Many of us have accepted that generative artificial intelligence (genAI) doesn’t autonomously handle digital PR, SEO, or content marketing tasks entirely on its own.
Tools like ChatGPT can currently enhance our workflow, improving the quality and speed of creating valuable resources that users and content creators want to share and link to due to their unique value.
Depending on the complexity of a task, it can be augmented, automated, or autonomously performed by machine learning, artificial intelligence (including genAI), or robotic process automation (RPA).
ChatGPT serves as a tool to support certain significant digital marketing and SEO tasks.
This article will explore how digital marketers or SEOs can leverage generative AI to create assets like useful tools and widgets that content creators want to share because of the value they provide to their audience.
Insights from the article:
- A linkable asset is a valuable resource owned by a company, which can include people, processes, or technology.
- Planning for linkable assets begins with identifying a very specific audience segment.
- Although generative AI has its limitations, digital marketers can create Google Sheets/Excel templates and then turn those templates into widgets using ChatGPT coding.
What is a linkable asset?
A linkable content asset is a piece of content that communicates the unique value proposition (UVP) of a company’s resources. These resources can include people, processes, or technology that the company owns.
These assets attract shares and links because of their distinctive value proposition, designed to resonate with content creators, journalists, and audiences. The primary goal is to create a compelling story around the asset that encourages sharing and linking.
Linkable assets have a story to tell, which can take the form of helpful infographics, interactive tools, blog articles, interviews, or case studies.
For example, a study on the influence of online reviews in consumer decision-making received over 2,563 links, demonstrating strong interest and engagement.
The study itself is the asset, but the compelling story that surrounds it magnifies its impact. Strong brand expectations for insightful studies further reinforce its value.
Tip: Professional journalists and content creators typically want to cite the source of a study. If people find a study meaningful, they will link back to the original source on your website.
Linkable assets earn links when they resonate with an audience’s needs and desires. Connecting your company’s assets to those needs requires a customer-centric approach to planning the assets.
Linkable asset planning
Linkable assets must provide significant value to readers. However, not every outlet or creator will see the same value or understand how the content connects to their audience.
This challenge requires creativity. Employing a creative framework that starts with identifying available assets, connects those assets to customer needs, and concludes with enabling the assets creatively is essential.
An enablement framework for marketing linkable assets includes:
- Ambassador: Identify the ideal customer’s pain points, gains, and workflows.
- Find assets: Identify the company’s owned assets that solve customer pain points.
- Position assets: Develop a story explaining how the asset impacts the customer’s goals or needs.
- Create assets: Use a design-thinking method to enable the story to be told by trusted internal and external sources.
The story is ready to be told once the assets are identified, but now you need to create a content asset.
Tip: Before you start planning the asset, set the overall team or project objectives using the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) method.
Creating a linkable asset with ChatGPT
Generative AI has its limitations, but it is possible to create useful tools and templates to address foundational pain points using ChatGPT.
Be an ambassador
Have ChatGPT act like a product manager to explain the customer journey, pains, and needs.
For my example, I found that digital marketers struggle with overused email templates.
However, crafting each email from scratch is too time-consuming.
Find assets
I have an email template that avoids overused approaches and focuses on providing bulletproof facts and evidence to support claims based on content analysis.
Position asset
Many digital marketers need to improve their performance by using outreach templates that lack customization and proof of expertise.
This template is for digital marketers who have expertise but need assistance in conveying their story.
Tip: When creating an asset, aim for a blue ocean link building strategy (creating new market space) instead of a red ocean strategy (competing in an existing market).
Create asset
Using ChatGPT, I turned my email template into a Google Sheet template builder.
This template allows digital marketers to analyze gaps and explain how their expertise aligns with site needs.
The asset saves time on site analysis and writing customized emails, allowing marketers to focus on higher-level tasks.
Steps to create the Google Sheet template builder:
- Upload the output template (base email template).
- Ask ChatGPT to reverse-engineer it to identify dynamic fields.
- Create the equation to combine each input field into an output field for the final email.
This screenshot shows a template created by ChatGPT. Here’s the final output:
Create simple widgets
I expanded this by creating a widget allowing the team to select various templates based on the email campaign type.
Prompted by ChatGPT, I created a widget using inline HTML and CSS from the template.
Tip: After creating the asset, you must market it effectively. As emphasized in various guides, the goal of asset marketing is to create audience action rather than merely aiming for links. Links are a natural consequence of excellent asset marketing.
Create more value for your audience by using ChatGPT for advanced analysis. There are multiple SEO use cases for ChatGPT’s advanced data analysis plugin, which can be integrated with template and widget creation processes.
Take the leap
While AI won’t replace all aspects of PR, SEO, or content marketing, it can significantly enhance our processes, making tasks more efficient and providing greater value to the audience.
Using AI, unique and valuable content can be created more efficiently, paving the way for a more automated and optimized future in digital marketing.
Whether augmenting, automating, or acting autonomously, tools like ChatGPT offer substantial value in the digital space.
