Three quick and easy ways to use AI to improve higher education content marketing right now
Everyone is talking about it. Here at Pickle Jar we’ve been experimenting to see how AI can contribute to digital content creation for a university website. The results are, frankly, terrifying.
We’ve also been asking ourselves how AI will change how future students gather information about their university choices, and how it will open up the world of international education to them. That topic is for another post and a few conference talks that we’re giving too.
In the discussions about the impact of AI on higher education marketing and recruitment, we’ve noticed a tendency to focus on the big things:
Personalisation of decision journeys
Enhanced automation of support
More sophisticated CRM and marketing interventions
Efficiencies and enhanced customer service through the admissions cycle
And so on...
All of these are worthy conversations, but they hold us in thinking about AI as a technology for the future, not the now.
So, let’s look at the now. Here are three very quick and easy ways that you can use chatGPT alone right now to enhance and add efficiency to your higher education content marketing approaches.
1 - Have it write the boring first draft of your content
One of the biggest challenges in higher education marketing is that the content across different institutions tends to all sound very samey. We use the same kind of brand values and messaging points as each other (see “Are university brands all a bit samey, and what can we do about it?”). Here we can use AI to our advantage. Because AI relies on existing source content (i.e. content already on multiple university websites), when you ask it to generate a piece of content, it draws from those sources and provides you with something that is a convincing - and often fairly well-written - hybrid. In other words, it shows you what a middle of the road piece of content would probably be like.
Rather than use this as inspiration, use it as a starting point. Work through it and identify all the things that you can change and supercharge to then make your own second draft really stand out. In other words, use it as the boring baseline to challenge yourself to produce something far far better.
Source: chatGPT, June 2023
A “study here” page generated by chatGPT
2 - Generate keyword and key phrase recommendations
Now, this is definitely no substitute for proper key phrase research. You know, the kind that uses actual search data and definitely not the search data from your own site’s analytics? (I’ll save why that is a terrible approach for another blog post) But on a day to day basis, and for some kinds of content, the data itself isn’t the most important thing: we might simply be turning to keyword and key phrases to gather some ideas for content topics, or to uncover the words and phrases that warrant further research. We might even be producing our own research approach, and might want a list of potential key words or key phrases to test with our target audiences.
Head over to chatGPT to generate that starter-list for you with requests like “Generate a list of possible SEO keywords or key phrases for studying economics”, and within seconds you’ll have a list that you can use to build more of your work - whether content ideas or audience research - around.
Source: chatGPT, June 2023
A list of SEO keywords generated from chatGPT about studying economics
3 - Generate content marketing topics to inspire your editorial plan
Just as with suggestion 1, this suggestion isn’t about it actually doing the work for you. If you rely on chatGPT just to create all the content plans and the content, you’re going to end up with content that is ultimately a mediocre approximation of what everyone else is already creating. However, you can use it to generate the initial ideas that you can then tailor and adapt or even (again) test out on your audience to see if they like the topic and idea.
So, try asking the tool things like “give me a list of 20 social media posts for prospective university students”, or “give me a list of blog post topics that I could write for parents of prospective university students”, and in seconds you’ll have the starting point that will prompt you to then riff on those ideas and tailor them to your own content plan.
Source: chatGPT, June 2023
A list of suggested blog post titles for parents with a child about to go to university
So, those are just three ways if you’re starting to experiment with AI and tools like chatGPT in which you can start using it right now, today, in your day to day content marketing work.
Want more (human) support in developing your content marketing approaches? Have a chat with us about how we can help you.