Should I use Google Bard AI For Marketing?

With so many new generative AI tools coming out over the last year, many marketers are trying to find ways to streamline their marketing campaigns and content creation. While AI can be a great addition to your marketing efforts, it’s not quite ready to take any digital marketing jobs yet.

What is an AI Chatbot?

Chatbots use artificial intelligence and natural language processing to try to understand questions and generate answers to those questions. They rely heavily on machine learning and their large language models to try to understand the questions they are asked. Their algorithms are always changing since they are always learning.

Historically, a chatbot’s functionality was to be a high-quality, interactive FAQ generator. However, with recent advancements in AI technology,  conversational AI is now more centered around providing real-time answers to questions asked by its users.

What Google Says About How to Use Bard AI

Even Google itself says that Bard should only be used for research, content ideas, and drafts. They don’t suggest that you use it for your final content since it is still in the early stages of development. While Bard is not a search engine (Google Search, Bing, Yahoo, etc.) replacement, product lead Jack Krawczyk says, “The magic we’re finding in using the product is really around being this creative companion to helping you be the sparkplug for imagination, explore your curiosity, etc.” (CNBC 2023).

Bard AI runs off of a lightweight version of LaMDA and is still in its experimental phase. This means that Bard’s responses may still require fact-checking. This means that while it can still be used as a content marketing tool, Google’s AI isn’t ready to create polished work for you. Especially since Bard, and most other AI tools, do not generate content that is optimized for SEO.

Is Google Bard AI Better than Open AI’s ChatGPT?

We’ve tried both Google Bard AI and Open AI’s ChatGPT with drastically different results from both platforms. In both use cases, we’ve seen how it’s possible these tools could be used as part of a marketing strategy, and are great for brainstorming, but neither is completely capable of leveraging content that will guarantee marketing results.

We conducted a few tests to see what these platforms were truly capable of. The results in our datasets were widely varied (and equally hilarious).

For our first test, we asked both Bard and ChatGPT: “What is the longest 5 letter word in the English language?” The question itself was purposefully confusing to see if the chatbots would understand what we were trying to say. We also wanted to see what the initiatives of each program were.

ChatGPT hilariously gave us the word “queue” as a result since it technically is the longest 5 letter word in the English language, meaning “to wait in line”.

Our results with Bard, however, were slightly concerning since it told us that “squeezed” is the longest 5 letter word in the English language. Which is actually 7 letters.

Our next test was to see how well these tools would work in our real-world work scenarios, instead of us just messing around. We asked each automation to generate a social media post for us. The prompt we gave was to “generate a social media post for a digital marketing company called WorldLight Media.”

ChatGPT gave us a detailed post for our company complete with the use of emojis throughout the post. We could have easily copied and pasted the post straight into our social media scheduler.

Bard generated a slightly different post, and although it was fairly detailed, still required some extra editing. Something that Bard did differently, and possibly even better than ChatGPT, is that it gave us clear calls-to-action to include in the post as well as additional ideas for other social media posts. It even gave us information on who the target audience for the post was, and the purpose the call-to-action would serve.

While we can definitely see how these programs could be useful for idea generation, neither one of them are good enough to use on their own. They're great tools to use to help you say something in a new way, brainstorm, or even help with writer's block. 

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At WorldLight Media, we are marketing experts, certified HubSpot Gold Partners, and can help take your business to the next level. We solve marketing, sales, and technology problems for companies so they can grow. Contact us and we’ll help you with all of your digital marketing needs.