Leveraging ChatGPT for Marketing Research: Tips and Tricks

You need more knowledge about your audience, your ideal customer and how to reach them? And you don’t have a big budget for an expensive marketing research company? No problem! This is where AI, and specifically ChatGPT can help you out as well. And free of charge.

ChatGPT is not only perfect for writing content, but can be leveraged to help you with your research on your audience as well. Whether you own a small consulting business, webshop, niche website or just a fun blog.

You can excellently use this AI Tool to increase your knowledge about your target audience, know what concerns them, what solutions they are looking for and what social media they are active on. This will also help you learn where there are gaps and opportunities in your content. And thus you can optimize your content even more and leave the competition behind.

In this article, I will show you how to give prompts (commands) to ChatGPT in different ways that will allow you to do marketing research for your organization and target audience at lightning speed and effectively.

You will learn, among other things:

How to quickly find topics and keywords for your specific niche
Who exactly your target audience is based on your previous content
Setting up a buyers persona
How to better anticipate the expectations of your targeted audience
What the search intention of your audience is
And where there are gaps in your content

Keyword Research

In a previous article, I modestly (ahem)provided a fairly comprehensive explanation of how to use ChatGPT for your Keyword Research. That one mainly goes into how to find the right keywords for creating written content like a Blog.

Whereas this article on Marketing Research deals more specifically with your target groups. In it, I also give you tips on keyword research. It is advisable (but certainly not compulsory) to use both articles as inspiration/tools for your content strategy. Have fun!

What do you need for this ChatGPT Marketing Research

Preferably your own website already.
At least some idea about your niche/topics/service
An Excel or Google Sheet to copy paste the results of each research query

And before we start, my advice would be to conduct all of your research in the same ChatGPT chat conversation. That way ChatGPT can more easily answer your search queries and combine the results at the end.

Further more, don’t forget to copy paste every result into a new Excel of Google Sheets file to keep track

First step: a Brainstorming Session to gather as many Keywords and Topics as possible

Ok, the first thing we want to do is to gather as many topics and keywords that fit your website/niche as possible.

We want:

unique and original keywords
unique and original long tail keywords
and finally, unique and original keywords packaged in a good query/question

unique and original keywords:

For this, we type the following prompt:

[ Describe your website, goals and products as specifically as possible. Also offer the URL of your website and the main, most important topics of your content] List 30 unique and original keywords that I can use for my website.

I used my own website as an example, which would look like this:

unique and original long tail keywords:

To find long tail keywords, I use a slight variation of the above prompt. I only modify the last command, as you can see:

And in the example, then you see right away long tail keywords, which in my opinion are also stronger than the above single search terms.

(Small piece of SEO advice: basically, as a niche website/small blog, you want to target the long tail keywords more)

unique and original keywords packaged in a good query/question

And of course, you also want to know what queries can be found on your topic/niche. After all, if you can answer those questions correctly in your content, you will get more visitors. And more visitors means more leads and money.

Again, we only make in small adjustment in the very first prompt we used. And it then comes to look like this:

Ok, with these searches you already have an overview of which topics fit your business perfectly. For now, save them in an Excel file or Google Sheets document.

You will be able to use these perfectly once you start planning your content.

Researching your target audience

And now we come to the fun, but also important part: researching and determining your target audience.

Look, if you are a company like Amazon or Coke Cola, basically everyone on earth is your target audience.

But if you are a smaller entrepreneur, maintain a modest webshop, have a niche website or a nice blog about, say, drones, it is important to know exactly who your target audience is.

You want to know who you are dealing with in your target audience, their background, age, interests, their pains/needs, what they enjoy. And also where they can be found online and what they search for. You want to know all this information to make sure your content connects with them in the best possible way. And also resonates with them.

The first step is to create a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. Mostly based on research and date on previous customers or members of your target audience, you create a fictitious person (or Persona) and write down information about this person that is helpful to your marketing and content strategy. Data like:

Demographics: average age, medium income, level of education, where do they live
Likes and Dislikes: what does this person like doing, eating and what does he/she dislike
Online Presence: on which platforms can he/she be found, how do they use Social Media etc
Motivation and Goals: What are the goals? What motivates this person?
Needs, Pains and desires: what kind of problems is this person struggling with

All this information is extremely helpful in your marketing. If you know what kind of problems your target audience is struggling with, what kind of tone of voice resonates with them and how you can help them, creating content becomes much, much easier.

