How to create an effective Generative AI prompt

- Social media never sleeps and with 24/7 online stores, neither does your e-commerce marketing. And it's sometimes challenging to come up with fresh ideas to drive awareness and promote your brand. Generative AI can become your helpful brainstorm assistant, provided, you know how to talk "machine". While it's easy to set up a chat with a chatbot, the responses you get often seem generic or overwritten. Still, conversational prompting, where you go back and forth with an AI as if you're talking to another person, is one of the strategies you can use. But to create more unique and out there ideas, you may want to use a structured prompting framework. Now, structured prompts include detailed instructions and examples of what you want the AI to produce. Think of it like writing code, but with natural language. What does a machine need to know to process your request? It helps if you provide lots of detail and follow logical format. And there are many ways to do that. Chatbots like Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude, often provide you with tips that work for their platform, and that's a good place to start. You'll notice they suggest you begin by defining a role for your AI. You could ask it to act like an e-commerce marketer with 20 years of experience or an award-winning creative director or designer. That way you're giving your AI a clue about what data you want it to draw on. Next, you'll want to add in your goal, details about your customers, and several examples of campaigns have worked well in the past. It's important to be specific about the type of output you want, whether it's a bulleted list, suggestions, reasons your ad might appeal to your customers and so on. The more organized your thinking is, and the more examples you give your AI, the better your results will be. A great resource is David Birss' course how to research and write using generative AI tools. Of course, you'll want to customize your request to your brand. For instance, say a company like h+ sport, is looking for ideas for a marathon training kit that includes product descriptions for a collection of clothing and energy drinks personalized for each customer. Their prompt could start, "You are an e-commerce marketer for an award-winning sporting goods company with over 20 years of experience. You are known for pushing boundaries, delighting customers, and providing them with exactly what they're looking for. Your customers are young, hip and love to look stylish and be comfortable when they run. You are preparing a promo for a new marathon training line of custom sportswear, running shoes and energy drinks, designed to help your customers have more fun running and enhance their performance. Give 10 ideas for visuals we could use for the product bundle that will amaze and delight our customers." And you could get something like this, which isn't too bad. You'll also want to include examples of past campaigns, product images, and other marketing materials, so your AI has a clearer idea of what you want it to do. Design your prompts in a way that gives your chatbot what it needs to generate great results. When you're asking it to brainstorm ideas, and trust me, you'll have a lot that don't hit the mark. Your job is to find the gem in the rough or combine fragments of two ideas to create something new. And if you don't like what you get, well Generative AI is a prediction machine, so adjust your prompt and roll the dice again.