Guide: 5 Ways to Use AI to Increase Efficiency

Marketers wear a lot of hats. Whether it's conducting competitive analysis, crafting compelling content, or optimizing campaigns, the demands on our time and energy can feel endless. Staying ahead of the curve is more important and challenging than ever. If you’re juggling multiple tasks and striving to maintain a competitive edge, leveraging AI could be your secret weapon. In this guide, I’ll outline five ways you can use AI to streamline your workflow and increase efficiency, helping you focus on what truly matters… driving meaningful results.

When leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and others, it's important to understand that these tools are only as effective as the instructions you give them. In other words, the quality of the output depends heavily on the quality of the input.

So, what does that mean in practice?

It means that creating an effective prompt—one that guides the AI to deliver precise, valuable results—is key. An effective prompt has five qualities, and mastering these qualities will improve your overall efficiency. To help you get started, we’ve compiled tips for each of these qualities. Put them into practice, and you’ll see how AI can shave hours off your daily tasks.

5 Tips For Leveraging Artificial Intelligence for Work Productivity

1. Be as Specific as Possible

When using AI tools like ChatGPT, the quality of the output heavily depends on the specificity of your input. Vague prompts lead to generic responses, so be clear and detailed about what you need. It may be helpful to pretend you are introducing the project to someone new and asking them for their help.

What kind of information would you share with them? Instead of sending them a landing page and asking them to take a stab at ad copy, you might share the website, along with a description of your business: a link to social proof, unique selling propositions, high-priority keywords you’d like incorporated into your copy, as well as call to actions that might be specific to your brand.

You can even take your prompt another step further by asking the tool to adhere to specific character limits and follow desired guidelines for formatting.

How to Put Prompt Specificity into Practice:

• Define Your Goals: Before interacting with your AI tool of choice, take a moment to clarify what you want to achieve. Whether it’s gathering competitive insights, fact-checking information, or writing persuasive ad copy, a clear goal will guide the AI in generating relevant and valuable output.

• Include context: Providing context is key to getting custom responses that align with your brand’s voice and objectives. For example, instead of simply asking for social media captions, you could say: “Generate caption ideas for a social media post for my company, Vinyl Resting Place. Vinyl Resting Place is a record store that has been around since 1974. We sell records, band memorabilia, and artisanal coffee, targeting millennials in urban areas who are interested in reviving the nostalgic ways of consuming music and enjoying great-tasting coffee.”

  • This level of detail helps the AI produce copy that is on-brand and far more effective than a generic request.

    

• Set constraints: If you need the AI to adhere to specific guidelines, such as word counts, tone, or style, be sure to include those in your prompt. For instance, you could refine the previous prompt by adding: “Write five 30-character headlines, including spaces, for Vinyl Resting Place. Ensure one includes a call to action, one incorporates social proof, and the other three highlight unique selling points from our website.”

  • By setting clear constraints, you’ll receive output that’s creative and meets your precise requirements.

2. Ask Follow-up Questions to Improve The Output

AI is becoming more intelligent every day, but it still doesn’t think the way humans do. Where you or I might tackle a problem with a logical thought process, AI tools tend to generate the first thing that comes to "mind."

This is where follow-up questions become invaluable. They create a back-and-forth dialogue, allowing you to refine the AI's output and ensure it meets your needs.

Here’s how you can use follow-up questions effectively:

• Evaluate the Initial Output: Once you receive the AI’s initial output, take a moment to review it carefully. Does the output fully address your needs? Are there any parts that seem off or need further clarification? Asking follow-up questions helps you check for quality and ensures the output aligns with your expectations.

• Clarify and Refine: If the initial output is too broad or not quite on target, use follow-up questions to narrow the focus and provide more direction. For example, you could ask, “Can you elaborate on the differences between the taste of Vinyl Resting Place’s Dark Side of the Moon coffee vs. Starbucks’s Caffe Verona coffee?” or “Please refine this copy to emphasize the aromatic qualities of our coffee.”

