Getting started with prompts.
Before we dive into some hands-on advice, here are our key tips to consider before starting your conversation with ChatGPT to nail your prompts.
Practise precision: Broad prompts are yesterday's news. To get to the results you need, you have to hone in on the specifics. For example: Instead of just “marketing ideas”, try “guerrilla marketing tactics for SaaS products across community and events”.
Variety is the spice of life: Don't settle for the first output. Always ask for multiple versions of content ChatGPT delivers, in another style, using a different tone of voice or requesting specific phrases. Combine elements of different outputs to get the perfect combination.
4 ways to up your prompt game on ChatGPT.
Detailed prompts are the first step to ChatGPT success. Read on to get the top tips and tricks from the Forward team.
Feed ChatGPT a relevant boilerplate before each prompt.
If you were briefing a copywriter before they started working with your company, what information would you send them? The same should apply to ChatGPT. You can upload the copy from relevant documents so that it can adjust its response accordingly.
How to upload your boilerplate?
As ChatGPT is a text-based tool, the most straightforward approach is to copy text from your document and paste it in. Remember to tell ChatGPT that you are going to feed it some information and that it doesn't need to respond to you until you're ready to ask it to carry out a task for you.
What kind of documents should you use as a boilerplate?
- Get ChatGPT up to speed with the context.
Feed it the copy from your recent investor deck, your company overview, your PR boilerplate - any document that has valuable and specific information about your business, relevant to the task you're asking it to complete. - Teach the tool to write like you or your company.
Paste the copy from your Tone of Voice document so that it can understand the dos and don'ts of copywriting for your startup. What does your company stand for? What does it sound like? Any guides that can help frame this for the tool, are going to 10x the output.
Use cases in action ⚡️
- Craft compelling and exciting slides for your investment deck.
Give ChatGPT your company data and ask it to summarise it for you in a specific style. In this example, we're working on a pitch deck, and we need a punchy opening paragraph and an eye-grabbing title.
- Make sure your content aligns with your startup's tone of voice.
Feed ChatGPT your tone of voice document and any piece of draft content. You can then ask it to score the article against your tone of voice guidelines, provide detailed feedback, and rewrite the article incorporating the feedback that you agree with.
Adjust the temperature of your response.
Did you know that generative AI apps have a temperature setting on their responses? Ordinarily, they are scored from zero to one. The lower the temperature setting, the more consistent the answer will be. As you set the temperature closer to one, the answers become more creative (and sometimes, a little wild). You can read more about temperature settings in this article here.
Use cases in action ⚡️
Draft thoughtful and impactful customer service responses.
Use the temperature setting to tweak the tone and language in an email response so that the copy is suitable to be sent to a customer.
Act like a thought leader or industry specialist.
Along with temperature settings, you can adjust the style of ChatGPTs responses by specifying a particular person for it to take inspiration from. Remember, the key here is to give the tool as much information as possible. Here are a few ways to use personas and thought leaders to get it on the right track:
- Specify the job role that ChatGPT is emulating in this task.
Is it a business strategist, a marketer or perhaps a developer? Tell the tool, who it needs to be, the objective of this task and whether it needs to deliver its response in a specific tone. - Ask it to clarify parameters to get better outputs.
When a product manager and developer work together to create a feature they'll discuss the grey areas in a specification to get it right. LLMs don't, but you can force clarity. Ask the same from the model by using this prompt. "Ask me questions until you have all the information you need to complete the task." - Ask ChatGPT to write in the style of a specific person.
Think Gary Vaynerchuk or Dave Trott. Remember the tool is only trained up until the end of 2021, but providing your thought leader was prominent before then, chances are ChatGPT will know who you're referencing and more importantly, how to talk like them.
Use cases in action ⚡️
Experiment with your social media content using different styles and tones of voice.
Ask ChatGPT to give you the same piece of content in differing styles. You can then ask it to summarise the main differences for each version and highlight keywords that are used in each example, for a quick and easy analysis.
Get to grips with iterative thinking.
A common issue with ChatGPT is that users ask just one question and are often disappointed by the response (this is called a 'zero shot' prompt.) 'Few shot' prompts allow you to dig deeper and iterate and produce far better results.
Consider your interaction as a conversation, guiding the model through a structure to refine the content by providing feedback, further context and guidance. Often, we find combining parts from different outputs yields the best results. This goes for formatting too. You can ask ChatGPT to format the results into a table and then add new columns with each response.
Use case of iterative thinking in action ⚡️
- Craft compelling and exciting slides for your investment deck.
- Make sure your content aligns with your startup's tone of voice.
- Draft thoughtful and impactful customer service responses.
- Experiment with your social media content using different styles and tones of voice.
In a nutshell, understanding and leveraging 'few-shot' prompts can dramatically enhance the quality of responses from ChatGPT. The secret ingredients? Precision, variety, appropriate context, tone, iterative thinking, and learning to manipulate the 'temperature' of your response.
Whether it's crafting compelling slides for your investment deck, aligning content with your startup's tone of voice, drafting thoughtful customer service responses, or experimenting with social media content using different styles and tones of voice, applying these strategies can transform your interaction with ChatGPT into a powerful tool for your business.
