I recently led a full-day workshop at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum called “AI for B2B Content and Lead Generation” during which I shared dozens of AI methods and prompts for content marketing, SEO and lead generation,
Marketing Profs, as usual, wanted to max out the awesomeness levels, so they asked me to create a workbook. Rather than a typical workbook, we simply put all of the prompts together into one big guide.
During the session, I held that printed workbook in my hands and wondered out loud if it wasn’t the most valuable thing we’d ever made. It may be.
Today we are giving it to you. Content marketing has always been a contest of generosity. The brand that gives away the best tips, tricks and tools, wins the most loyalty, leads and love. In that spirit of generosity, here is our prompt library for B2B marketers.
There are 20 marketing prompts, grouped into the following categories:
AI for Research & Personas
AI for Content Marketing
AI for SEO
AI for Social Media
AI for Lead Generation
AI for GA4 Analysis
When the prompt requires more explanation, we’ve linked to the articles and videos that show the processes in detail. Ready? Scan through, copy your favs into your own docs, or build these into your marketing processes!
AI for Research & Personas
First we’ll use AI to get to know our audience better. What are the emotional triggers for our prospects? Where do they get information? Where are they spending time?
1. Persona generation using AI
First we’ll create a synthetic member of our target audience, which we can then use in other prompts. This prompt comes from our guide on creating AI marketing personas.
This is unnecessary if you have battle-tested ideal client profiles. You may already have documented personas. But if you don’t, this will give you a big head start. Just remember, whatever it gives you won’t be 100% correct. So tell the AI to make edits and improvements. When it’s polished up, save it by pasting it into a doc and save as a PDF. You’ll use it again in subsequent prompts below.
Note: to upload files to ChatGPT, you’ll need a ChatGPT Plus account, which currently costs $20/month.
Build me a persona of a [job title] at [industry/company size/geography] with [roles/skills/responsibility].
This person is looking for help with [challenge/problem/task] and is considering
List their hopes/dreams, fears/concerns, emotional triggers and decision criteria for hiring/contacting a potential partner/vendor/provider.
2. Audience research: Communities and PR opportunities
This method comes from our friend, Liza Adams, who uses AI for marketing strategy and research. Here she has AI generate a table showing where people within various verticals spend time and look for insights. This may give you ideas for PR, event marketing and community engagement.
For a [company type] in [industry] we are targeting the following verticals: [list target markets]
You are an expert [B2B industry] marketer who is deeply familiar with these target markets and the buyer persona for [industry] solutions, including where they tend to congregate.
We want to diversify how we reach this market and go beyond search and other digital marketing channels. We want to identify a variety of “watering holes” where these potential customers learn, engage and interact with each other, so we can target and build relationships with them.
Create a table with the categories of watering holes as rows, the verticals as columns and the specific watering holes as the cells. (e.g., the actual names of the communities, industry forums, events, groups, marketplaces, webinars, content platforms, partnerships, financial institutions, associations, etc.) Be as comprehensive as possible with the categories.
Think about this step by step. Do you have any questions for me?
AI for Content Marketing
There are many ways that generative AI can help with content strategy and content creation, of course. The following prompts came from our guide on AI Powered Content Strategy
3. Content marketing mission statement and email signup CTAs
This is an example of a prompt that includes a summary of best practices. It’s from our own structure for draft content mission statements: the audience, topics and benefit to the readers. It also takes the mission one step farther and adapts it into possible email signup calls to action.
A content marketing mission statement includes three elements: the target audience, the topics and the benefit to the reader. It should be concise and be adaptable as a call to action to subscribe to a newsletter.
You are an expert content strategist, skilled in creating content that attracts visitors and builds trust.
Craft a draft content mission statement for the persona based on their information needs. Create three examples of newsletter signup calls to action based on the mission statement.
[attach the persona]
Look closely at the draft signup CTAs. Compare them to your own. Did AI suggest an improvement? Is it more specific than your current CTA? Does yours have the three P’s?
4. Persona-based topic research
Brainstorming topics is the number one AI use case for content marketers (source). But AI makes terrible recommendations until you train it on the target persona. So use this prompt in the same thread where you created the persona or attach the persona doc.
You are an expert content strategist, skilled in selecting topics that build awareness and trust with a target audience.
What are the prioritized information needs of this persona?
What information and advice do they need to do their job well?
List them in terms of topics and themes for a content marketing program.
