Hello lovely fellow business owners.
It has been a while since I posted about my AI research. The reason being, there’s so much to look into and I started down a ‘rabbit hole’. I’ve tried to bring my research back down into something structured so hopefully you will find some gems in my ramblings to help you in your own research.
By the end of this post, you will have a better understanding of what an AI prompt is, what to include and why it is important to have a think about what you prompt to get the most out of your time spent.
Why knowing what to write in your prompt makes a difference
Now, we have all heard of ChatGPT and Gemini as ‘All rounder’ AI tools. But, did you know that to get the most out of them, you need to know what to ask them.
You will get an answer with just a simple question however, will it be the best answer or will you have to keep refining your question to get somewhere near what you were hoping for?
Using AI is a time saving tool, but you need to learn how to use it for it to be fully effective.
In this blog, I’m going to give you a framework of what to include in your prompt to save you time and get a focused answer that you can use.
A simple prompt framework that will help you create purposeful AI prompts
CREATE
Helpfully, Gemini has put together an easy to remember acronym to frame your prompt:
C is Character– ChatGPT and Gemini work well when you ask them to behave as a particular type of person eg ‘you are a social media content creator, please use this persona to…’
By including this, it focuses in on the angle you want to have your answer from. It drills down to give more detail.
R is for Request– this is an easy one, what you are wanting the tool to do or answer e.g ‘Please can you create social media posts for linkedIn, Facebook and instagram from this blog post”
A is for Audience– by letting the tool know who you are writing for will make sure it is tailored for your audience. ‘I’m writing a post to speak directly to local small business owners’ will prompt the tool to think about this niche and what they would be looking for.
E is for Examples– providing a sample of your style of writing will set the tone of what you are hoping for instead of receiving a generic answer that everyone can see is AI generated from a glance.
T is for Type– what format do you want the answer to be generated in? A table or a LinkedIn post? Some tools will even format for you so if you need a pie chart you need to include that in your prompt.
E is for Exclusions– If there is anything that you don’t want it to do e.g. “I would like the post to be informative and not salesy.
What happened when I tested the prompt framework?
As part of my experiment, I gave this framework a go with ChatGPT and also tested it with a one sentence prompt both asking for the ‘top 3 content ideas’.
Whilst the prompt with scanty info did produce a useable response, at the very end of the chat, ChatGPT asked for further info:
‘If you want, tell me:
- your industry
- which platform (Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, X, etc.)
- your goal (growth, sales, authority, community)
So, I now have a choice. I can use the info it gave me or prompt again with additional info. If I had included this in the original prompt it would have reduced the amount of time to get to the best answer to my query.
In saying this, however, ChatGPT’s software is so sophisticated, even with skeleton information, that it can provide a usable response to help small businesses with their marketing.
My conclusion
If you know all the info as part of the CREATE prompt framework, it would save time to include it in your first prompt.
If, however, you are trying to explore an idea or are not entirely sure what answer you want, you can use a smaller prompt and then shape the answer by refining your prompt after each answer.
Luckily, both ChatGPT and Gemini have a feature where it stores your chats, if you create a free account. These can then be referred back to and you can use them to refine your ideas and thoughts at a later date.
I hope the above has given you more insight into how to use AI and that the framework is useful to you. If you haven’t tried this yet, give the CREATE framework a go for one of your marketing tasks this week!
Here is a sample prompt you could use:
‘You are a social media content creator (Character). Please create three Instagram post ideas (Request) using a friendly, conversational tone similar to the example below (Examples). This is for local gardeners (Audience). Present the ideas in bullet points (Type). Please keep the content informative, not salesy (Exclusions).”
In my next blog, I’m going to look into how free AI tools can be used to research trends and topics you should be including in your content.
If you would like some advice on how to use your prompt to get the most out of AI tools, send me a message here.