On Our Radar | May 2023 | TwoSix Digital

The TwoSix team is here to share what’s On Our Radar for May so that you can stay ahead of the always-evolving digital marketing landscape. This month we are switching things up… the entire TwoSix Digital team took a deep dive into the various ways to utilize ChatGPT for destination marketing! Keep reading to find out more about how our team uses ChatGPT.

DEVELOPING ITINERARIES WITH CHATGPT

Developing a travel itinerary with ChatGPT is one of the most prolific uses of the application for those involved in the travel industry. The key is imputing the proper prompt into the application with the objectives you would like to accomplish and the critical characteristics of your trip.

For example, we recently discussed sourcing content for your monthly or quarterly e-newsletter in an educational session at the Pure Michigan Tourism Conference. One suggestion was building out a travel itinerary for a block of content that you could add to the e-newsletter.

We developed a prompt based on our interests and objectives – “Give me a 2-day itinerary for visiting Grand Rapids, Michigan, for someone interested in craft beer, biking, visual arts, and pizza.”

As you can see, we covered all of our objectives and goals in the prompt and were very specific about the location. Click on the video link below to see how the content was delivered to us.

One reminder, verify everything! This is a great starter and suggestion tool, but you should always validate all the items for accuracy before publishing or sharing.

Dave SerinoFounder & Chief Strategist

CRAFTING THE PERFECT SUBJECT LINE WITH CHATGPT

The subject line of your regular e-newsletter is extremely important, as it can greatly affect whether or not the recipient decides to open and read the email. A clear, concise, and compelling subject line can help grab the readers attention and entice them to open the email.

On the other hand, a poorly written or vague subject line may cause the recipient to ignore the email or even mark it as spam.

To maximize the effectiveness of your email newsletter, it’s important to take the time to craft a subject line that accurately reflects the content of the email and that appeals to your target audience. This can be a bit tricky! A lot trickier than it sounds.

How can ChatGPT help?

As an AI language model, ChatGPT can suggest ideas for crafting subject lines. You can ask it to analyze your email content and identify important themes or simply ask it to generate ideas based on your input.

Here’s an example:

You start by asking ChatGPT to generate an idea:

ChatGPT will generate a response:

From there, you can ask it to refine the result. Let’s say we need to make this more fun and include emojis! Remember, emojis can increase open rates by up to 56%.

Now we have something fun, but it’s a little long. No problem! Ask ChatGPT to shorten things up!

Perfect. Don’t stop there! Use the “Regenerate” option to get a variety of different subject lines.

You can do this as many times as you want until you feel like you’ve landed on some solid options.

Voila! Just by asking a few questions you now have a bunch of compelling subject lines to utilize in your email marketing campaign. It’s also a lot of fun! Better than banging your head on the keyword and asking the universe for inspiration.

Don’t forget to use the variations to A-B test subject lines to make sure you leverage the best one in your next campaign and don’t forget about best practices:

1. Keep it short and sweet: Try to keep your subject line between 5-10 words. Shorter subject lines tend to perform better.

2. Use the subject line to clearly communicate what the email is about and how it will benefit the reader.

3. Use action-oriented language: Verbs and action-oriented language can help create a sense of urgency.

4. Be creative: Use humor, puns, or other creative language to make your subject line stand out.

5. Test and refine: A/B testing can help you identify the subject lines that perform the best with your target audience.

If you’ve been struggling with subject lines, give ChatGPT a try. It’s quite remarkable and a great way to start leveraging AI in your day-to-day routines.

Note: The majority of this blog was created using ChatGPT

Brian MatsonSenior Director of Strategy and Education

ENHANCING AD COPY WITH CHATGPT

Black Mirror is that you? Technology headlines as of late may suggest that we’re now living in a universe similar to that of the hit Netflix show. ChatGPT, the AI chatbot that’s been a hot topic for the past few months is something that is becoming quite popular and a tad controversial. As an ads manager at TwoSix, I’ve been experimenting with ChatGPT to see how this new piece of technology can help us.

ChatGPT does a very good job at writing ad copy, headlines and other short forms of advertisements. I’ve tested it by giving it a subject to write about in a restricted number of words, I’ve given it a webpage to build short copy out of and I’ve had it revise copy that I’ve written to make it more descriptive and enticing. Each time, ChatGPT delivered. For example, I asked for 100-character copy for a Facebook ad based off Travel Marquette’s Waterfalls page. ChatGPT gave me 3 options to pick from which include:

“Escape to Marquette’s scenic waterfalls. Adventure awaits. Start planning your trip today at travelmarquette.com”
“Experience the beauty of Michigan’s waterfalls. Find your perfect trail in Marquette. Plan now at travelmarquette.com”
“Find your happy place in Marquette’s waterfalls. Plan your outdoor getaway today. Visit travelmarquette.com for more info.”

And just like that you have copy or a starting point at which to tweak the copy for your ad! ChatGPT can remember your conversation so if you say something like make the copy more exciting or enticing it will regenerate a response so both of you can work together to create your ideal piece of copy.

This new piece of AI can help us in so many ways, it can increase our productivity, efficiency and maybe even give our creativity a boost as you may see words that you never would have thought about using before and may help create the next ad you create either on your own or with the help of AI.

