How to leverage AI to boost your ROI in 2023.

1. Develop ‘best practice’ ways of doing things, and stick to them.

As leader of the content team here at Dilate, for me this one is huge. I’m always trying to figure out better ways of doing things that will save my team time and enable them to deliver a better final product. Best practice is a great way to do this, but it can be difficult to transition smoothly and sometimes, it’s a big risk. 

You’ve got to come up with a new way of doing things, based on testing and experience, and then roll it out. That roll out process takes time and energy—not to mention costs the business money—and even with careful preparation, you might run into something you didn’t anticipate that kills the whole thing. 

With ChatGPT, I can experiment with different formats, processes and approaches quickly and repeatedly. Once I’ve tweaked, refined and polished the new ‘best practice’, I can quickly generate hundreds of examples and even a training plan for the team. 

Like I mentioned earlier, ChatGPT can’t replace you by knowing when to do these things. What it can do, is make the mundane much, much, MUCH faster. And because it's faster, easier and now a no-brainer, you stick to it. Because why wouldn’t you? It’s the fastest way of doing things AND the most effective. 

When time’s your investment, now that’s what I call lifting ROI.

2. Automate these best practice ways of doing things.

This point is an extension of the previous point, and relates to getting buy-in from the team and ensuring uptake of a new process. When it comes to rolling out change, making the process smooth and simple, and not too time-consuming, generally nets the best results. 

ChatGPT really helps with this. By building a clear ‘best practice’ framework, such as a content brief or a content outline, you can feed this to ChatGPT and have it spit out material in that format. 

Which is exactly what we’ve been doing here at Dilate recently. After a fair bit of experimenting, trial and error, we came up with a new, standardised format of writing content briefs. This method not only takes less time than the old way, but also contains more information and tighter instructions. 

Then, this got taken further. We took the content brief, and used ChatGPT to generate an effective outline from this brief. Basically automating 90% of the mundane part of the process. 

Writing brilliant, engaging and informative blogs that actually drive revenue for our partners isn’t about how neatly you can put the headings together or where you put your bullet point lists. 

That bit doesn’t make the difference.

What makes the difference is writing ability, and understanding of the target audience’s pain points, needs and desires. By leveraging ChatGPT to speed up the part of the process that isn’t where we can make the biggest impact gives us more time to really utilise our skills and make an impact. 

This applies to any industry. Use AI tools to speed up the part of the process that anyone can do, so you can spend more time doing what very few people can do. Leverage your competitive advantage. 

On what exactly you can use ChatGPT for, it’s not just content outlines. You could do the same with sales proposals, email replies, customer service inquiries, purchase order requests; anything. It even integrates (to a degree) with Excel/table data. 

We’re still playing at a low level as far as the capabilities of ChatGPT’s formatting, but the limit really is only your creativity.

3. Come up with ideas, and help you get started.

You can’t edit a blank page—and ChatGPT can help make it… not blank.

There’s a lot of things the creative team at Dilate can do, but the one thing no-one has figured out is how to edit a blank page. The blank page is the enemy of all of us, and sometimes the hardest thing is just getting started. 

While the content that ChatGPT spits out isn’t particularly groundbreaking, and honestly isn’t that good, it is something. Something that you can use for inspiration, or as a starting point. 

Often you’ll even look at ChatGPT’s content and think “that’s not right”, which then prompts you for what is right. You can also use it to suggest angles, frameworks and concepts and then choose the bits you like from multiple. 

Again, the real ability of a strong copywriter or content marketer isn’t in the mundane doing, but the expertise to know what’s good and what’s not. What’s right for the target audience, and what’s going to fall flat. 

Use AI writing tools to get those neurons firing and the creative juice flowing. 

*Important side note, everything I’ve read so far indicates Google can already detect AI copy, and doesn’t like it. Neil Patel ran a study pre-ChatGPT to test this and the results were pretty conclusive. Don’t rely on AI-generated content to fuel your website. We don’t use any level of AI generated content anywhere for multiple reasons; this being one of them. But if you must, be sure to edit it heavily and review it thoroughly. Consider running it through a quality AI content detector. 

Of course, there’s a whole lot more. 

This is barely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what’s possible as far as using AI to boost ROI is concerned. You could probably spend the whole year pumping out blog posts on the topic and still not get through it. The best thing to do is roll up your sleeves, dive in and see what you can do! 

Hopefully, these three ideas give you a solid starting point and some pointers on leveraging the new tools.