Can ChatGPT Do Your Marketing? Here Are 5 Things You Need To Know
- Apr 21, 2023
- 6 min read
Updated: Mar 5, 2025
Written by: Kate Greunke, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Because ChatGPT is insanely popular, wildly powerful, and still quite new to the landscape, I decided to interview the bot itself on all things marketing. Primarily, I wanted to know whether it was smart to allow ChatGPT to do time-consuming marketing tasks, such as write entire blog posts.
Secondarily, I was curious. As a techy person, I’ve largely considered technology to be my friend, but ChatGPT had me feeling a little apprehensive and slightly annoyed – because how could a robot create free marketing content in seconds when it takes an experienced professional years of experience to do the same thing? ChatGPT was refreshingly transparent when answering my questions. By the end of the interview, I found myself saying niceties such as “please” and “thank you” and got weird satisfaction from watching it type answers to my questions at a scintillating rate. Here are the results of that interview. Enjoy!
1. If you use ChatGPT to create marketing content, you need to disclose it
Here’s what ChatGPT said:
“It's always a good idea to be transparent about the fact that the content was generated with the help of AI technology, especially if you're using it for commercial purposes.” And here’s what Google said on their blog: “If automation is used to substantially generate content, here are some questions to ask yourself:
Is the use of automation, including AI-generation, self-evident to visitors through disclosures or in other ways?
Are you providing background about how automation or AI-generation was used to create content?
Are you explaining why automation or AI was seen as useful to produce content?”
What this means for your business: If letting AI write all your marketing material sounds too good to be true, well… It is. It’s also not going to resonate with your audience (but more on that later). AI can’t use reason or emotions like a human can, and marketing is entirely a human-to-human relationship. It only makes sense that, from an ethical standpoint, you’ll need to tell your audience if you’ve farmed out your relationship with them to a bot. (It sounds heartless because it is.)
2. ChatGPT does not optimize blog content for search engines
Here’s what ChatGPT said:
“As an AI language model, I don't create blog posts with the intention of optimizing them for search engines. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a complex process that involves many factors, including website structure, content quality, backlinks, and user experience. “While the text I generate can be helpful in providing relevant information, it's important to optimize the website and content as a whole for SEO purposes. This may involve additional steps such as optimizing images, creating meta descriptions, and building quality backlinks.” What this means for your business: Try as we might, we can’t use AI as a magic marketing tool to get our websites to rank higher in search results. As Google has stated, “…those seeking success in Google Search should be looking to produce original, high-quality, people-first content.” And by the way, Google knows if you’re using a bot instead of your brain to create content.
3. Google knows if you’re using AI-generated content
Here’s what Google said on their blog: “Using automation- including AI – to generate content with the primary purpose of manipulating ranking in search results is a violation of our spam policies. “Appropriate use of AI or automation [which Google defined earlier in their post as things like sports scores, weather forecasts, and transcripts] is not against our guidelines. This means that it is not used to generate content primarily to manipulate search rankings, which is against our spam policies. “…those seeking success in Google Search should be looking to produce original, high-quality, people-first content.”
What this means for your business: If you violate Google’s spam policy by using ChatGPT or a similar AI software to author your written content from start to finish, you’ll find your website ranking lower and lower in search results – because that’s what Google does to content it deems as spam. To quote the pessimistic yet realistic view expressed on Social Media Today, “Despite Google’s explanation here, you can bet that billions of pages of SEO-optimized junk are already being pumped out by spammy content peddlers.”
Don’t be that guy.
4. Marketing content solely created by ChatGPT or other AI isn’t effective
Here’s what ChatGPT said:
“It's important to note that while I can be a valuable tool for creating marketing content, it's still important for businesses to develop their own unique brand voice and messaging. Marketing content that is overly reliant on automated text generation may come across as impersonal or robotic, which can detract from its effectiveness. “While the use of AI language models like myself can be a helpful tool for businesses, it's important to use them in moderation and to supplement them with other creative and strategic approaches to marketing.” What this means for your business: In order to appropriately use ChatGPT or a similar tool to create marketing content, you will need to use it as a research/idea generator, then rewrite any content it gives you so that it 1) sounds like a human wrote it and 2) matches your brand voice. Without those two elements, your written content will fall flat with both SEO and your audience.
5. Marketing content created with ChatGPT is redundant
Here’s what ChatGPT said:
“If thousands or millions of people use me to create marketing content, there is a possibility that some of the generated content may share similar or identical phrases or structures, particularly if the input provided to me is similar.” What this means for your business: Would it bother you to know that your AI-produced marketing content looks just like the next business’s marketing content, especially if that other business is your competitor? How would you feel when your customers started calling you out for supposed plagiarism, or worse, lying to them? If you care about authenticity and ethics (and you do), then this fact should make you stop in your virtual tracks. ChatGPT and other AI models are only as good as the human-produced content already on the internet. A portion of that content is excellent; the rest is spam. AI doesn’t discriminate between the two. When asked to create a blog post, it regurgitates and repackages information, wording, and ideas from all content, both good and bad. As more “spammy content peddlers” use AI to create marketing content, more and more of the internet will consist of redundant content that the AI itself had already created and continues to regurgitate and repackage. The good news is that original content will significantly stand out. Yay for me (and you, I hope).
A case atudy in lazy marketing
BuzzFeed had a brilliant marketing idea, and by “brilliant,” I mean ridiculous: Let’s use AI to generate our blog content. Wanna see how that worked out for them? Futurism wrote a great article on just how poorly that experiment went. Here’s what they said: “BuzzFeed quietly started publishing fully AI-generated articles that are produced by non-editorial staff — and they sound a lot like the content mill model that Peretti [BuzzFeedCEO] had promised to avoid. The 40 or so articles, all of which appear to be SEO-driven travel guides, are comically bland and similar to one another.” If you’d like to see these aforementioned comically bland AI blog posts, you can snicker at them here. ChatGPT and other AI platforms are helpful for researching your audience and topic ideas. They are not helpful for speaking directly to your ideal clients or for communicating your brand message- two things which are, honestly, the entire point of marketing.
Is ChatGPT a friend or an enemy of human copywriters?
It’s neither since tools are neutral. How you use the tool is what matters. Are you using ChatGPT to write all your marketing content from start to finish without rewriting it (which is the only way to add your brand voice)? Your marketing will be ineffective as a result. Are you using AI to do research and proofreading? That just makes sense.
After interviewing ChatGPT, I can confidently say that robots and artificial intelligence aren’t going to take over the world (phew!), nor are they going to do all your marketing for you. (Bummer, I know.) However, advanced AI tools such as ChatGPT are exactly that – tools that will help you become more efficient in the research and editing phases of content marketing.
Kate Greunke, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Kate Greunke founded Socialite in 2014 as a virtual agency of professional marketing specialists exclusively for the home industry. Kate hosts a marketing podcast, The Kate Show, which is ranked in the top 1.5% of all podcasts globally and available on all podcasting apps. In 2021, Kate was named 20 Under 40 by Window Fashion Vision Magazine. She currently resides in Wisconsin with her husband and two children while managing an international team and extensive client roster.
