How to Use AI Prompts for Content Creation: A Guide
Over the last few years, you’ve probably heard more and more about AI (artificial intelligence). You may have even started dabbling in using it yourself. AI can be an absolute game-changer when it comes to the ways we’re able to strategize, create content, and communicate, but you need to know how to use it correctly in order to really make this powerful tool work for you. Enter AI prompts. Whether you’re using AI to help you brainstorm, working to automate email communications or workflows, trying on a new skill that isn’t your area of expertise (like social media caption writing, for example), or just trying to create content that will speak to your audience, having a solid understanding of how AI prompts can help you get the results you want can make all the difference.
Here, we’re breaking down what AI prompts are, why you should be using them if you’re using AI in your business, and how they can help transform your marketing and PR efforts.
What Are AI Prompts and How Do You Use Them?
AI prompts are just as they sound: they’re the instructions you give an AI system that gives you a specific response. You can tell it how to think, give it a certain role in a company or industry, or ask questions to help get the results you’re looking for. Using these prompts, the AI system can produce images, write copy, create code, or even make strategic suggestions to help you solve your problem or work faster.
Here’s a prompt example:
Create a list of blog titles about the biggest food trends in 2024.
The resulting information you get from the AI system partially depends on how well your prompt directs it to respond. If you don’t get what you want right away, you can tweak your initial prompt or just ask the system to do things differently to try to get more of the information you need added to the response. The more information you give generative AI tools, the better results you'll receive.
How Can AI Prompts Help with Marketing and PR Efforts?
Understanding how good AI prompts can help you tackle marketing and PR can help you work smarter, not harder.
Streamline Your Workflow: Because AI systems can quickly and easily create drafts for things like emails, social media captions, press releases, PR pitches, and the like, you’ll be able to get marketing content and PR materials finalized more quickly, which is especially useful if this isn’t your main job.
Boost Creativity: Whether you’re not sure where to start with a new campaign or you find yourself struggling with a nasty case of writer’s block, AI prompts can help you break through and give you new, fresh ideas that you may not have thought of on your own—or that you may have thought of only after spending a long time unsure of how to move forward.
Make Your Content More Personal: If you’re trying to create content that will speak with certain segments of your audience (or potential audience), AI prompts can help tailor your content so that it will resonate with your target audience rather than just more generally, which can help boost engagement and conversions.
Do More with Less: If you’re using the right prompts, you’ll be able to create solid content across a variety of platforms that’s tailored to individual audience segments and the platforms themselves without battling inconsistent output or having to do everything yourself, all on your own.
How to Write Effective AI Prompts for Marketing and PR
For best results when using AI tools, you need to make sure you're using well-crafted prompts. Here are some best practices to keep in mind when writing different types of prompts so you can feel confident you'll get useful responses:
1. The more specific you are, the better
If you keep your prompt too vague and general, you’re going to end up with a vague and general response. Make sure you’re telling the AI system exactly what you’re looking to get, what you want the content to be about, the kind of voice you want it to be written in, and more. Instead of telling it “Write a social media caption for a podcast episode,” try explaining, “Write a LinkedIn caption to promote an episode of the company podcast. Use the following summary to inform the post.” That way, you’ll end up with something that’s likely a lot closer to what you were hoping for. Specific details will lead to more accurate results.
2. Make your goal clear
The AI tools you’re using can’t read your mind (at least, not yet). Make it clear what your goals are. This tip goes along with being specific with your ask. If your goal is a conversational email newsletter to your subscribers or a formal press release to send out to industry pros, make sure to give the AI tool all the information it will need to structure your content the way you want it to.
3. Refine your prompt to get the right result
You might not get the perfect response the first time. That’s okay! You can tweak your original prompt to get closer to what you’re looking for, give the tool additional information to guide its output, or tell it to change its tone of voice to help refine the result you receive.
Examples of the Best Types of AI Prompts for Marketing and PR
For Social Media
"Create a list of 15-20 blog post ideas for a baby food company geared toward millennial parents.”
"Write a product description for a brand-new robe for our sleepwear line that’s made from super-soft cotton using sustainable practices.”
2. For Content Creation
"Create a list of 15-20 blog post ideas for a baby food company geared toward millennial parents.”
"Write a product description for a brand-new robe for our sleepwear line that’s made from super-soft cotton using sustainable practices.”
3. For Email Campaigns
"Create an abandoned cart email flow for subscribers who have added products to their cart, but haven’t completed their purchase.”
"Write a warm and friendly welcome email for new subscribers who bought our online course, but haven’t started the modules yet.”
AI Prompts and Marketing Moving Forward
AI tools have already started to seriously impact how we work, but that’s likely only going to continue to accelerate in the future. As companies continue to work to improve AI tools and systems, that’s going to continue. Plus, as these tools get newer features and capabilities, it’s likely that the way you use AI for marketing and PR, as well as for other uses, might change too. You’ll need to develop prompts to make use of these added capabilities. Think how you might want to incorporate not just text, but images, videos, and more. You also might want to develop policies and processes for using AI tools. Are there any AI features or capabilities you don’t feel comfortable using? Make sure your team knows where and how you will use and and where and how you won’t so that you don’t end up in a sticky situation.
Learning and understanding AI tools can help you get a head start on new ideas and techniques and put you ahead of the curve in the marketing and PR industries and figuring out how you can use AI to help drive engagement and growth could make a huge difference to your business.
Ready to Put AI to Use for Your Business? Here's What's Next
If you want to see how AI can help make a difference in the day-to-day work you're doing (or your team is doing) for your business, there are a few steps to take before jumping right in. Here are a few things to keep in mind when it comes to AI strategy and use cases for your brand or business:
Think about who might benefit from adding AI into their workflow: Whether it's for marketing and PR, communications, customer service, product development, or something else, first get a feel for who might benefit from using AI tools.
Get the stakeholders together: When you have an initial idea of what kinds of things your team will want to use AI for, it's time to get people together to develop some brand descriptions and summaries, basic prompts, key points, and the like that you and your team can use to help ensure accurate, relevant, useful responses each and every time. Marketing, PR, communications pros, executives, maybe a project manager or two, anyone who will be using the tools and is invested in the way the brand story is told should be included in these conversations. You'll also want to talk through when and how to use AI tools with all of the team members who will be involved.
Spread the word: Make sure that everyone who will be using AI tools knows where to find any basic company information that you'll want to use to feed into an AI system so that you can get the best possible results (and consistent ones at that). They won't be able to use them if they're not sure where they're kept. You also want to make sure they know when to use AI tools and when not to.
Practice prompt writing: All of the team members who are going to be using AI tools for work should feel confident writing prompts, as well as how to handle things if their first prompt doesn't lead to any useful output. AI content will always be better with a more detailed prompt that's carefully drafted to your specific needs so it will give you your desired results.
Knowing how to use novel AI prompts to your best advantage can make work more efficient, cut down on time spent on some of your everyday tasks, and help you think differently. By cracking the code on useful, effective, precise AI prompts, you’ll be better able to put your AI tool of choice to work for you, creating more interesting content that’ll help you connect and engage with your audience.