You know it when you see it. The “it’s not X, it’s Y” setup, excessive em dashes, articles that open with “in today’s fast-paced digital landscape.” These are all tell-tale signs of someone using ChatGPT for their marketing copy.
Feeling called out? Don’t. In today’s fast-moving landscape (kidding), AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude are a lifesaver when you’re up against a deadline and running on fumes. But your audience is savvy. They can spot generic AI slop in seconds, and once they do, it’s hard to get that credibility back. The fix isn’t swearing off AI marketing tools, but rather knowing how to use them in a way that expresses your unique POV.
So what does it look like to use AI for marketing the right way?
We sat down with Ethan King, bestselling author of ChatGPT to Double Your Business in 90 Days and founder of Simple Success AI, on “Marketing, Demystified The Podcast” to talk about using AI to scale your marketing.
With over twenty years of building businesses and helping leaders automate their marketing, Ethan came ready to share the exact strategies, shortcuts, and mistakes to avoid when using ChatGPT for marketing.
Welcome to the AI slop era
It’s ironic. Marketers use ChatGPT as a creative writing tool, but AI is much more of a mathematician than a wordsmith. At its core, it predicts the next most logical word in a sentence based on everything it’s ever been trained on. Ask it a generic question, and it reaches for the most average, statistically predictable answer it can find.
Which is how we ended up in the AI slop era.
Millions of people are typing generic prompts into ChatGPT and publishing whatever it spits out. And since everyone is pulling from the same giant pool of averaged human language, everything sounds the same. The problem is, you get lost in the process.
Every single person reading this has a completely unique point of view. You have experiences, opinions, and stories that nobody else on the planet has. That is what your audience latches onto.
Sure, someone might stumble across your content because you covered a topic they were searching for. What keeps them coming back is your perspective. That’s what creates an authentic connection. And no AI can replicate it out of the box.
Once you stop using ChatGPT as a source of ideas and start using it as a tool to help express the ideas you already have, you claw your way out of the AI slop era. The key is personalization.
How to personalize ChatGPT for marketing
Most people setting up ChatGPT for marketing skip straight to prompting. That’s a mistake. Before you type a single prompt, there are two setup steps that determine the quality of your output.
The first is your custom instructions. In ChatGPT’s settings under personalization, you’ll find three fields:
- Custom instructions (input your style and tone preferences)
- Occupation (input what you do and your professional background)
- More about you (input interests, values, and other preferences)
Fill all three out to the maximum 1,500 characters each. This is the foundation that shapes every output ChatGPT generates for you.
The second step is to utilize ChatGPT’s memory feature. Try telling it a story from your life and the lesson it taught you every single day, building a library of real experiences the tool can draw from when creating content.
“It can’t be AI slop because it’s using my authentic stories that I’ve lived,” Ethan says.
But this work doesn’t stop in the settings tab. Every prompt you write is an opportunity to either reinforce authenticity or undermine it. That’s where having a prompting framework changes everything.
The TRACE Framework: ChatGPT prompts for marketing
Even with a fully personalized ChatGPT, a weak prompt gets a weak result. Ethan’s TRACE framework is a five-step structure for writing ChatGPT marketing prompts that actually deliver.
T – Task and Tools: Before you type a single word, be clear on what you’re trying to accomplish and customize accordingly. Writing a LinkedIn post? Standard ChatGPT is fine. Working through something complex? Turn on Thinking or Deep Research. The tools you choose on before you prompt set the stage for everything that follows.
R – Role: Tell ChatGPT who to be. You might say, “Act like you are the best marketing copywriter in the world, someone who has written campaigns that have won industry awards and been studied in business schools.” The more specific the role, the more useful the output.
A – Action: Tell it exactly what you want it to do. Write a Facebook post. Draft a subject line. Summarize this transcript. Be simple and direct.
C – Context: Context tells AI what this specific job requires. Who is the audience for this piece? What does a good version look like? What should it avoid? The more specific you get here, the less editing you’ll do on the back end.
E – Execution: Tell AI exactly what you want to walk away with. A 600-word article with no bullet points? A social post under 150 characters? A subject line with an emoji? Specify the format, the length, and any structural preferences upfront. Don’t leave it to chance.
These ChatGPT prompts for marketing copy work because they remove ambiguity. After all, ChatGPT is only as good as what you give it, and TRACE ensures you’re giving it the fuel it needs.
ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini: AI tools for marketing are ever-changing
The marketers getting real value out of AI right now aren’t smarter than you or more technical than you. They just did the setup work. They personalized their tools, built a story bank, and use the right prompts every time they sit down to create.
That’s it. Do those three things, and the quality of your output will skyrocket.
And while this article focuses on ChatGPT, these principles apply across platforms. Some people swear by Claude. Others live in Gemini. The truth is, the tools will keep changing. But the philosophy remains: Use AI as a tool to express your original ideas, not as a pool of ideas to pull from.
Remember, people connect with other people. Lend ChatGPT your voice, your stories, and your perspective, and you’ll start to stand out and make genuine connections with the people who are looking for a solution only you can offer.
Your voice is your differentiator. If you want a team to help you build the marketing engine to amplify it, here’s how we work.