• Explore Alternatives: Don’t be afraid to ask the AI to consider your prompt from a different angle or perspective. This can lead to more creative and diverse solutions. For example, if the AI suggests a list of paid media strategies for launching Vinyl Resting Place’s new coffee, you could ask, “Which of these strategies would be most effective for a small company with a limited budget?” or “Which strategy would Taylor Swift’s PR team likely choose?” Exploring alternatives can reveal new insights and opportunities you might not have considered initially.

3. Ask AI to Take on a Certain Role

AI feeds on human content, which gives it a parrot-like ability to mimic our roles and personas. By asking an AI tool to take on a specific role, you can generate more targeted and contextually appropriate outputs that align closely with your goal.

Here’s how to effectively guide AI in adopting a specific role:

• Choose the Right Role: Start by considering your end user or customer. What perspective would best serve your needs? For example, if you're conducting a competitive analysis, instruct the AI to take on the role of a decision-maker. This approach can help you gain insights that are directly relevant to the strategic decisions your target audience might face.

  • Pro tip: When you ask AI to compare your brand to competitors using specific websites, you not only receive a comparative analysis but also gain insight into what the AI deems important on your site. If a unique selling point you consider strong isn't highlighted by the AI, it might indicate that you need to emphasize that point more effectively.

• Clearly State the Role or Persona: Be explicit about the role you want the AI to assume. For instance, if you're writing a blog post for readers who admire Joan Didion, instruct the AI to adopt her tone and style. This level of specificity helps the AI generate content that resonates with your intended audience.

• Test Different Roles: Don’t hesitate to experiment with various roles to uncover which one offers the most valuable insights. You might find, for example, that an office manager's perspective on choosing an office cleaning service provides unique and actionable feedback that differs significantly from the view of a company president. Each role can bring a different dimension to the output, helping you explore new angles and solutions.

4. Provide Examples to Work With

Just as AI can effectively mimic roles and personas, it can also replicate the quality and style of examples you provide. If you have examples of high-quality content or analysis, sharing them with AI as a reference can dramatically improve the output. When AI has a clear benchmark to follow, it’s more likely to produce content that aligns with your expectations.

Here’s how to use examples to improve your output:

• Share Examples Upfront: Include examples of the kind of prompt you are looking for in your initial prompt. For instance, if you need a product description for a new record launch, you could say: “Here’s an example of a product description I like for a record in the same genre. Please create a similar description for this new record using the information provided.” By giving AI a benchmark to follow, you’ll guide it toward producing content that meets your expectations.

• Use Comparisons From The Real World: In the same vein as asking AI to adopt a persona, ask AI to reference a well-known brand or blog to generate an output in a similar format.

  • Pro tip: Be cautious when referencing another brand’s tone to ensure you maintain your own brand’s voice and identity. It’s fine to use outside influences as inspiration, but always prioritize consistency with your own brand.

• Provide Multiple Examples: The more relevant examples you provide, the better AI can understand the nuances of what you’re looking for. For example, if you’re looking for headlines, provide a range of examples that capture the different angles, styles, and tones you’re interested in.

• Refine with Follow-ups: If the initial table doesn’t quite meet your expectations or misses some details, use follow-up questions to refine it. For example, you might say: “Please add a column for each record’s sales numbers,” or “Reorder the table based on streaming count, from highest to lowest.” This allows you to fine-tune the output until it matches your requirements, saving you from having to make manual adjustments later.

Remember, Humans + Technology = Stronger Results

Artificial Intelligence, as we’ve seen these past few years, is an evolving tool. As marketers, the possibilities for how we use AI to streamline our day-to-day jobs are not only endless but also evolving. These tips serve as a foundation for writing better prompts because better prompts allow us to work smarter rather than harder. By being specific, iterating through follow-up questions, assigning roles, providing examples, and utilizing tabular formats, marketers can increase efficiency and achieve better results in a fraction of the time.

For more tips and tricks for leveraging Artificial intelligence in your digital marketing strategies leveraging AI, contact us!