In the digital age, where voices crowd the internet like stars in the night sky, standing out demands not just brilliance but authenticity. Welcome to the double-edged universe of Custom GPTs, where the power to tailor content with precision meets the shadows of potential misuse and misunderstanding. Imagine wielding a tool so adept it can echo your voice, style, and wisdom across the vast digital expanse, ensuring your brand resonates consistently, from tweet to feature article. But here’s the rub: this tool, for all its allure, harbors a dark side—risks of overreliance, dilution of uniqueness, and ethical quandaries that could turn your content dream into a nightmare.

In this journey, I’ll guide you through the thrilling highs and cautionary lows of custom GPTs. We’ll explore how to craft these digital doppelgängers to amplify your marketing prowess without losing the soul of your message. From ensuring your AI companion enhances rather than replaces human creativity to strategizing its use to bolster your brand’s digital footprint, I’ll arm you with best practices that safeguard your brand’s integrity. Because here’s the thing: neglecting the nuanced craft of custom GPT creation and management might just be the riskiest move of all. 

The Bright Side and Dark Side of Custom GPTs

There’s a lot of good that can come from custom GPTs:

• Unprecedented speed and volume: If you know how to use ChatGPT for marketing copy generation, it can help you churn out content faster than you can say publish.
• Tailored to your voice: Custom GPTs can be trained to mimic specific styles, tones, and even quirks, making the content feel personal and authentic.
• SEO‘s best friend: They can work keywords into copy, ensuring that your content ranks higher and reaches a wider audience.
• Scalability: Custom GPTs adapt and grow along with your content needs and based on your feedback.
• Bridges the blank page gap: Custom GPTs can kickstart the content process with minimal input.

And a lot of bad:

• Lack of emotional intelligence: AI lacks the ability to empathize with or understand your audience’s emotions the way a human writer can.
• Over-reliance risks: Leaning too heavily on AI can make your content strategy feel one-note and lack creativity and uniqueness.
• Quality control: AI might be smart, but it’s not infallible. AI-generated content can be susceptible to inaccuracies or misinformation.
• Ethical and legal considerations: AI can inadvertently replicate existing content, which can lead to plagiarism and the potential associated legal issues.

Obviously, humans need to step in to review and perfect AI-generated content. At the same time, though, the more you hone and guide these AI tools, the closer they get to producing content that’s almost ready to go live.

Future Outlook: GPTs as New Brand Standards

In the near future, these GPTs could well become the new benchmark for brand standards. For example, imagine brands sharing their custom GPTs with agencies or contractors for seamless content creation. It’s an innovation that has the potential to shape the future of brand communication.

You just can’t fully entrust the essence of your brand to AI. For instance, custom GPTs won’t make it unnecessary to continue working with subject matter experts. The human touch remains irreplaceable, especially when you’re creating thought leadership content. It’s the only thing that ensures your brand’s online reputation stays carefully crafted and doesn’t become an outpouring of shallow, algorithmically generated strings of text.

A Reality Check

With this in mind, it’s important to remember that creating a custom GPT for your thought leadership content creation isn’t a walk in the park. It demands strategy, precision, and a treasure trove of resources. The goal isn’t just to generate content — it’s to create content that’s as knowledgeable, engaging, and authentic as your subject matter experts themselves. Without these resources, the quality of your content will suffer.

If you invest time into understanding and adapting to these tools now, you’ll be putting yourself ahead of the game. Conversely, if you’re not currently exploring their capabilities, you may be at a serious disadvantage when it becomes necessary to know how to use ChatGPT for content marketing, a time that may arrive sooner than you think.

The Prep Work: Crafting a Custom GPT for Your Subject Matter Experts

While the need to adopt ChatGPT is pressing, you should make sure that you have all your ducks in a row before you do. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Document a clear content strategy.

Throwing random data at your GPT model and expecting magic is a no-go. Success hinges on a well-crafted content strategy that ensures the data you feed your AI is as relevant and curated as possible. Here’s why:

• Quality over quantity: The caliber of input data determines your GPT model’s output. Focus on relevance and precision to boost accuracy and effectiveness.
• Scalability and adaptability: Your content strategy is the framework for your model’s growth. It ensures your AI can evolve with your business, staying proactive and flexible.
• Efficient data use: Avoid data overload. A strategic approach helps filter out the noise, ensuring your model works with optimal data sets.
• Future-proofing: Keep your model up-to-date with ongoing adjustments for new trends and language shifts. This continuous improvement is crucial for maintaining edge.

Bottom line: A solid content strategy is non-negotiable. It’s what separates a performing model from an outstanding one. Prioritize it to guarantee your GPT’s success.

For our example, imagine you’re the head of marketing for a lighting company, Illumination Station. As a luxury lighting company, Illumination Station provides more than trending products online to customers. The company gives personalized recommendations based on purchase history and design preferences (of course, using AI). So, we have a lot of data to provide a custom GPT.

