How to Train ChatGPT for Marketing (So It Actually Sounds Like You)

Why You Should Train ChatGPT (Not Just Use It)

Think of it like hiring a new team member.
You wouldn’t just say “Go write my blog” and hope for the best.

You’d explain your brand. Your goals. Your audience. Your tone.
You’d give examples. You’d give feedback.

ChatGPT works the same way.

The 7-Step Process

1. Use a Dedicated Account or Thread
Keep business prompts separate. Treat it like a workspace.

2. Ask It to Remember Your Info
Especially if you're a paid user—this gives you long-term consistency.

3. Feed It Your Business Basics
What you do, who you serve, what makes you different.

4. Define Your Brand Tone
Bold, casual, empathetic, cheeky? Be specific.

5. Set Clear Marketing Goals
Blog posts? Lead magnets? Social posts? Tell it what success looks like.

6. Share Audience Insights
What your people care about. What scares them. What they secretly want.

7. Refine Through Feedback
“Great outline—but next time, keep the intro snappier.”
ChatGPT learns fast when you teach it how.

Final Thought
Don’t settle for bland AI content.
Train it once—then let it save you hours every week.

This isn’t just about productivity.
It’s about building a brand that’s clear, consistent, and yours.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

Okay, real talk here. I can spot most ChatGPT generated content a mile away. Why? Because it is painfully generic now. Don't get me wrong. ChatGPT is absolutely amazing and I think you should be using it any possible way that you can to help your business grow, but you need to train it first. If you're just hopping in there with a hey ChatGPT, write me a blog post about X, y, Z and expecting that to be magic.

It's not going to be magic. You're setting yourself up for inauthentic, generic content and a whole lot of roles. Okay, mostly from me, but if you train ChatGPT right, then it becomes this ridiculously powerful marketing assistant, a tool that knows your brand, your voice, your tone, even your audience's deepest pain points. Today, I'm going to walk you through seven steps to train ChatGPT to be more valuable to you as a marketing assistant than most human, and be sure to stay till the end for one extra little tip.

Let's do this.

Hi everyone and welcome! I'm Melisa from Zero to B2B and I use all of my years of experience working with fortune 500 companies to help small businesses and solopreneurs create marketing strategies that actually move the needle only without spending a whole lot of time and money. So if you're trying to do it all yourself and you need the help of ChatGPT, I totally get you.

But if you also want to make sure that that content sounds authentic to you, then you're going to love this video. And the good news is that you don't have to take any notes. I've compiled all of these tips into a freebie on my website, and I will link that in the description below, so feel free to grab it now if you want to follow along.

It's cool. I'll wait. Are you back? Welcome back. Step number one. Step one sounds really boring, but it is incredibly necessary to get great results. You're either going to want to create a specific login or a dedicated project within ChatGPT for your business. It's dedicated just for your business. So what's the difference between those two things? Well, if you're on the paid program in ChatGPT, it allows you to create a project folder, which is basically a collection of threads all related to the same topic.

In this case, that topic should be your business. But if you're not quite ready to be on the page plan, that's completely fine. The other way to do this is just to create a separate login for ChatGPT that is just for your business purposes. So why am I asking you to do this? Well, because ChatGPT typically references the whole amount of your inputs to create outputs.

So if you're using ChatGPT for personal things like, I don't know, research on your next vacation or maybe recipes that you want to say, then it's going to pull from those things too. And you obviously don't want that to happen when you're just trying to create content for your business. Think of this like creating a clean workspace for your AI assistant.

Clean inputs equals better results. Step number two. This is the step that most people don't even know is possible, but it's a game changer. Ask ChatGPT to remember. You can literally ask ChatGPT to remember something that you input and it will. For instance, you could tell ChatGPT please remember everything I put in this thread and use it when you're creating marketing materials for me in the future.

Boom, that easy. Now you're creating an AI assistant that gets smarter as you go along and learns every single time you use it. You can also create a training thread. This is where you upload everything you want ChatGPT to remember about your business. It can include things like your audience, your tone, your brand, themes, whatever it is that you want ChatGPT to remember about you and your business.

And then ChatGPT can pull from that training thread as a home base. Step number three I alluded to this a little bit in the last step, but you want to give ChatGPT context. The more it knows about you and about your business, the better it's going to be at generating responses that sound like you and your business. So you can feed ChatGPT things like your industry or your niche.

You can tell it about your audience. You can talk about what you offer and what makes you different. Here's an example. Using my go to Thrive in Co. Thrive and Co is just a company I've made up. It's that we can use it as a reference for all of these examples. So thrive and Co is just an imaginary local business that provides plant and plant care for corporate offices.

So a short version of what you might say to ChatGPT is something like this I run Thrive in Company, a corporate plant care service that helps offices look more vibrant and inviting. Our competitive edge is reliability. We keep plants healthy, offices vibrant, but we do it in a stress free way so employees don't have to worry about a thing.

And as you're doing this step, don't forget to tell ChatGPT about yourself as well. Specifically, I asked ChatGPT to interview me as though it were a writer writing the story of my life, particularly focusing on why I give the advice that I do and what qualifies me to give marketing advice. This process kind of blew my mind, to be honest with you.