[attach the persona]
Scan through. Pick a topic that aligns with your content mission, value proposition or recent focus. Then use it in this next prompt:
Suggest 10 articles on the following topic. These articles will capture the interest of the persona and provide practical utility. Make them compelling and memorable.
[add topic from the previous response]
The results of this persona-driven 2-step process are 100x better than those short, single, lazy prompts that so many content marketers are still trying. You’ll eat their lunch with this approach.
5. Thought leadership research
Thought leadership (aka, strong opinion) is one of the two highly differentiated formats for content marketing that are future proof, even in the AI era. The other is original research.
Of course, AI can’t produce thought leadership itself because it has no opinions. AI doesn’t care about anything. But it can help you quickly find topics that you feel strongly about. These are the topics that trigger conversation and social engagement. They can also form deep connections on a personal level.
These prompts come from our guide on AI and Thought Leadership. Again, they require that you upload an accurate persona.
Topics that trigger conversation:
What are some relatively mundane, almost trivial topics that people in the persona’s industry have very strong opinions about?
What questions are people in the persona’s industry afraid to answer?
What false things do people in the persona’s industry believe to be true? And vice versa?
[attach the persona]
Content gaps across the industry:
What topics are super interesting to this persona, but unlikely to be covered by the industry blogs?
What are the most important topics in the persona’s industry that are the least likely to be covered by the popular blogs?
What counter narrative opinions in the persona’s industry are least likely to be discussed by bloggers and thought leaders?
Revealing deeper insights into the personas true emotions and perspectives:
What widely accepted best practices does this persona secretly question or reject?
What unpopular opinion does the persona hold about a trending topic in their field?
What common advice does this person think is actually harmful?
What counterintuitive approach to a common problem has this persona found to be surprisingly effective?
Discovering uncommon points of view:
What seemingly unrelated topic or field does the persona believe has crucial lessons for their industry?
What commonly held fear or concern does the persona think is overblown or misguided?
What prediction does this persona have that most people in their industry think is unlikely?
6. Outlines and content briefs
Rather than just asking AI write an article, start by having it write an outline. Then edit that outline, removing the boring sections, adding sections that fit with your examples and your perspectives.
You are an expert content strategist, skilled in crafting detailed, memorable articles that delight this persona.
Write an outline for an article on the following topic. When relevant, include and highlight sections that allow for the opportunity to cover counter-narratives and topics less frequently covered by other blogs.
[attach the persona, insert topic]
7. Generating first drafts
Personally, I don’t use AI to write. But if that’s your style, here’s the next prompt. It’s based on the revised outline from the previous prompt. The tone will be better if you provide it with examples of your past articles. If you use ChatGPT, you can create a custom GPT and give it lots of articles.
Write an article for the persona based on the following outline. Make the article concise but detailed, practical and memorable.
[optional and only relevant if you have provided training data] Use the voice, tone, style and formatting patterns found in your knowledge sources. Include 2-3 short bullet lists in the article. Keep paragraphs short. Use 1-2 single sentence paragraphs that are impactful soundbites.
[insert outline]
AI for SEO
Search is still a major source of traffic, even if clickthrough rates are down. AI is actually an opportunity for SEOs. The following AI methods will improve the visibility of your URLs in search engines. Start with your service pages and then move up the funnel to the blog articles.
These prompts come from our guide on AI for SEO.
8. SEO edits for semantically related keyphrases
SEO is about more than using the primary keyphrase in the title, header and body. The most relevant page for any query incorporates the semantically related phrases. For years, SEOs use tools to discover and work in these subtopics and answers. But today, AI is a fast alternative.
You are a semantic SEO expert, skilled at selecting keyphrases that are semantically related to a primary target keyphrase. Suggest 10 phrases that are adjacent to the following keyphrase:
[enter keyphrase]
Expand the list by adding 10 phrases that go deeper into the related subtopics with a bit more semantic distance between them.
Now add the following keyphrases to the list: [add striking distance keyphrases, competitor keyphrases or other phrases you’ve spotted through research]
Show the full list.
Now that you have a list of the semantically related phrases, AI can help you take the next step and suggest copy edits to include those phrases.
Search optimized pages are focused on a specific topic/keyphrase, but they also incorporate the closely related subtopics/semantically related keyphrases.
