The rise of artificial intelligence has given rise to variations of a new saying: you won’t be replaced by AI, you will be replaced by someone who knows how to use AI.
AI skills have become increasingly valuable across all industries, especially in marketing. The trend precedes the public availability of ChatGPT: according to a Statista global survey90% of marketers were using AI tools in 2022. This percentage was almost as high, at 88%, in 2021.
Dr. Anushika Babu Vadlamudi was an early adopter of AI in digital marketing. As Director of Marketing for the San Jose-based technology training and assessment platform AppSec Engineer, Vadlamudi is both using AI in marketing and teaching others how to do it. She does this in part through conferences like the “Practical AI Techniques for High-Performance Marketers” workshop she led at Cybersecurity Marketing Company CyberMarketingCon 2023.
AppSecEngineer evolved very quickly, Vadlamudi said, with the help of AI. The company generated $1 million in revenue and 10,000 paying users in less than 18 months.
“The reason we were able to reach this kind of milestone was simply because we had automated everything we could automate,” Vadlamundi told Technical.ly.
Dr Anushika Babu Vadlamudi (Courtesy Vadlamudi)
The Anatomy of the Prompt
AI is all about prompting. Without that bit of human interaction giving it instructions, it’s nothing, whether you’re using ChatGPT, Midjourney, or DALL-E.
“One of the things I’ve continued to do and teach people is to create prompt libraries that work specifically for your use case,” Vadlamudi said. “Everyone has a unique use case and creating the right form takes time. »
How a prompt is formatted is important, Vadlamudi emphasized. She makes hers regularly updated prompt library available for free online to help cybersecurity marketers learn the proper way to write a prompt.
If you didn’t know any better, you might think the prompt library — essentially a list of categorized prompts — was a worksheet from a Marketing 101 course.
For example, to create a Twitter thread:
Create an engaging Twitter feed about the latest cybersecurity threats and best practices. Include 5 wires. Include related hashtags like #CyberSecurityAwareness, #InfoSec and #DataProtection.
Or, to create Google Ads copy:
Create concise and compelling ad copy for our Google Ads campaign targeting “cybersecurity solutions,” focusing on the key features and benefits of (cybersecurity software) based on this URL: (product URL).
The task is the most important element of the prompt, followed by context and background, example, format, personality, and tone. As Vadlamudi says, understanding, mastering, and customizing your prompts takes some work, but it greatly streamlines the process in the long run.
“I teach the anatomy of the prompt and then go into each specific area,” Vadlamudi said. “As for context, how do you teach the AI to think for you? And then another thing that marketers don’t quite understand is that there are so many different types of prompts (that) you can actually teach your AI model to create your prompt for you.
Incentive strategy
With the right prompts, a generative AI chatbot like ChatGPT can help automate marketing strategy. For example, if you want to analyze your target audience, you can trigger it with a prompt like:
Identify and analyze key target audience segments for our cybersecurity solutions, considering demographics such as mid- and large enterprise IT managers, psychographics such as security awareness and buyer behavior.
You also use it to create a marketing calendar with a prompt like:
Create a 6-month content calendar for a cybersecurity company. Include formats like social media posts, webinars, LinkedIn Lives, blog posts, and infographics. Include 3 pieces of content per week. Competitor Analysis List Create a list of the top 5 competitors for (your company/product name/cybersecurity service).
“And then at that point you can request a tabular result and then move it into your Google Sheets,” Vadlamudi said. “And now you have a basic overview of your calendar ready. The next steps I would take would be to start working from video because ultimately it is the content that garners the most views.
The generative AI chatbot can write your scripts based on detailed prompts that can ask it, for example, to create a three-minute script that can be broken down into five short videos.
When you’re making the video, you can use AI to make corrections like eliminating “uhs,” as well as setting it to make eye contact with the viewer when you’re not looking into the camera.
“Once you get the hang of it, it becomes very easy,” Vadlamudi said of using different AI tools. “It’s getting really, really fast. It’s a skill like anything else.
Beyond social networks
Using AI for social media is just the tip of the iceberg: AI and CGI can be used to create larger-than-life marketing campaigns – or, at least, the illusion of ‘a campaign.
A good example of next-level AI-driven marketing is Maybelline’s viral ad in London featuring a train with a giant eyelash running through a giant eyelash brush that appeared to be set up in a train station.
In fact, installing something like the lash train could be prohibitively expensive and dangerous to pull off, if the marketing company could even get permission to pull such a public stunt in the first place. But AI creates a useful shortcut, according to Vadlamudi.
“What’s really cool is we now live in a time where this video was generated without having to get any of these permits, without having to actually set up that moment. It was completely generated by AI and then spread on social media and went viral on its own,” Vadlamudi said. “So you had all these looks at this team and all this publicity without having to do the stunts that would have been necessary for that.”
“Marketing will be very, very interesting in the future,” she added.
Knowledge is power!
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