This week, I joined hundreds of higher ed marketers at the 2024 AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education in Las Vegas. In addition to fifty thousand steps, I also walked away with these 5 creative AI prompts that every marketer can use right now.
1. Elevate Your Newsletter Game with Comparative Analysis
While newsletters can be an essential tool to get the word out, they have the great risk of being incredibly boring. Delete. Unsubscribe. Mark as spam.
A clever content marketer shared this prompting technique that coaches the AI to qualitatively understand what makes a great newsletter and apply its learning to your content:
- Gather examples of newsletters you admire.
- Feed them to your AI tool.
- Use this powerful prompt: "Tell me why these are engaging or boring. Identify where the copy is bloated or concise.” Then add your newsletter draft and ask AI to “Help me write a newsletter that captures the engaging elements while staying concise."
This approach gives you both analytical insights and actionable guidance for improvement.
2. The Color-Coded Persona Prompt
Marketing personas are really just sets of marketing data, packaged up into clean, personified bundles. But crafting content for multiple personas can be daunting. This ingenious hack simplifies persona-based content creation:
- Take your existing persona types and assign them different colors (e.g., Blue, Yellow, Red). Feed your persona details to AI.
- Use this prompt: “Take this email draft and modify it for my Blue Persona.”
- When reviewing the draft content, you can then tweak by telling the AI to "make this content more Blue and less Yellow."
This color-coding system makes it remarkably intuitive to fine-tune content for specific audience segments. No more getting lost in complex persona descriptions – just simple, clear directions for more targeted messaging.
3. Campaign Analysis Made Simple
Transform complex campaign data into actionable insights with this straightforward approach:
- Upload your campaign results data.
- Ask AI to "Tell me why this campaign was effective in a few short bullets that highlight key stats."
This prompt cuts through the noise and delivers clear, stats-backed insights about what's working and why. Caution: Double check the stats it feeds back.
Pro Tip: Tie your top of funnel metrics to what’s happening further down the funnel. Not sure how? Let’s chat.
4. Personalized AI Voices for Leadership
Here's a game-changer for PR and communications teams:
- Create an AI profile using your president's or leader's written content.
- Use this personalized AI to generate authentic-sounding quotes for press releases.
- Result: Consistent voice and messaging that truly reflects your leadership's style.
5. The Student Perspective on AI Images
A surprising insight emerged: students are increasingly sophisticated in detecting AI-generated images – and they're not fans. In fact, many prefer traditional clip art to AI-generated visuals. This revelation challenges our assumptions about what feels authentic to Gen Z. This insight sparked so much discussion, we explored it further in Are prospective students getting "the ick" from your AI generated content?.
Making AI Work for You: The Everspring Perspective
With these powerful tools at our disposal, the possibilities seem endless. For small marketing teams trying to do more with less, AI can be more than just a tool – it can be a trusted thought partner that:
- Rejuvenates creativity
- Enables deeper personalization
- Scales channel efforts
- Enhances team collaboration by creating bandwidth for new ideas
However, the key question isn't just what you can do with AI – it's what you should do.
The Bottom Line
While AI opens up exciting new possibilities for scaling and execution, it's crucial to measure the impact of AI-generated content on your target audience. With insights like students getting "the ick" from AI-generated images, it's clear that monitoring the effectiveness – and potential drawbacks – of AI-generated content should be a key part of your strategy.
The most successful marketers will be those who find the sweet spot between leveraging AI's capabilities and maintaining authentic connections with their audience. As you experiment with these prompting techniques, keep a close eye on engagement metrics and audience feedback to ensure your AI-enhanced content resonates with your target audience.
Remember: AI is a powerful tool, but it's just that – a tool. The real magic happens when you combine these technological capabilities with human insight, creativity, and strategic thinking.