Choosing AI Marketing Assistants For Your Early Startup

Imagine a world where marketing is accessible to early-stage startups. As early as ideation. A world where they don’t have to hire expensive but experienced consultants or work with agencies of any sort, whether in SEO, branding, performance, or something else. Where they don’t have to learn the depths of marketing themselves, already wearing so many hats that there’s barely time or space for anything else to add to this pile.

Do you see where I’m going with it? Of course, the answer lies on the surface of very much hyped generative AI that could offer just that.

It is now a possibility that all early startups can explore. It won’t replace – or even partially eliminate – the need for marketers, but it will finally be able to bridge the gap between the two, which is so crucial at the beginning of a startup journey.

Over the last weekend, I analyzed three free AI writing tools – ChatGPT, Copy AI, and Writesonic – to briefly overview what startups can start with when it comes to their marketing.

And also to put my fellow marketers at ease with their limitations that will prevent this dream world for startups from becoming the biggest nightmare for marketers. At least for now.

ChatGPT: Flexibility is Key

With ChatGPT, your world of writing is your oyster. You can use an ever-growing collection of prompts and ask it to act in a certain way reflecting your target audience's needs and your tone of voice.

And if you need more than that, just keep the dialogue flowing – clarifying, editing, and improving your text until it perfectly suits your task.

Whether outlining a blog post structure, writing an article, or summarising it into one paragraph, ChatGPT is as flexible and accessible as you want it to be.

But, as with any flexibility comes responsibility. The need to know exactly what output you’re looking to achieve at the end of your conversation with ChatGPT might come as a frustrating downside for someone who doesn’t know what this output needs to look like.

That’s where other GPT-powered apps come in, offering a variety of pre-made templates that the language model is purposefully fine-tuned towards.

Writesonic: Is Easy Too Easy?

Writesonic could be an option for that. Given that, unlike ChatGPT, Writesonic has access to the latest Google open data, it can provide you with relevant links to reinforce its statements.

With only a brief input you need to complete in a couple of minutes – asking for the product description, tone of voice, and the platform that you intend to post this text on – you get a variety of results for almost anything. And that includes articles and blogs, ads and marketing tools, general writing, social media, e-commerce, website copy, company bio, mission, and vision.

It seems like a one-stop shop that an early-stage startup founder, aka its own marketer, would have preferred to any other writing tool.

The question is, however, if the product one-liner and the selection of the ‘dramatic’ tone of voice, for example, are enough to not only hit the right spot of your differentiated market positioning but also create a trustworthy output without making stuff up.

And even when you have to input more data to create a landing page copy outlining your project name, description, and three key features, the result is still not very impressive. Of course, it does give you a wireframe template of how your copy elements might be structured, but the copy is often repetitive and generic.

Copy.AI: One for Everything

Writesonic seems like a one-stop shop for anything marketing related until you come across Copy.AI. Its template base includes so many different use cases and deliverables – including special promotions, testimonials, and motivational quotes – that it gives you ideas for your marketing campaigns even when scrolling through the list.

Until you scroll all the way to dating profiles and wedding vows… I can relate to dating profiles. It took me three hours and three edits to put the final version up. And I still don’t really want to re-read it. But wedding vows? Wow!

This is truly one for everything.

What I also liked about Copy.AI is that it gives a more detailed onboarding form to generate your output. For example, it asks for a brand one-liner (or tagline), a target audience, why you started the company, the problem you are trying to solve, and how.

With a similar list of tone-of-voice principles to choose from, it also gives you the option to define your personality outside of the pre-determined criteria. Do you want to sound like David Attenborough or Greta Thunberg for your startup tackling climate change? No problem, you can do that.

Limitations

I wouldn’t talk about possible ‘hallucinations’ of generative AI as a limitation. Fact-checking and critical thinking should have already become our go-to skills – with the speed of fake news spreading on social media and now with GPT.

But one thing that makes these tools limited for marketing purposes is the prompt-to-output principle. Why? Because even with a small text input requested to create a GPT-powered copy, this small text has to be consistent across all templated communication materials. And even then, GPT can generate as many different variations as possible without sticking to one big idea.

At the beginning of a startup journey, it is crucial to create awareness by reinforcing the same associations that come to the mind of your users. The same message – in different forms and formats – must repeat over and over, from one touchpoint to the next, from one channel to another. Only then can you rent this little mental space that represents your idea.

A strategic approach, therefore, is of the essence when building a brand from scratch. So if you decide to use these marketing tools for your early startup, remember that they are implementation tools, not all-in-one marketing tools to outsource the whole function to.

Stick to one concept and the same key message, reiterating it to different audiences across communication materials like a robot (pun intended) to make sure it sticks with others. And that is, interestingly, the human task of today’s marketing.

But give it a go and enjoy the perks of 2023.

See for yourself if generative AI would make your job – whether a startup founder or a marketer – a tiny bit easier.