the images. Many of these tools may hallucinate sometimes. Just be mindful of what you ask of them and double check what you get in return. With that said, the goal is to increase engagement with your followers while saving time creating content and this outline and these tools will help you do that.