Generative AI prompting 101: Writing the perfect prompt to empower your people
By Dyllan Thweatt, Copywriter 🇺🇸
For all the glitz, glam, and celebrity of Las Vegas, AI was the star of the show at Google Next 2024. Generative AI is doing everything from driving greater ROI to powering the new Google Vids.
To make the most of this growing suite of AI features, our team got their hands on a guide for writing quality generative AI prompts for Gemini. Some key tips include using natural language to converse with it, being specific, staying concise and simple, and iterating on prompts by making the prompting process conversational.
Our team at distillery works hard to present the best possible recommendations and innovative ideas to our clients. We can use generative AI to help with some background research and establish a starting point to develop incredible content, but we have to prompt wisely.
In the following examples, let’s pretend we just spoke to a new client in the cloud computing industry. They’re looking for support for a campaign to improve awareness of cloud computing features, and we’re starting to think through what we want to pitch.
Below are two marketing campaign brainstorming prompts: one posed as a simple question and the other constructed using prompting best practices to help us get the ball rolling.
Prompting with a broad request
The most successful prompts average around 21 words, but new users frequently use fewer than nine words, leading to broad responses which take even more work to refine. If you have a quick, simple question, generative AI can aggregate search information and answer. If you’re asking for something slightly more complex, such as a brainstorming session, prompts require a bit more specificity to return deeper answers. Let’s take a look at what ideas we get from a short, broad prompt:
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Absolutely! Brainstorming is a great way to spark creative ideas for your marketing campaign. Here are some questions and techniques to get you started:
Audience Deep Dive:
Who are you trying to reach? Get super specific! Demographics, interests, online behavior and even common pain points will all influence your approach.
What are their challenges? How can your product or service solve their problems and make their lives better?
Where do they hang out online? Are they on social media platforms like TikTok or Instagram? Do they frequent industry news websites or online forums? Understanding their preferred channels is key.
Campaign Goal Brainstorm:
Move beyond just sales! While sales are great, consider other goals like brand awareness, lead generation or establishing yourself as an authority in your niche.
Think creatively! Could you run a contest or giveaway to generate excitement? Host a webinar to educate potential customers?
Content Brainstorming:
What type of content would resonate with your audience? Funny memes for a younger demographic? In-depth blog posts for industry professionals? Eye-catching infographics to explain complex topics?
Can you repurpose existing content across different channels?
Brainstorm campaign slogans or hashtags! These should be memorable, catchy and relevant to your target audience.
Brainstorming Techniques:
Mind Mapping: Visually brainstorm ideas by starting with a central theme (your product/service) and branching out with related ideas and keywords.
Crazy 8s: Set a timer for 8 minutes and sketch 8 different creative campaign ideas on a piece of paper. Don't hold back on any ideas, even the seemingly outlandish ones!
Role-Playing: Pretend to be your ideal customer and brainstorm how you, as the marketer, would reach them and convince them of your product/service's value.
Remember:
Quantity over Quality: The goal is to generate a large pool of ideas at this stage. Don't worry about filtering or judging them yet.
Encourage Participation: If brainstorming with a team, encourage everyone to contribute and build upon each other's ideas.
Embrace the Wild!: Don't be afraid of unconventional ideas. Sometimes the craziest ideas can be the most successful when refined.
By following these steps and using creative brainstorming techniques, you can generate a wealth of ideas to kickstart your marketing campaign.
Okay, that’s not quite what we meant…
We partner with our clients to drive value by offering creative solutions to their problems. While we may be subject matter experts, Gemini doesn’t know that; it doesn’t know who our clients are or what kind of ideas we’re looking for. It took the phrase “marketing campaign” and scoured the internet for marketing 101 tips and campaign best practices.
This answer may be useful for someone who’s never launched a campaign or for a very early-stage idea map, but it’s far from what we had in mind when we asked for a “campaign brainstorm.” We wanted a starting point for some client-specific ideas based on other campaigns already out in the wild that we can play off of, alter or subvert to make something fresh. How do we communicate that to Gemini?
Prompting with a specific request
For our next prompt, let’s use the syntax suggested in our prompting guide: begin with a persona, state a specific task, provide context, and describe the preferred format for the answer. Here’s our more precise prompt for the same topic:
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Customer Marketing Strategy for a Cloud Computing Company: Brainstorming Themes and Content
Campaign Theme 1: The Cloud As Your Superpower
Target Audience: Businesses hesitant to migrate to the cloud due to perceived complexity or security concerns.
Tone: Upbeat, informative, and empowering.
Content Ideas:
Blog Series: "Cloud Computing for Dummies" - Break down complex cloud concepts into easy-to-understand language with real-world examples.
Infographic: "The Cloud Advantage" - Visually showcase the benefits of cloud computing such as scalability, cost-efficiency and improved security.
Campaign Theme 2: Unleash Your Business Potential with the Cloud
Target Audience: Businesses looking to scale their operations or optimize their current workflow.
Tone: Professional, results-oriented, and data-driven.
Content Ideas:
Customer Case Studies: Showcase how existing clients have leveraged the cloud to achieve specific business goals (e.g., increased sales, improved collaboration, reduced downtime).
Ebook: "The Cloud Migration Roadmap" - Provide a step-by-step guide for businesses considering cloud migration, including planning, implementation and best practices.