So let’s create a Buyers Persona!

And for that we use the same, trusted prompt again, with the following adjustment:

[ Describe your website, goals and products as specifically as possible. Also offer the URL of your website and the main, most important topics of your content] Write a buyer persona for my target audience

And you will see ChatGPT create a Buyers Persona. In my case a man called Marketer Mike

Copy Paste Marketer Mike’s information and now you have a much clearer idea about your audience.

how to better meet the expectations of my target audience

The second step is to research how to better meet the expectations of your target audience. What improvements can you make?

And for that we use the following prompt (again, a slight variation on the original prompt):

[ Describe your website, goals and products as specifically as possible. Also offer the URL of your website and the main, most important topics of your content] What can I add to my website to better meet the expectations of my target audience?

And as you can see I’m getting some useful suggestions, for instance the need for more video content. I’m not offering video’s as of yet ( I do have a Youtube channel about video games though). But I’m seriously considering offering the advice in my articles in helpful video’s as well.

Researching the Search intent of your audience

We have our keywords and we have a good sense of our audience/customers. Now we want to know what their search intent is and how we can optimize our own content for that intent. So we want to know:

Search Intent of our audience
which of our keywords align well with the search intent of our target audience
And immediately what possible blog/content titles there are for each keyword/search intent combination.

Search Intent of our audience

We type in the following prompt:

[ Describe your website, goals and products as specifically as possible. Also offer the URL of your website and the main, most important topics of your content] What are the search intentions/queries of my target audience?

And get a number of suggestions with regards to search intentions (or questions) that your audience will have.

which of our keywords align well with the search intent of our target audience

Next is researching if our keywords align with this search intent

Again, use the same, tried and test prompt, but this time add the keywords you want to research as well. Your prompt will look like this:

[ Describe your website, goals and products as specifically as possible. Also offer the URL of your website and the main, most important topics of your content, add 30 keywords you want to use] Can you match my keywords with the search intent of my target audience?

And immediately what possible blog/content titles there are for each keyword/search intent combination.

We now know what questions our target audience is asking online, we then know whether our own keywords can be combined with those queries.

Last step is to ask ChatGPT to combine them and generate for us a nice number of good titles for possible blogs and content. And for that, we will have to ask for a little extra in our prompt this time:

[ Describe your website, goals and products as specifically as possible. Also offer the URL of your website and the main, most important topics of your content, add 30 keywords you want to use] Write a great and nice blog title for each keyword and combine the search intent of my target audience in each title

As you can see, ChatGPT generated 2 or more suggestions for each Keyword. Nicely done!

And finally, the last piece of research: Gaps in your own content

We now have a considerable list of keywords and possible topics, we have excellent knowledge of who our target audience/customer is and what their online search intent is. We can incorporate that into a content strategy or content calendar.

But are there any missing gaps in our content?

For that we ask ChatGPT to combine and compare the results of every step in your research and ask it if there are any gaps you’ve missed.

Use the following prompt:

With the above information about my website, various keywords, buyers persona, search intent and blog titles. Are there any gaps in my keywords and content that you can think of for me?

And see the following suggestions. Which is quite helpful

Final Thoughts

There you have it. With these tips and prompts you now know how to conduct a fast and effective marketing research into your content, target audience, search intent and any possible gaps in your content.

You have learned how to:

Generate unique topics, keywords and questions about your niche/business
Create a buyers persona and get a better understanding of your target audience or perfect client
Know the search intent of your target audience
Combine your keywords and search intent to create content
And find possible gaps in your content

Don’t forget to collect this data and put it into an Excel or Google Sheet (or other alternative) to get a neat overview of your marketing research.

What can you use this research for, among other things?

Initially for your blogs and other content, for example. But you can always use it as a reference for sending converting emails to your target group, copywriting in Social Media or Google ads at a high level. And also, for instance, to sharpen your target groups when creating ads. After all, based on your Marketing Research and Buyers Persona, you now know exactly who to target and who not.

I don’t have a website yet, so how can I still conduct Marketing Research using these tips?

In that case, you will already need to be pretty clear about what services or products you want to sell or promote, to whom, through which media (blog, video, podcast, ads etc), what topics you want to use in your content and who you think your ideal customer is.

Put that information in the ChatGPT prompt, as I showed it above, only without a Website URL, and you will still get results that will at least get you started on additional ideas and who your target audience is.