I invite you to try out ChatGPT the next time you have copy needs. But don’t forget to say please and thank you, we don’t need to find ourselves in the heart of an actual black mirror episode.

Ashley MaddixDigital Advertising Strategist

WHAT ARE THE LIMITATIONS OF CHATGPT & DESTINATION MARKETING

At this point, if you haven’t tried ChatGPT for destination marketing, you really should! However, there are some limitations that you should be aware of. In fact, there are so many, it’s a little difficult to put into a small article, but we can at least list those that are important to us as marketers.

Certainly, the most significant restriction is that it generally lacks any information on anything that happened after September 2021, since the data it was trained on was collected then. For example, if you ask it to write an itinerary of things to do in the area, you really will need to check it — because businesses will have, of course, opened and closed since then!

The next imperfection is its inability to follow character or word count requests. As its makers, OpenAI write, “the model is often excessively verbose”. It seems to be unable to count its own output. Personally, I’ve had real difficulties asking it to reduce character counts when it really matters, such as when asking it for inspiration regarding Meta Descriptions for website SEO.

The last limitation that is important to highlight is that, sometimes, it might just be wrong or at the very least, biased. ChatGPT is a large language model, so everything it “knows” is based on its training data, which was collected from the internet. At this point, every knows, you can’t trust everything you read on the internet!

Nick DanowskiLead Content Strategist

USING CHATGPT TO TAKE BETTER ADVANTAGE OF YOUR BRANDING

A business or organization’s story is told through the way it presents itself to the world, or its branding. From your logo to your web colors to the voice used in your communications, having a cohesive and consistent representation helps customers engage with you more comfortably. But as every marketing and social media manager knows, it can be easy for branding to become overly consistent, even dry, or too inconsistent and losing clear identity.

From how to communicate your brand voice more effectively on social media, to larger tasks like an overall brand audit or creating more effective brand guidelines, ChatGPT can be an invaluable resource for shaking off the cobwebs and breathing new life into how you interact and interpret your brand.

To start, give ChatGPT your website URL and ask your question. For example, if you would like to freshen up your social media brand voice you could ask “Based on my website branding and voice, (insert URL here), what hashtags and emojis would you recommend we include in our social media posts?” Now, you may already have a set list of those items that you use, but asking ChatGPT will give you a free pair of fresh eyes that can either confirm offer new and helpful suggestions.

Scout DelicatoDigital Advertising Strategist

HOW CHATGPT CAN ASSIST WITH BLOG WRITING

As AI becomes more mainstream, it is important to learn how to take advantage of it! ChatGPT has become a tool that I use every day working at TwoSix Digital. One of the tasks that ChatGPT helps me with the most is blog writing. One of the best ways to use ChatGPT for blog writing is its ability to generate topic ideas. By providing a general topic or area of interest, ChatGPT can provide a variety of ideas and angles that you may not have considered, helping to keep your content fresh and engaging. This can be extremely helpful when coming up with keywords to research for SEO. ChatGPT can help identify popular trends and topics within your niche, which can be useful for optimizing content for search engines and driving traffic to your blog.

Another way to use ChatGPT for blog writing is to edit and proofread content, helping writers to identify errors in grammar and spelling, as well as providing suggestions for improving the overall clarity and structure of their writing. Additionally, ChatGPT can assist with generating outlines for blog posts based on the content provided. You can input ideas and rough notes into ChatGPT, and the language model will help you organize your thoughts into a logical and cohesive outline. This can help ensure that your blog posts flow smoothly and cover all the necessary points, while also making it easier to write the actual content. Additionally, ChatGPT can provide suggestions for subheadings and topic sentences that can help bloggers structure their posts and make them more engaging for readers.

Makenna SchmitzDigital & Social Media Director

USING CHATGPT TO OPTIMIZE CONTENT

Another useful aspect of AI, and especially ChatGPT, is that the content it generates is primed for SEO. One of my current favorite uses for ChatGPT is to position blog posts to rank well for featured snippets.

Ranking your webpage for featured snippets requires a few key strategies. Here are some tips on how ChatGPT can help you achieve this goal:

Identify the common questions and keywords that people use to search for information related to your topic. ChatGPT can help you by analyzing search queries and suggesting the most common phrases and questions that lead to featured snippets. These are all features that are generally locked behind a paywall on sites like SEMrush and ahrefs.
Create high-quality content that answers those questions in a clear and concise manner. ChatGPT can assist you in optimizing your content to ensure it meets the requirements for a featured snippet, such as having a clear and concise answer and using proper formatting (e.g. bullet points or numbered lists).
Optimize your webpage’s meta description and title tags to include relevant keywords that align with the featured snippet you’re targeting. ChatGPT can help you by suggesting the best keywords to use and optimizing your tags to maximize visibility.
Utilize structured data markup to help search engines better understand the content of your webpage. AI can assist you in implementing structured data markup and ensuring it’s properly formatted to help search engines identify the most relevant information.
Keep your content up-to-date and relevant. AI can help you by monitoring changes in search queries and updating your content accordingly to maintain its relevance and accuracy.

Give it a try for yourself! Just remember, AI is still in its infancy, and it occasionally gives bad responses or false information. Be sure to proofread and edit any content it’s produced for you.

Danny LynchDigital Advertising Strategist