Campaign Theme 3: The Cloud: More Than Just Storage
Target Audience: Businesses already using cloud storage solutions but unaware of the full range of cloud computing services.
Tone: Informative, innovative, and forward-thinking.
Content Ideas:
Webinar Series: "Unlocking the Power of Cloud Services" - Explore advanced cloud-based solutions like AI, machine learning and data analytics to help businesses unlock new potential.
Interactive Quiz: "What Cloud Service is Right for You?" - A fun and engaging way to assess a business's specific needs and recommend relevant cloud solutions.
Important Topics to Cover Across All Campaigns:
Security: Address security concerns head-on by highlighting the robust security features and compliance certifications offered by your cloud platform.
Scalability: Emphasize the cloud's ability to adapt to changing business needs, allowing businesses to easily scale resources up or down as required.
By implementing these creative campaign themes and focusing on the key topics of security and scalability, you can develop a customer marketing strategy that resonates with different audience segments within the cloud computing industry. Remember to tailor the content to each specific theme and target audience for maximum impact.
That’s more like it!
There we go! Before we dive into the results, let’s break down what we did right in the prompting process.
Persona: “You're a creative director for a creative practice.”
By telling Gemini exactly who it’s supposed to be, we’re able to weed out the stuff we already know. It understands the level of depth we’re searching for because it understands what a “creative director” should already know, so it doesn’t have to explain the basics.
Task: “Brainstorm ideas for a marketing strategy…”
A specific task request produces narrowed responses. In our broad prompt, we asked it to “help me brainstorm.” From that, it produced questions that would be useful for brainstorming, but Gemini didn’t know we wanted specific ideas from it. Now, it can recognize that we want the ideas themselves, not just brainstorming tools.
Context: “...for a client in the cloud computing industry.”
Just like we have to tell Gemini who we are, we also have to tell it who we’re speaking to. Trying to brainstorm a campaign idea without an audience in mind is impossible which meant that our first prompt led to broad ideas.
Format: “Include a bulleted list of three potential campaign themes and two important topics to cover in the content.”
We’ve also given Gemini a structure for what we want the output to look like. Rather than dumping information on us or providing a laundry list of ideas, it drafted a concise list of three themes with supporting evidence. It also included two topics that, based on other content related to cloud computing, it felt were important.
What do we do now?
The reply to our second prompt is great but it’s still pretty high-level. This is where our own creative instincts can help shape and refine. Superhero campaigns are a bit overdone, and “unleashing business potential” doesn’t feel especially inspired, but “more than just storage” has interesting potential. Let’s try one last clarifying question to refine and iterate before our creative team gets to work:
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Absolutely, here are five niche cloud computing use cases that perfectly fit the theme "The Cloud: More Than Just Storage":
High-Performance Computing (HPC): Cloud computing provides access to powerful virtual machines and vast storage resources, making it ideal for complex scientific simulations, medical research and engineering design tasks that require significant computational power.
Media Rendering and Processing: Cloud resources can be leveraged for rendering high-definition video, 3D animation and other demanding creative tasks. This allows studios and production companies to scale their rendering infrastructure on-demand without the need for expensive in-house hardware.
Internet of Things (IoT) Data Management: The cloud provides a scalable and secure platform to collect, store and analyze data generated by a vast network of IoT devices. This data can be used for real-time monitoring, predictive maintenance and developing data-driven insights for various applications.
Game Development and Deployment: Cloud-based solutions enable game developers to build and deploy games without the need for expensive upfront investments in hardware. Cloud resources can also be used for game testing and distribution, reaching a wider audience globally.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML): Cloud platforms offer access to pre-trained AI models and powerful computing resources for developing and deploying custom AI and ML applications. This allows businesses of all sizes to leverage the power of AI for tasks like image recognition, natural language processing and data analysis, without the need for extensive in-house expertise.
These are just a few examples and the possibilities are constantly expanding as cloud computing technology evolves. By highlighting these niche use cases in your marketing campaign, you can effectively showcase the cloud's potential beyond just data storage, attracting businesses seeking innovative solutions for their specific needs.
Now for the human touch
After just a few questions, we have a few key ideas to catapult a potential campaign forward. With our client’s goal in mind, we have a pitch: improve awareness of niche, future-facing cloud computing applications to generate interest in their product beyond just cloud storage to reach new audiences.
From here, our writers refine the language and loglines as they dive more deeply into researching these specific use cases (and potentially discover more!). Our designers will reflect on the visual language we’d like to use to represent future-facing and niche technologies.
We can take the content ideas from the previous prompt and use our own knowledge of our target audience to map a full plan: build a blog series—each highlighting a use case and its relevant audience—aggregate the posts into an eBook with additional content, break that back down into a slide deck for a webinar, and follow up with customer case studies that highlight why our clients’ tools are the best option for others in their areas of expertise.
By collaborating with generative AI, we can accelerate our creative exercises to give us more time to focus on execution. If we want to harness the technology effectively, we have to understand how to craft productive prompts, but even then, quality, innovative work is innately human.
Our team recently worked with Bridgestone to launch a campaign combining the worlds of driving and art to highlight the company's ultra performance tires. Check out the video below to see how we've used AI in combination with human input to make art in an unexpected way.
