How Are Tourism Copywriters Using ChatGPT?

By now, you’ve probably played around with ChatGPT or dove headfirst into writing tour descriptions and landing pages for your tour, activity, or attraction business. But as AI technology has evolved rapidly with integrations and AI tools, it is becoming useful for more than improving copywriting. But what is the tourism copywriter’s perspective on ChatGPT (and other AI tools)? Are they using them, and if so, what do they think of the writing capabilities? What do they know that can help you get good results every time?

In this post, you’ll discover:

• Are Tourism Copywriters using AI Tools like ChatGPT for Writing Copy? 
• Here’s What We’ve Learned About Chat GPT For Copywriting 

1. The Instant Benefits  
2. “Well, Chat GPT Says This…….” so… 
3. The Best, Most Persuasive Copy Moves People Emotionally- AI Is Rational.
4. AI Tools Won’t Help Your Writing If You Don’t Know Your Customer
5. Use Copywriting Frameworks to Improve AI Copywriting 
6. Writing AI Prompts Is Like Writing A Good Marketing Brief 
7. Trust ChatGPT As Much As You Trust Social Media

Are Tourism Copywriters Using AI Tools Like ChatGPT for Copywriting?

Yes, absolutely! Our team at Blend has been experimenting with different features of ChatGPT and other AI tools for several months now. Although there are some drawbacks, we see the value in using these tools. Nobody, including me, can ignore the technology that could be the next big thing since the Internet, even if it’s on the verge of completely transforming the writing profession.

Here’s What We’ve Learned About Chat GPT For Copywriting 

1. The Instant Benefits  

AI allows copywriters with the most taxing and least satisfying part of copywriting—just getting started. In mere seconds, AI tools eliminate the frustration of staring at a blank screen with a blinking cursor and provide an initial, unedited draft in seconds. This helps to establish momentum and flow when starting any writing project! Even if you don’t write copy full-time, it’s safe to assume that getting those first few sentences or paragraphs written can sometimes be difficult, and it may discourage you from writing altogether. Do you agree?

If there is a tool out there to improve productivity and idea generation, ChatGPT fits the bill. AI tools help complete tasks faster and come up with ideas quickly, allowing you to use your time to plan more challenging writing projects and content strategies and review customer data.  This revolution is probably similar to how graphic designers felt when Canva became the design tool for the masses. Today designers can now spend less time creating social media post images and focus on more strategic and complicated design jobs. (And, like with ChatGPT, Canva outputs often benefit from a professional’s editing touch.)

2. “Well, Chat GPT Says This…….” Then It Must Be Good Copy, Right? 

I hear this comment at least once a day. Someone will send me their opinion on some copy and they respond with,” According to ChatGPT, ……”

My response about 80% of the time is… “This isn’t good copy at all.”

The typical AI prompts (what you tell AI to do) lead to very generic copy that is not relevant to your target audience. It is copy that is too rational, often sounds robotic, and does not follow good copywriting principles that have persuaded customers to take action since the early days of marketing. Sometimes, sentences are strangely constructed. ChatGPT definitely doesn’t know what copy will make your brand stand out from the competition. However, when you create better prompts, you get better quality, helping AI work to your advantage.

Let’s break this down with some specifics: 

3. The Best, Most Persuasive Copy Moves People Emotionally. AI Is Too Rational.

Some of the most powerful copy available comes directly from the mouths of your customers. By analyzing the words and phrases they use to describe their experiences with your company, you can find ‘sticky’ copy. What they say and how they say it—is what we call the voice of customer data, and it’s what can make your copy ‘sticky.’ 

Sticky copy is phrases, comments, and words born from your guests’ moments of highest tension or their moments of highest pleasure (before or after a tour). It’s those real-life moments where a guest tells you what they saw and how they felt. They visualize these emotions and tell you their thoughts in a survey, verbal comment, or review. 

Not all voice of customer data is golden. It’s those memorable words that you won’t hear from ChatGPT as it scours the internet (although ChatGPT can come up with some interesting ideas, which we’ll explore later).

Example of Voice of Customer Data from reviews:

Here’s what I mean by sticky copy using an example from a customer review:  

Customer review response 1

“Our family loved the zipline tour. It was so much fun; we’ll be back again!”

Congratulations, you landed a good 5-star review, but these aren’t words that you can use in your copy to move or persuade other guests. They are pretty standard. 

Customer review response 2

“This zipline tour made me feel like a kid again, swinging from line to line like Tarzan, without a care in the world.”  I’ve got the confidence of Indiana Jones on his next adventure without fear and with complete confidence. I feel so exhilarated!”

You won’t get reviews like this every day, and not every guest is this articulate; however, snippets of phrases like “feel like a kid again”  “Swing from line to line like Tarzan”, “without a care in the world”, and “got the confidence of Indiana Jones” are definitely unique, memorable, and bring in thoughts that anyone can visualize. Imagine how these phrases could translate to a tour description to create some verbally stimulating copy.

How Chat GPT and AI tools measure up  

AI today is a rational black box scouring the Internet based on the prompts you provide. 

• It doesn’t prioritize sticky copy or the voice of customer language. 
• It doesn’t know what your specific target customer will say and how they will say it. 
• It won’t create a big, new creative idea.

Humans have to drive (and pilot) these initiatives first. 