You are an expert SEO copywriter, skilled at making copy edits that improve the search rankings of webpages by incorporating keyphrases and indicating relevance. I’m giving you the text from the webpage. Suggest 10 copy edits to 10 sentences on this page that would incorporate phrases from this list. Make suggestions that would improve the flow and clarity for the persona, as well as keyphrase relevance.
Highlight the keyphrases in the suggestions.
[attach the persona, paste in the copy or link to the webpage]
9. SEO edits from Google Search Console performance data
Better than having AI recommend semantically related phrases, you can pull them right out of Google Search Console, which shows all of the phrases for which each of your URLs rank.
You are an expert SEO, highly proficient at keyphrase analysis.
I’m giving you Google Search Console data showing the search performance of a single URL.
Merge the rows with very similar queries into single rows with a single, representative marketing keyphrase.
Provide link to download.
Anytime you ask AI to edit a spreadsheet, ask it to “provide a link to download” so you can check it. Sometimes, AI removes most of the data!
Here is the webpage for the data you’ve analyzed. Evaluate this content’s keyphrase usage and frequency for the keyphrases in the dataset.
[paste in webpage text]
And again, AI can suggest edits based on the list of phrases.
You are an SEO copywriter, skilled in improving the relevance of pages through semantic SEO.
Suggest edits to this page that would help it rank higher by better indicating its relevance for the keyphrases in the dataset.
Focus on recommendations for including the phrases that are not used on the page do appear in the dataset.
Make suggestions that improve the flow and clarity of the content, as well as the keyphrase relevance.
Highlight the recommended changes.
[paste in or link to the webpage]
AI for Social Media
These prompts are from our guide on AI for Social Media. These methods will help drive engagement in social streams.
10. Analysis of social media data
AI can analyze social media performance data. First, export social media analytics from any platform or tool, then make sure the file is easy for the AI to ingest. The CSV file should be nicely organized and the data should be clean. Spend some time enhancing the data by adding a column for “topics” and categorizing your top posts.
You are a social media marketing data analyst, skilled at finding insights using data about social media post performance.
I’m giving you data showing the performance of top social media posts posted to a social media marketing account over [time span].
Which topics get the most follower growth per post, per engagement and per impression?
[upload CSV report from social media analytics, with posts categorized by topic]
Draw a heatmap matrix showing the normalized average impressions, average engagements, average number of comments, average number of reposts and average number of followers from each category.
The AI will generate a visual showing the performance of various topics on social media across metrics and outcomes. Use the insights to inform your social media strategy.
11. Creating a social media style guide
If the CSV you uploaded includes your top social media posts, you can now ask AI to generate a new social media style guide based on the performance of those posts. It’s based on what works for your content and your audience.
Create a prompt that can work as a style guide that can be given to ChatGPT so the AI can effectively write future posts in this same voice, tone and style.
12. Finding compelling soundbites in long-form content
You want to share that big guide, or that 40 minute podcast, or that one video. But how to write social posts that grab attention? What’s the best quote or statistic to share? Let AI find that nugget for you, then use it in social promotion.
Which statements in this content is the audience most likely to be surprised by?Which sound bites would make the best video clips for social media?
[podcast or video transcript, guide, etc.]
13. Audit social media ads
This one was actually a proof of concept and part of our guide for writing auditing prompts. It’s an example of a framework for auditing any marketing asset.
The idea was that AI can be used to audit anything. We’ve never done any paid marketing, so we have no experience crafting social ads. In this absence of skill, AI can help.
You are a paid social media strategist, skilled at crafting ads that drive clicks and conversions. The most effective LinkedIn ads share several common traits:
1. The message is tailored for the target audience and speaks directly to their pain points, using language that resonates and highlights benefits.
2. The headlines are clear and direct, indicating why they should care.
3. The visuals are impactful, uncluttered and have minimal text.
4. The CTA text in the button aligns well with the offer
5. The ad indicates urgency, scarcity, exclusivity when relevant
6. The ad leverages evidence to boost credibility such as testimonials or data when possible
I’m giving you a LinkedIn ad and target persona. Rate the extent to which the ad does or does not align with the best practices above. Recommend changes that would make this ad more effective.
[attach screenshot of the ad]
Here’s a second marketing asset for comparison. Create a color coded heatmap matrix scoring each against the best practices and alignment with the psychology of the persona.
AI for Lead Generation
Finally, we’ll use AI to improve lead flow. These prompts are from our guide on AI for Website Audits. They help you to see your key pages from the perspective of your buyer, then make recommendations.
