AI Can Boost Your Product Marketing Skills - Here’s How

AI is more than just a craze, it's a new way of doing business that transcends all industries. Many of the Product Marketers I know use it regularly, but some do not. I’m just starting out and wanted to share some of the ways that I am using it and loving it.

One Year Ago

“Just try it,” my (non-PMM) friend said to me. “I’ve used it and it has given me some great recommendations.” He was of course talking about artificial intelligence. That was almost a year ago, yet I’ve only taken it up in the last few months. I was hesitant to try it, probably because of all of the negative hype — robots are taking over the world! AI will take your job! — that kind of thinking. I was also reluctant to try it because of rumors of unreliability and “hallucinations - responses generated by AI which contain false or misleading information presented as facts.” 

I even questioned whether I was too old to learn a new technology. However, I reminded myself that I’m barely middle-aged and have successfully mastered the internet, social media, iPhones, Alexa, and many other technologies that weren’t around during my childhood. I’m being transparent because I’ll bet that you’ve had similar thoughts at one point or another. 

After much hemming and hawing, I am happy to report that I now use AI almost daily. There are many different ways to use AI for Product Marketing. Though I am only scratching the surface, I’ll share a few ideas for PMMs to effectively leverage  AI tools, specifically ChatGPT. 

Images generated by AI

Content Creation

Using generative AI is, in my opinion, the primary use case for PMMs. I have been successful using ChatGPT to write blog posts. For a previous company, I wrote about an app that includes functionality for digital key cards. To get started, I entered this prompt into the message bar: Write a story about a boy who lost his keys and couldn’t get into his apartment building. 

Chat GPT returned a great narrative about a young marketing professional who worked late, forgot his keys at the office, and didn’t remember that they were on his desk until he got home. I used it for the first part of the blog. ChatGPT went on to say that the boy ran into a neighbor outside the apartment building who let him in. I replaced that AI-generated section with my product value proposition and details, i.e. the boy used the digital key card to get inside. Eureka! 

In this case, ChatGPT gave me the beginning framework of the blog, but I had to rewrite much of it to fit my product narrative. I also had to revise the text for tone. ChatGPT has a specific tone that doesn’t match my brand voice, so any content it generates requires significant editing. 

It took a while to edit the whole piece. But in the end, AI saved considerable time by providing the initial framework for the blog.

Persona Development

I was researching an interesting company the other day, Cambridge Mobile Telematics, which developed an app to track mobile phone usage in cars to measure distraction in drivers. The app is typically marketed to insurance companies who use the data to offer discounts to people who are safe drivers and less distracted. The primary persona is an insurance actuary, a role which I knew nothing about. I turned to ChatGPT and typed in:  “ Create a persona for an insurance actuary. 

Within a matter of seconds, ChatGPT created a profile, including demographics, goals and objectives, challenges, values and motivations, tech-savviness, and communication style. Fantastic! To gather that information without AI, I would have conducted numerous interviews with customers, sales, and customer success - it could have taken weeks! However, the caveat is that I had no knowledge of the persona to begin with so I couldn’t validate the information ChatGPT provided. As with content creation, when using AI for persona development, you’ll need to heavily edit and validate the results. 

Competitive Analysis

After I tried ChatGPT for persona development, I decided to give it a whirl with competitive analysis. In this case, I used a company I was already familiar with, a competitor of a previous company I worked for. The prompt I used was:  Provide competitive analysis for xyz company. 

I’m definitely not a master at prompt building. However, even with my simple direction, ChatGPT produced a SWOT in a few seconds. The results reminded me of the synopsis of the company in the Gartner Magic Quadrant, a prominent research paper from the analyst firm Gartner which measures technology vendors - analysts beware! ChatGPT’s information was good. However, it lacked the in-depth understanding of the industry that analysts have. It also didn’t do a good job of suggesting areas that my current company could win, even when I typed in: compare xyz company to my company, Trillium Software. Additional strategic thought was needed to relate the information to my company, something that only a human can do.

Value Propositions

I attended one of the Product Marketing Alliance’s virtual events where one of the speakers mentioned using AI for value propositions. In fact, she typed her company name into ChatGPT to evaluate what was being said about her company in the market. I did the same for my company, and while some of the resulting information was accurate, it was dated and not written in our brand tone. I’d spent a lot of time updating the value proposition at my company, yet it was not reflected in the results. However, the results did convey the basic idea of what the company does which I could use as a framework for building future value propositions.

I also used ChatGPT to create a value proposition for myself! I input my resume into the message bar and received a list of my accomplishments reorganized in a different way. Rather than detailing experience by company, it organized my work history by contributions that I’d made, e.g. revenue impact, team leadership, and go-to-market excellence. As with prior outputs, the content needed serious editing. But it was an interesting exercise that gave me a different way to present information about myself.

I’m a few months into my AI journey and I’m hooked! As I mentioned, I use it almost every day to write content, develop personas, conduct competitive analysis, and revamp value propositions. In addition to trial and error, I am learning as much as I can by attending webinars and reading books. I highly recommend the Marketing AI Institute,  as a resource. I hope that you found my story interesting and helpful.  For more AI insights from Olivine read Comparing AI-writing tools to create real product messaging.