To begin, you’ll start your GPT by sharing your clear content strategy, customer feedback, purchase history, and engagement data. We want this tool to have all the historical context to increase its understanding of our business, like we would train a new employee.

2. Define subject matter expert guidelines.

To create the subject matter expert guidelines that you’ll be using to train your custom GPT model, you should:

• Identify topic areas in need of expertise. For Illumination Station, focus on creating content about the latest interior design lighting trends, as this is what customers are actively seeking.
• Select qualified subject matter experts. Choose subject matter experts who are knowledgeable about these topic areas just identified. For our example, Illumination Station’s in-house interior design specialist or head of sales are great options to speak on the latest interior design trends. Both are ideal experts based on their expertise and relevant experience.
• Develop a content framework. Identify the desired outcomes for the brand’s content, focusing on how to incorporate expert insights seamlessly. What specific information from subject matter experts is necessary, and how will it reflect in the content’s voice and tone? Decide on the content’s technical level and the inclusion of expert opinions in external outlets. The goal is clear: develop writing guidelines with specific objectives to leverage expert contributions efficiently.

Illumination Station’s brand guidelines advocate a polished, professional tone. However, to incorporate your subject matter experts’ casual, engaging style into the blog, adjust the GPT’s output for a professional yet approachable tone. This strategy aims to authentically merge expert voices with the brand’s identity.

• Establish tone guidelines. Does your expert have published content they’re proud of or feel captures their voice well? Or are there any industry thought leaders they’d like to emulate? Would they rather their content be formal and authoritative or conversational and casual? Do they want to be seen as inspirational and visionary, or would they rather give readers pragmatic and practical information?

For example, Gary Vaynerchuk is bold and direct. He communicates with a high-energy, assertive tone and motivates and challenges his audience with straightforward, impactful messages. Another example is Richard Branson, who is motivating, approachable, inspirational, and relatable. He often shares stories of his adventures and business experiences, and he makes complex business concepts seem more accessible. For our fictitious lighting company, the interior designer previously published in an interior design publication with the tone being casual, expert, and animated. The link to this online article can be given to the GPT to study for future content.

• Take all of this and document the strategy. Put all this in writing and feed your GPT builder to start to create your CustomGPT. It may ask for clarification or additional information, so be sure to answer its questions and provide feedback. When interacting with ChatGPT, it’s common to encounter questions aimed at refining its understanding and output. 

For instance, it may inquire about the specific style or tone you’re aiming for in your content — do you prefer a formal, professional tone or something more casual and conversational? It could also ask for examples of content you admire or specific topics you want to cover, ensuring it aligns with your expectations. Additionally, ChatGPT might seek feedback on its previous responses to better tailor future interactions. Being prepared to provide detailed answers and constructive feedback will significantly enhance the model’s performance and relevance to your needs.

3. Implement a keyword strategy.

Your content’s long-tail keyword relevancy matters more than ever. Any keyword data you are looking to rank for should be communicated to your GPT. Keywords help models understand the context around queries, something they need to create relevant responses.

When your GPT is tasked with pulling information from external sources, keywords can also help them understand what’s relevant and what’s not, which can improve the speed and accuracy of data extraction. This approach can help provide audience-specific customization and avoid irrelevant or overly generic responses.

Illumination Station is looking to rank for blue dining room chandelier and zebra foyer rugs, in case you were wondering. So, you will tell your GPT to integrate these phrases into any content it creates for the foreseeable future.  

4. Show Your Work.

Think of this as feeding your GPT a healthy diet of knowledge. Feed your model a library of previously published content, blog posts by your subject matter experts, and any other relevant materials that align with your company’s point of view.

Keep in mind that the quality and relevance of the content matters. The richer the resources, the more accurately the model can emulate your subject matter experts’ perspective on a topic.

A Custom GPT in Action

Confession time: preaching the custom GPT gospel without actually using one? That would make me the ultimate hypocrite. As the president of a content division, time isn’t a luxury I can afford to waste.

My marketing team loaded my GPT with a treasure trove of my past writings over the last 12 years. Then, they put it through its paces, fine-tuning it until it was just shy of stealing my identity. Now, it’s the MVP for cranking out content drafts that land on my desk for the final touch. Are the drafts perfect? Far from it. I’m still central to the ideation, examples, vision for the structure and integrating the personal touches that take the final product from generic to insightful. But it has saved a ton of time, allowing me to focus energy on the revision stage vs. a blank page.

As with most things, balance is key. Use these tools to enhance your strategy, not replace the human element. Maintain quality control, and never lose sight of the emotional connection with your audience. You can combine ChatGPT and content marketing to increase efficiency to an unprecedented degree. Just be sure to remember that they can never replace human creativity or insight.

©2024 DK New Media, LLC, All rights reserved.

Originally Published on Martech Zone: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Custom GPT-Powered Content