What is Prompt Engineering - And How to Use It In Your Marketing

Successful strategies when using prompt engineering to promote and market your solutions

by Alyssa Rice

Prompt engineering is the process of refining prompts and inputting information, commands, examples, data, and other queries and instructions to an AI tool in order to generate high-quality content and output from an AI. Better prompts generate superior AI results.

Prompt engineering involves the systematic design, refinement, and optimization of prompts, commands and queries. By leveraging prompt engineering, marketers can better create content that better resonates with their target audience.

A well-engineered prompt effectively communicates clear intent and guidelines to an AI model, so it generates answers that are accurate and relevant. Knowing how to manipulate these tools is essential if you do marketing and content creation.

In this article, we will examine best practices for prompt engineering that can be beneficial to all marketers.

Four Types of Prompt Engineering

According to CMSWire, there are four types of prompt engineering:

1. Zero-shot: The AI model is provided with a simple question, like “What color is the sky?”
2. One-shot: The AI model is provided with a question and example on how to answer the question
3. Few-shot: The AI model is provided with a question and multiple examples on how to answer the question
4. Chain of Thought: The AI model is provided with specific example that illustrate a concept, behavior, or principle that explains the reasoning process for multiple subsequent questions

 

Four Steps for Using Prompt Engineering

When training the AI model to get a specific response, there are four standards that need to be included in your prompt:

Define the Goal

Tell AI what your specific objective is. For example,

“I need copy for an email. Write a 3 paragraph, no more than 500 word, excerpt for my website that is targeted toward food and beverage company executives.”

With this prompt, the goal, format, target audience, and use case are all specified for the AI.

Provide Background Information

Including relevant context will only help the AI model better understand the output you desire. This could include what industry you’re in, what your target audience is, or a specific tone or brand voice.

For example, “The output should be directed to company executives in North America including USA, Canada, and Mexico.” Use business-oriented English language in your output.

Include Input Data

Give an example of current information from your brand or include a competitor’s piece that you want the AI to take inspiration from. Here’s an example for Rack Room Shoes, a footwear chain for men, women, and children.

With this prompt, I asked AI for subject lines and included an example to take inspiration from. I received prompts that contained the same verbiage with “sneaker” and “wishlist” being included. If I didn’t include that example, the subject lines that were included most likely may not have included “sneaker” and “wishlist.”

The more specific you are, the better off you are. It’s important to be as clear as possible, as ambiguous phrasing will not get your desired output.

Test and Refine

Test different versions of the prompt in order to tell the AI how to build your perfect response. As you go through different prompts and analyze the outputs, you understand how the AI understands and responds to certain instructions. This approach gives you a deeper understanding of how to communicate effectively with AI, ultimately leading to more desirable outputs.

You may provide a bad prompt at first, and that’s okay. You can edit your input as many times as you want in order to get the desired output.

Overall, if outputs are too long, ask your AI for more concise responses. If outputs are too simple, ask for expert-level writing. If you dislike the format, show the AI the format you'd like to see. The AI won’t be offended if you have to ask them something several times. That’s what they do! The less the model has to guess at what you want, the more likely you'll get the results you need.

 

Five Examples of Appling Prompt Engineering for Best Results in Your Marketing Practices

Now that the prompt engineering basics are understood, let’s explore some best practices to use in your different kinds of marketing. Here are five example uses and deployments:

Brainstorming

If you are at a standstill with what blog post you should write next, or if you’re out of ideas for organic social media content, ask AI.

I asked AI, “Give me 5 content ideas to post on social media for my podcast, “Crime Junkie,” and here’s what I got:

Now, I have five great content ideas that can be tailored towards the podcast’s tone and style.

Finding Research for Reports

If you write research reports, it may be difficult to compile research. Now, you can just ask AI and they will not only provide your answers, but they can quickly provide important facts and information.

I asked AI, “Provide the top 5 most influential religious leaders.”

Within seconds, I got a list of five influential religious leaders. But, maybe this is not enough information for you. I asked AI, “Can you provide accomplishments of Pope Francis?” Immediately, there were seven accomplishments with explanations.

It can take a lot of time to find the important things that you need. AI helps by quickly outputting the important information, saving time from reading through pages and pages of research or articles, while telling AI how much information you require.

Creating Buyer Personas

Gone are the days of sitting around a table with the marketing team debating who, what, and where your brand’s buyer personas are.

I asked AI, “Create 3 buyer personas for the Kindle Paperwhite.” (A Kindle Paperwhite is an ebook reader notable for a high resolution screen and waterproof design).

AI gave three personas - the Avid Reader, the Tech-Savvy Student, and the Travel Enthusiast - with their demographics, backgrounds, and motivations. Here is what was provided for the Travel Enthusiast:

With this persona, I could plan marketing promotions that will resonate. For example, I would create a video advertisement of someone on their vacation on the beach, or someone camping, reading books on their Kindle Paperwhite.

However, let’s say Kindle really wants a persona based on one of their younger markets, children in elementary and middle school. I asked, “Create a buyer persona for the Kindle Paperwhite for elementary and middle school-aged children.”

Now, you have all the buyer personas you need for your marketing. AI provides a great starting point for buyer persona development. Of course, with all other outputs from AI, these need to be edited based on your brand specifics.

Keyword Research

            Use AI to find beneficial keywords to improve your SEO strategy.

I asked AI, “I am writing an article on employee experience in the healthcare industry. Provide keywords that I should include.” The output provided these 25 words:

From a quick glance, these certainly are great keywords to include in your article for SEO.

On the flip side, I wanted to ask AI to find articles about the employee experience from healthcare media companies, to which it replied:

Seeing what other brands are using for keywords in their employee experience content would have been nice.

Currently, and depending on the AI tool being used, and the level of your account, AI’s access to external websites is currently somewhat limited. That said, this topic is rapidly evolving, and subject to change.

Other inputs can be used to improve various aspects of SEO, like meta descriptions or headlines.

Writing Social Media Captions

Copywriters are tired. Thinking of marketing copy, social media captions, or landing page messaging can be made easier with AI.

AI was asked, “Can you provide 3 social media captions for a picture of someone drinking from a YETI cup?”

The output was:

Three unique, catchy social media captions with hashtags and emojis. Every social media content creator should be doing this.

But, what if I needed a caption based on a photo of someone sipping from a YETI on the beach? The captions above don’t really fit that image. So, I re-engineered my prompt to say, ”Can you provide 3 social media captions for a picture of someone drinking from a YETI cup? Tailor the captions around a beach vacation.”

            Now I have three more captions to choose from, centered around the beach!

Conclusion

Viola! Prompt engineering can now be used as a new tool in your marketing toolkit.

Prompt engineering in AI offers a method to create content that resonates with audiences, allowing you to achieve your goals. It can revolutionize marketing strategies, shaping them to be more successful and lucrative.

But, make sure to measure the impacts of your efforts. If you use it for social media, make sure to review your engagement, clicks, and impressions month-to-month. If you use it for subject line creation, monitor your open rates to see what’s working and what’s not.

Resources

AI tool Used for this Article: ChatGPT

The Four Types of Prompt Engineering:
https://www.cmswire.com/digital-marketing/prompt-engineering-basics-for-marketers-advertisers-and-content-producers/

Six Strategies for getting better results from your AI
https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/prompt-engineering/six-strategies-for-getting-better-results

AI tool for Email Marketing – brainstorming, email writing, email marketing copy optimization
https://www.InspiredMarketer.ai

Copyblogger blog about great copy writing - succinct
https://copyblogger.com