14. Audit service pages: Answer questions and address objections
This is possibly the most powerful prompt in the library. It puts the focus on the most important page (your service page) for your most important visitor (the potential prospect). It’s based on our best practices for B2B service pages, which itself is based on decades of experience building lead generation websites.
You’ll need to upload a full-page screenshot of the page, which you can capture using a browser plugin, such as the Go Full Page Chrome Extension. And of course, it needs a persona.
You are a conversion optimization expert, skilled in evaluating pages for their ability to both inform and persuade. The most compelling, highest converting web pages share common traits. The following are best practices for B2B service pages.
The header clearly indicates the topic of the page, quickly letting the visitor know they’re in the right place.
The copy clearly answers the visitor’s questions and addresses their objections
The order of the messages generally aligns with the visitor’s prioritized information needs.
The copy uses supportive evidence to support its marketing claims (testimonials, statistics, case studies, awards, logos, etc.)
Subheads for each section are meaningful and specific
The page connects with the visitor on a personal level using human elements (faces, quotes, stories)
The copy leverages cognitive biases in subtle ways when relevant (loss aversion, urgency, etc.)
The page provides compelling calls to action
I’m giving you a web page. Create a list showing the ways in which the page copy does and does not meet the information needs of the persona.
Suggest changes that would make the page more helpful and compelling to the visitor based on the persona above. Highlight the changes in the recommendations.
[attach a full page screenshot of a page, attach the persona]
Scan through the recommendations. Anything you missed? Any important questions you left unanswered? Any objections you failed to address? Any assertions you didn’t support with evidence?
It’s fascinating to see your key page from the perspective of your audience, even if that audience member is synthetic.
15. Audit service pages: adding supportive evidence
One of the best practices in the above prompt deserves a prompt of its own. This AI prompt audits any page from one very specific perspective: did the page use supportive evidence (testimonials, statistics, etc.) to support its claims? This prompt is based on our guide for adding social proof to webpages.
As above, upload the persona and a full page screenshot of a key service page.
You are a conversion optimization expert, skilled at using evidence to support marketing messages. The following are types of evidence that can be added to webpages: testimonials, reviews, case studies, success stories, data and statistics, years in business, number of happy clients, client logos, awards, association memberships, etc.
The attached image is a screenshot of a webpage. Rate the extent to which the page does and does not use supportive evidence. Which marketing claims are unsupported? Show your thinking.
[attach a full page screenshot of a page in the persona chat, or attach the persona]
Count the number of unsupported marketing claims made on the page
16. Competitive analysis based on web copy
If you give the AI the full-page screenshots of two homepages, yours and a competitor’s, it will compare the copy and show how the two brands are positioned in the market.
I’m giving you a persona and two web pages.
You are a conversion optimization expert, skilled in competitive analysis and converting visitors into leads through persuasive and clear copywriting.
How well do these pages align and not align with the persona’s information needs?
[attach two full page screenshots, one of your homepage and one of a competitor’s homepage. Attach the persona]
Next, you can ask it to make a color coded heat map matrix to show the differences.
You are a digital strategist and expert at competitive analysis and conversion optimization.
Create a heatmap matrix table using color to show the degree to which these pages satisfy the information needs and persuade the persona. Make the far left column a prioritized list of the persona’s information needs.
Here I’ve given the AI my site and the website of three competitors. The heat map shows alignment (and misalignment) with the persona’s information needs.
AI for GA4
If you don’t have a full time Data Scientist on staff, you can use AI to do basic analysis on reports. These reports may come from any of your marketing tools, so get excited next time you see an “Export” button. Here we’ll focus on GA4.
These methods were covered in our webinar about using AI to analyze GA4 data.
17. GA4 analysis for content gaps
This is a simple method that requires nothing more than an export of your “Pages” report. Use the dropdown menu above the first column to set the primary dimension to “Page title.” Export the report as a CSV file, open it, delete the first nine rows (they are simply comments added by GA4) and upload to ChatGPT with the following prompt.
You are a content strategist, skilled at using Analytics data to identify gaps in a content strategy.
I’m giving you a GA4 report showing the title tag of every article on a blog.
Infer topics from these title tags, then perform a semantic distance analysis of these topics.
Identify 10 topics for articles that do not appear in the dataset, but align well with the content here.
