There’s a Chatbot for That: 6 Ways to Use ChatGPT for School Marketing

Does ChatGPT belong in K-12? Here’s how you can use it for your enrollment marketing and school communication efforts.

If you’ve talked to a teacher recently, you may have heard about the challenges (or maybe even the opportunities) the new artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT is presenting in the classroom.

This free AI chat tool can do a lot. From writing a five-paragraph essay on the central themes of Great Expectations to calculating how many golf balls would fit in an average school bus (21.4 billion, in case you wanted to know), ChatGPT is a game-changer for the world of education.

But not only is ChatGPT changing what happens in the classroom — it can also help your school-based marketing in some REALLY interesting ways!

I’m sure there are more, but here are six ways you can use ChatGPT in school enrollment marketing:

1. Building Customer Personas
2. Writing Blog Posts
3. Writing Your School’s Value Proposition
4. Writing Social Media Posts
5. Writing a Press Release
6. Building Your School’s Marketing Plan

Note: In all of these examples, I used actual schools we’ve worked with. I blurred out their names to protect their anonymity. I also didn’t want to out them to their school for using ChatGPT in case their school community isn’t quite ready to embrace this new and innovative technology!

1. Using ChatGPT to Create Customer Personas for Your School

A customer persona, or a fictional representation of who your prospective parents are, is a useful marketing tool. Creating personas will help drive your marketing efforts and get you in the mindset of what a prospective parent is looking for in a school.

But how do you do that?

Of course, the best way to get insight into your prospective parents’ beliefs, desires, and decision drivers is to do some “voice of the customer” (VOC) research and interviews, but let’s be honest — you need information. And you need it yesterday.

So while your VOC project is a great long-term project, ChatGPT can help you fill in the gaps by getting you started on what a customer persona might look like for your school — and it can do so in less than two minutes!

Just ask ChatGPT to create a customer persona for your school and see what happens.

Here’s what happened when I asked ChatGPT to create a customer persona for a small elementary school in Gilbert, Arizona:

2. Using ChatGPT to Write Blog Posts for Your School

It’s HARD to get started with creative writing. As someone who is currently writing this blog post, I can attest to the challenges of staring at a blank piece of paper and waiting for inspiration to strike.

The “getting started” piece of content writing can be the most time-consuming and frustrating part of the entire process. So stop staring at the blinking cursor of your empty Google doc titled Blog Post and use ChatGPT to speed up the process!

You can ask ChatGPT to write a school blog post on just about anything. And while it likely won’t be perfect, it can be a great place to start from. It’s much easier to make changes to an already-existing draft than start from scratch.

In fact, you can use ChatGPT to start your process, and by the time you’re done editing for content and tone, you’ve got a totally different blog post than you started with.

So stop staring at the screen and waiting for inspiration to strike — use ChatGPT to give you the creative kick-start you need!

3. Using ChatGPT to Write School Value Propositions

Along the same lines as blog posts, writing a good value proposition for your school can be really difficult. It’s even harder when you work in the school every day and see all of the amazing things happening.

How could you ever distill that experience down into a few sentences?

As I mentioned earlier, changing something okay into something great is much easier than creating something great from nothing — which is where ChatGPT comes in.

Ask ChatGPT to create a catchy value proposition for your school, then take it from there!

Keep in mind that if you don’t feel like the first response from ChatGPT gave you what you were hoping for, you can always hit the regenerate response button.

Now that you have something to work from, make it your own!

Make sure you have a catchy hook that draws people in, tells them why they should consider your school, and gives them a window into what your school does really well.

I review a lot of school websites and value propositions, and let me tell you — this is stronger than many I’ve seen.

4. Using ChatGPT to Write School Social Media Posts

If your experience in student recruitment and marketing is like mine, you spend a LOT of time doing “other duties as assigned.” While varying up your day-to-day can be exciting, it can sometimes leave you without the time you need to do your ACTUAL job!

That’s where ChatGPT can come in.

Give the chatbot enough information to write an accurate social media post, and in no time, you’ll have something ready to go — hashtags and all.

The 20 minutes you’d spend creating a post from scratch is down to the five minutes needed to edit and paste it into your social media account!

And while we’re on the subject of making posting easy, if you are still posting social media posts directly to Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, look into a social media tool like Buffer or (my favorite) Hootsuite.

You’ll save even more time by using technology even MORE effectively.

5. Using ChatGPT to Write Press Releases

Whether you have a communication team or not, ChatGPT can make it easy to get information about the amazing things happening at your school out to the media. 

Once you know what topic you want to get coverage on, head to ChatGPT with the relevant details and ask for a press release. Once you get the release edited, throw it on some letterhead and send it to your local education reporters.

Not sure who the education reporters in your area are? I thought you might say that!

ChatGPT can handle that for you too. Just ask for a list of the local education reporters in your area and get ready to get some press!

6. Building a School Marketing Plan with ChatGPT

If you’re a brand new school or you’re a new marketer just starting in your role, a basic marketing plan can really help you stay focused, prioritized, and confident in your role.

But creating a brand new marketing plan from scratch isn’t easy to do:

• Where do you start?
• What do you include?
• What is the top priority and what can you tackle in a few months?
• What should your budget be?

Instead of starting from scratch, ask ChatGPT for some assistance. Ask for a marketing plan for your school, and voila!

You’re no longer starting from a blank page. Instead, you’ve got a semi-custom marketing plan in one minute or less. All you need to do is make the final adjustments and you’re ready to join the marketing pros! 

So What Does This Mean for You?

While teachers are deciding how to embrace this new tool in their classrooms, school marketers should start to identify how ChatGPT and other AI tools might provide new opportunities for them as well.

Now, I’m just guessing, but you’re probably thinking something like…

Charli…you just told me that ChatGPT can pretty much do most of my job! Should I be worried? 

Well, I asked ChatGPT that question, and it said…

“Chatbots and language models can perform routine tasks more efficiently and accurately than humans, but they lack the creative thinking and strategic decision-making skills that are essential for successful marketing.”

In all seriousness, it’s a tool — an awesome tool, but still just a tool in the toolbox. And like any tool, ChatGPT has uses and limitations.

So don’t worry, ChatGPT isn’t going to be replacing school marketers any time soon, and knowing how to use this tool efficiently and effectively will make you a BETTER marketer!

After all, by using it, you’re freeing up more resources, more time, and more creativity to devote to the things that AI can’t do.

So How Do I Suggest Using ChatGPT in School Marketing? Simple!

Do you need something quick, easy, and pretty good?

Great. ChatGPT will help you get there!

Do you need something impressive and incredible?

Since you’ve freed up some time by using ChatGPT on the easy stuff, you’ve got time to create something truly amazing and unique — no AI required.

What other ways are you using ChatGPT at your school? Let us know!