Not only did it, like help me remember different stories about what I have experienced in the marketing industry over several years, but it also was like kind of therapeutic in a way. So I very highly recommend it. A pro tip about this is, like I mentioned before, to put all of these things into a training thread, then you never have to retype it.

You just have to ask ChatGPT to go look at that thread when it's creating something new for you. So this one is kind of fun, but it's also super powerful. Hell ChatGPT how you want to sound. Literally spell it out. Are you formal or casual? Is your tone bold and direct or more warm and encouraging? Are there any phrases that you always use or words that you want to avoid?

Write it all down. Our tone is warm, professional, and approachable. We avoid sounding overly fancy or using botanical technical terms. We avoid sounding overly fancy or using botanical terms. We talk like a reliable partner who genuinely wants to make your life easier. Once you define these things, you will be shocked at how well ChatGPT starts matching your voice.

Step number five. This one gets overlooked, but it's so helpful. Tell ChatGPT what you're actually trying to do. Is your primary goal to build brand awareness. Are you trying to grow your email address? Or maybe you want to create more presence on social? The more specific you are, the better it will tailor your results. Here's a quick example from Thriving Code.

I want to generate more leads by connecting with HR professionals and office managers on LinkedIn and through local networking. I want to do this by sharing practical tips about creating more welcoming, healthy work environments. Once you do this, ChatGPT can then prioritize the ideas that it gives you and the language that it uses to help people move closer to taking the action that you want them to take.

Step number six. Now we're getting into buyer psychology, which is something that I absolutely love. We're going to go back to that training thread and we're going to help ChatGPT understand your audience. You want to tell ChatGPT who your audience is, what are their roles? What are their job titles, what do they struggle with and what motivates them?

Where are they in the buyer's journey and what are their top objections to working with you? If you're not sure of the answers to these questions, don't sweat it. This is something that's really important to know before you start training. Chatbot, as are things like your tone and messaging and differentiators. But if you haven't done this yet, that's okay.

I've made it super simple for you. I have a playlist that is full of great tips and worksheets about creating your messaging, defining your buyer persona, and really defining your tone. If I can remember how to do it, I will link it up here somewhere, or I'll put the link in the description below. So just take a little time to make sure you have those things defined before you start training.

ChatGPT. Here's a short example of what you might tell ChatGPT. Our audience is made up of busy office managers and HR pros. They care a lot about creating a positive work environment, but they do not have time to maintain plants themselves. They want a dependable vendor who makes their office shine with zero effort on their part. But once you go through the work of creating those buyer personas and journeys and building out your messaging, all of those things, I would literally just copy paste all that work that you do and put it into your training thread.

And remember, the more real and human your input is, the more authentic the output will be. The last step is to train ChatGPT like you would train an intern, and that's to give it lots of feedback. Tell it what worked, tell it what didn't work. Was the tone off. Did it miss a point? Did it over? Explain. Was the length what you wanted it to be?

Just like anyone learning how you operate, ChatGPT needs to know if it's on the right track. Here's an example. This outline is great, but can you make it a little snappier and cut the jargon? Also, can you add more bullet points? Because I think that'll make it easier for people to read. Not only can you give it direct feedback, but you can take something that it creates for you, rewrite it in ChatGPT, or rewrite it on the side and you can say, hey, here's the final product based off of your original suggestion.

Please take a look at the changes so you know how to write more like me in the future. The more clearly you give direction, the more consistent and helpful the responses will get, and the more you repeat what you like, the faster you're going to get into a really great groove. If you're still with me, thank you so much for hanging out with me.

If you're still watching, thank you so much for hanging out with me this long. I really appreciate you taking the time to watch this and see what might resonate with you. So here's a little extra bonus tip when working with ChatGPT. And that is to be nice and polite. Say please and thank you to Chatty Pete because, you know, just in case.

In all reality, I am actually very much an AI optimist. I know there are big drawbacks, but I think that what we see in the future because of AI is going to outweigh all of them in the end. But you know, better safe than sorry. Here's the bottom line ChatGPT is an amazing tool. We all know it is incredibly powerful, incredibly amazing, but it's not plug and play.

You wouldn't hire a new employee and expect them to be brilliant on day one, right? It's the same thing here. The good news is that you typically only have to tell ChatGPT once, and all that work in the beginning ends up paying off like crazy over time. So grab the free worksheet, use these seven steps and you'll start getting better, more strategic responses, all without needing to spend a ton of hours editing and rewriting.

I have so many more videos coming all around, how you can simplify your marketing and get it to actually drive results, all about how you can simplify your marketing and get your efforts to actually drive results so you can build a business that works. And let me know in the comments how you've been using ChatGPT lately, and any challenges that you might have come across as you're doing that.

I'd love to know if you have anything particular that you'd like help training it to do. Just remember you've got this. Marketing doesn't have to be crazy complicated and ChatGPT can help with that. I'll see you in the next one. Side note because I keep forgetting to record this in my videos, but I'm not being sponsored by ChatGPT or anyone else for that matter, at least at the time of this recording.

If anything changes, I will update the description below.