[attach GA4 report]
The AI will tell you which articles you’ve almost written, but never written. If you write any of these, you should have a ton of opportunities to connect the new content through internal links.
18. GA4 analysis for topic-channel alignment
If you export a GA4 report that shows the performance of your content across channels, and upload that report to AI, you can ask AI to analyze what content worked well in which channel …and then make recommendations.
As above, use the “Pages” report with the first column set to “Page title” in the dropdown. But this time, add a second column (by clicking the blue + plus sign) for “Session source / medium.” You can add a filter to show just your blog posts. Set a nice long date range. The report will look something like this.
Again, export to CSV and clean up the file, removing the rows with very few sessions. Upload it along with the following prompt:
I’m giving you an expert from GA4 showing content performance of a blog. This report shows title tags, traffic sources and engagement metrics.
Remove the brand name from all of the title tags.
Remove rows with non-English title tags.
Remove rows with fewer than 50 sessions.
Provide link to download
[attach GA4 report]
You are an expert content strategist, skilled at doing analysis on GA4 data to find insights that inform content marketing strategy.
I’m giving you an expert from GA4 showing blog performance. Infer topics from the title tags of the articles. Analyze the performance of topics across traffic sources and make data-driven content strategy recommendations that will drive greater traffic and engagement to this blog. Show your thinking.
[attach GA4 report]
Recommend 5 new articles based on the data in this dataset.For each, create two draft headlines, a short summary and a few suggestions on how to promote them in which traffic channels.
19. GA4 analysis for top-converting articles
Which of your articles grows your email list the fastest?
Which topics are so compelling to your visitors that they give you their email address?
AI can tell you.
But you have to give it two reports. One that shows the traffic to your articles and the other that shows the number of times each article sent visitors to your newsletter signup thank you page. You can find instructions for exporting those reports here (jump to minute 43 of the video). Remind me later and I’ll write out the process in an article.
Once you have the reports, upload them to ChatGPT with a simple prompt that merges them…
I’m giving you two GA4 reports.
One shows traffic to blog posts.
The other shows the conversion from those same blog posts.
Merge these into a single spreadsheet, joining the data as you would with a VLOOKUP.
Provide link to download.
[attach the two GA4 reports]
…then ask the AI to create a bar chart showing which articles drive email list growth!
Create a bar chart showing the conversion rates for the top 20 blog posts.
You might be surprised by the report. Some articles are great at growing your list. Others, not so much. What to do with your high converting URLs? Do everything possible to promote them.
20. Discovering when do your visitors convert into leads?
Although you won’t need to do this analysis often, it’s useful to see the times-of-day and days-of-week when your visitors take action. These prompts come from our guide on lead timing analysis. You’ll find the step-by-step instructions for exporting the GA4 report there.
I’m giving you a CSV file showing the date and time of conversions on a B2B lead generation website.
Perform an analysis of conversions by day of week. Visualize on a bar chart.
Perform an analysis of conversions by time of day. Visualize on a bar chart.
Create a single heatmap matrix showing conversions by both time of day and day of week.
The report will look something like this. You can actually create this for any type of conversion (lead gen, email signup, apply) or really any event tracked in GA4 (video views, phone calls, downloads, logins).
The insights may guide decisions about campaign timing, paid channel optimization and reducing response times for new leads. Of course, AI can also make recommendations. Here’s the follow up prompt:
You are a B2B lead generation strategist, skilled at using interesting types of analysis to discover new opportunities to improve the flow of qualified leads.
Make five recommendations for better B2B lead generation based on this data.
The things you’ve always done, done better
Most of these prompts are for marketing methods we’ve done for years.
Now with AI, we can do them more thoroughly. AI is a faster way to double check our own thinking for these marketing methods we’ve always done. It’s another point of view that we add to our own expertise, to push results ever higher.
And we can transfer skills to you, the reader, very efficiently. You don’t need 15 years of content strategy experience or 20 years of experience building lead generation websites to get some of that expert perspective.
So in marketing, there are two main uses for AI:
Make those with lower skillsfor a given task more expert.
Make those with expert skills for a given task even better.
It’s why they call AI a skills leveler.
Now you have most of our AI prompt library. Feel free to move these AI prompts into shared documents that can be used by anyone on your team. I’ve added a screenshot of our prompt library below.
Better yet, take a close look at your marketing processes, training docs and SOPs (standard operating procedures) and see where these may fit it.
Use your marketing powers to do good in the world!