The coaches guide to ChatGPT makes clear how and why AI is so important for coaches.
However, it doesn’t really look at why so many coaches are using AI ineffectively when producing content.
They will type in prompts like:
Write me a blog post on stress management and make it great.
Or the rather slightly better:
Write me a blog post on stress management, and explain why breath work is important and the differences between stress and eustress. Also, include a section on using meditation to lower stress levels.
The second attempt looks reasonable, and you may well get a reasonable response from it.
But reasonable is no longer good enough if you want to get coaching clients.
Your content needs to be excellent if it’s to stand out and position you as an expert in the crowded coaching marketplace.
The problem with AI is that all it can do is take information it already has or can find on the internet and re-present it to you.
Imagine you have just hired a VA to help you with your social media marketing.
Would you tell them, ‘Go and market me‘?
No, of course not.
Would you even say, ‘I’d like you to dive into my Facebook group and make it more engaging’?
Hopefully not.
You would give specific detailed instructions which help them understand exactly what it is you need and what you expect from them.
That’s what you need to do with ChatGPT, and that is what very few coaches are doing.
Note: Even though I’m referring to ChatGPT, this also applies to Claude and Bard,
It’s why you can so often spot AI-created content.
Counterintuitively, it’s also why so many people (including software developed to perform the task) cannot spot AI-generated content when it is done well.
Because they presume it can’t be AI because it’s too natural.
There’s a well-known acronym in computer science circles, GIGO (garbage in, garbage out)
This means that if you feed poor data or instructions into a computer, you will get poor results.
It’s slightly different with AI because poor instructions (prompts) can still give you mediocre results.
But they will never give you good, never mind great results.
To get those, you need to treat AI as a VA and do as much as you can to remove any ambiguity or uncertainty in what it is you want.
And this is where the acronym of CRAFT comes in, something I heard during an episode one of my favourite podcasts, Marketing Against the Grain.
How coaches can use ChatGPT more effectively using the CRAFT model
Context
Give the chatbot as much background as you can.
For me, this usually means I will give it a blog post or two of mine. Ones that I like and are relevant and have had good feedback from my ideal clients.
I will also make sure it knows that I help coaches looking to get more paying clients.
Role
Who do you want it to be?
This may be as simple as yourself, in which case it can gather enough information from the context element.
However, rarely do I assign it the role of being me because I could then just do it myself.
Rather, I may tell it I want it to be the brilliant advertiser and direct response marketer David Ogilvy. Or brilliant copywriter, Joseph Sugarman.
Both of those two are very dead, but ChatGPT can access a huge body of their work from when they were alive to base its response on.
Just the other day I told ChatGPT it was a world-leading Indian chef teaching their young assistant (me) how to prepare their award-winning fantastic fish curry.
It gave me an idiot’s guide to a fish curry that didn’t taste at all like an idiot had made it. Or me for that matter.
Remember, ChatGPT has decades of data to draw from, so unless you ask it to pretend it’s Bob, the greengrocer from up the road who is always over-charging for his cabbages, you’ll probably be good to go.
Presuming that you are creating content for yourself and your audience, tell it what it is you do
Actions
Tell it what you’re doing and what you want it to do.
It could be a blog post, a course you’re designing, a lead magnet or a launch sequence of emails for new subscribers.
The more granular you get with it, the better the results you’ll get.
Format
This is similar to context, but it literally means who you want it to write for you.
I have a tendency to drop the F-bomb on occasion, and that may be needed in longer posts if it’s to sound authentic.
Similarly, I make sure I don’t have paragraphs that are more than a sentence or maybe two long so my posts are easy to scan.
I also write very informally and with humour, so it needs to know that – it is still pretty shit at humour though.
If you like to use emojis, tables or images, tell it!
Target
This is where you tell ChatGPT who the intended consumer of whatever it is you’re asking for is.
This should be information lifted directly from your client avatar.
If you have never done any client avatar work, fear not. Just click here and sign up for my Pro List newsletter, and you will get my client avatar workbook FREE of charge.
I would tell it that I help English-speaking struggling coaches get more paying clients. Of course I could add more detail than that if it were, say, copy for a sales page, but that is sufficient for a blog post..
For you, you want to tell it what your coaching niche is and who it is you serve.
And there you have it, CRAFT, a simple and easy to remember way to nail your use of AI!
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