You will need to know how to use the voice of customer data from your guests and how to feed AI prompts to get to that sticky and emotional language. Without good prompts, your copy will convey emotion with way too many exclamation marks (literal or figurative), which ends up sounding and reading fake and out of touch with reality. However, when you prompt these tools well, the “storytelling” aspects of the response can be really interesting. If you use your customer data in combination with AI to craft an interesting message, your copy will stand out.

4. AI Tools Won’t Help Your Writing If You Don’t Know Your Customer

Do you remember planning for your last vacation and coming across an ad, email, or landing page that felt like it was speaking directly to you? It was as if they knew who you were and exactly what you were looking for. That’s relevance. Aim to be relevant to the people that matter the most—your target audience. 

The Rule of One 

Write for one customer, the kind of person that represents 80% of your ideal customers. This is the guest you want more of, someone who loves your product. Creating a customer persona (a document that outlines the needs, habits, problems, feelings, and emotions of your ideal customer), can help you write relevant copy and effective marketing. 

How Chat GPT and AI tools measure up

AI will never truly understand what’s going on in the heart and mind of your customer. With basic prompts, your copy will be written for a general audience. However, with improved prompts or by using AI tools that allow you to incorporate customer persona information, you can create more personalized copy that speaks directly to your reader, as long as you’ve put in the research and uncovered insights to truly understand who they are. In my opinion, manual editing is still necessary to achieve the best results, but you’ll certainly produce better copy than you did before. 

Additionally, questions that begin with “why” often elicit the most profound and emotional responses. For example, why did you decide to book with us today? ChatGPT is unable to answer these types of questions as effectively as human customers can, so it’s valuable to integrate customer data when using AI, rather than relying solely on the AI to generate customer-relevant copy.

5. Use Copywriting Frameworks to Improve AI Copywriting 

Copywriters use proven frameworks to write copy that reaches prospective customers and persuades them to take action. These frameworks help copywriters address key content while writing and have been used since the beginning of marketing. One of the most common copywriting frameworks is:  

PAS – Problem, Agitation, Solution 

This framework helps writers (and marketers) reach customers by speaking to their pain points— what frustrates, scares, or excites them to seek out a solution. A solution is what your tour, activity, or attraction can do to best solve that problem and ultimately buy. 

How Chat GPT and AI tools measure up

Many of the new AI tools have templates specific to copywriting frameworks to achieve more relevant and persuasive copy. You can develop prompts in ChatGPT to address questions based on these frameworks. However, ChatGPT will write you a whole novel if you let it, so you need to become a really good editor and prompt it to write shorter, snappier copy.

6. Writing AI Prompts Is Like Writing A Good Marketing Brief 

An essential and longstanding marketing tool is the marketing brief which serves as the go-to document for sharing essential information with a marketing agency working on a project. It’s comprised of target audience information, product description, relevant research and information, key phrases, tone of voice, and even keywords. The brief acts as a master guide that can make or break the quality of the work you receive from an agency and a copywriter. 

Similarly, AI prompts require a solid background to deliver better prompts for better copy outputs.

How Chat GPT and AI tools measure up

“Feeding the AI” is crucial to achieving better quality outputs. 

To achieve this,  

• Use one session for every project – focus on one project at a time such as one email or one blog post.
• “Feed the session” with relevant product info and target audience information before requesting it to write. 
• Use copywriting frameworks to ask the right questions to get the desired quality of copy you are looking for. 
• Many AI tools also have some tone of voice prompts to ensure the vocabulary, tone, and cadence align with your brand.

7. Trust ChatGPT As Much As You Trust Social Media 

Chat GPT can be a helpful research assistant that can synthesize data in seconds and save you hours on tasks by summarizing data such as key themes from customer reviews or completing a competitive analysis. However, more often than not, AI tools provide inaccurate information and make problematic assumptions, and they can sometimes fill in the gaps that don’t even exist! ChatGPT isn’t a marketing team that’s going to pinpoint the competitive advantage for your brand vs. the competition—humans have to work through those conclusions.   

For example, we were working on some research for 360 CHICAGO Observation Deck and attractions in the Chicago Area. ChatGPT included features such as a rotating floor on the 94th floor, which doesn’t even exist at all! It likely filled in the gaps because there are observation decks around the world that do have revolving floors. In addition, it created a long, drawn-out list of features that needed some editing to get the writing to manageable and effective copy. 

In another situation, our team completed a competitive analysis for a number of zipline companies, and after reviewing ChatGPT’s synthesis of the features and benefits, it included benefits such as ‘longest ziplines’, but completely missed the ‘highest’ and ‘fastest’ ziplines (which were clearly stated on the same page, and matter to some customers). In addition, the competitors’ ziplines allow people to fly mostly through a valley, while our client has lines that soar from mountaintop to mountaintop. We knew we had to leverage this benefit in our copy to stand out from competitors; ChatGPT did not.  

How Chat GPT and AI tools measure up

Synthesizing large amounts of information is very helpful for research and writing, but please check your sources thoroughly, and check the links to ensure the information is correct before using it. 

AI tools are only going to improve. Today, they are useful as long as you develop good prompting skills, use proven copywriting skills, become a great editor, and know that the outputs have limitations. Copywriting (the human kind) isn’t dead; it’s going to focus on much more strategic jobs. 

So you might be asking, did I use AI to write this post?  Yes. I didn’t use it to write my thoughts on this topic, but I did use the content improver template to fix grammatical errors, shorten some paragraphs, and improve the structure of some of the content to better explain my key points. If it’s going to save time and effort, I’m all for it!