How to Set Up a Custom GPT for Awesome Brand Content

If you're just starting to explore AI in content creation or have been frustrated by the lack of quality outputs, make sure to visit our beginner's guide. Once you've got the basics down, it’s time to take things up a notch with a Custom GPT within OpenAI’s ChatGPT platform. This guide will show you how to streamline your content process, ensuring consistency in your brand's voice across all platforms and freeing up time for you to focus on other strategic initiatives. Let’s get started!

Understanding Custom GPT (My GPT)

A custom GPT will transform how artificial intelligence can serve your brand’s unique needs. This specialized tool can be designed to align closely with your brand's voice and style, ensuring that every piece of content it creates feels like it was written by your team. Before we jump into strategies and tactics, let’s first look at what a custom GPT is and does. 

First things first: to set up your own GPT, you need to subscribe to a paid plan. The subscription gives you the necessary access to advanced features and capabilities that allow for the customization and training of your ChatGPT model. If you haven’t done that yet, go ahead and do that now…we’ll wait right here.

Tailored to Your Brand

A custom GPT learns from a vast array of your historical content. By analyzing and understanding the language, tone, and style of your previous communications, it becomes proficient (not perfect!) in replicating these elements consistently across new content. Whether it’s drafting blog posts, crafting tweets, or responding to customer inquiries, the AI makes sure that the words closely resonate with your brand’s identity.

Unlike standard models, your custom GPT isn’t static. It's designed to continue learning from new content as it's created. This means that as your brand evolves, or as new trends emerge, your custom GPT can adapt, making it an invaluable tool for keeping your communications up-to-date and relevant without significant manual retraining.

Scalability and Efficiency

With a custom GPT, scaling your content creation becomes more manageable. Because the AI handles much of the content generation process, your team can focus on higher-value tasks along with polishing the AI’s end product. This division of labor increases overall efficiency and productivity, allowing you to do more with less and without compromising the quality.

Setting Up Your Custom ChatGPT

Take a deep breath. This could be a bit overwhelming but we did our best to simplify the setup process. And as a reminder, what works for one person or brand may not be what works for another. Use this as a guide to help you get familiar with setting up your own GPT and then optimize it as you continue to learn.

Step 1: Define the GPT’s Purpose and Capabilities

Name Your GPT:

Choose a name that best explains the function of your GPT. For instance, “[Your Brands] Content Creator”.

Description:

Write a brief description that outlines what your GPT does. Example: “This GPT generates consistent and engaging brand content for blogs, social media, and email campaigns.”

Instructions:

Here is where you need to detail out the specific tasks your GPT will handle and where you set the tone and behavior of your GPT. What you should include:

• Tone and Style Guidelines: Be specific about how the GPT should sound, e.g., "Use a friendly and informative tone suitable for a young audience." and “Always write at a comprehension level of high school to make the content easy to understand.” The more defined, the better.
• Personify Your Brand: Sometimes, selecting a well-known persona that aligns with your brand can be more effective than crafting complex, detailed persona instructions. This approach leverages ChatGPT's extensive training on diverse datasets, which includes numerous examples of various personas. For instance, instructing ChatGPT to 'Act like a helpful kindergarten teacher' or 'Emulate the charisma of John Travolta' gives the AI a clear and relatable reference point, enabling it to generate content that naturally resonates with these familiar tones and styles.
• Utilize Brand Voice Guidelines: If you have them, drop in detailed voice and tone guidelines directly into the instructions and instruct the GPT to adhere to these guidelines.
• Specific Dos and Don'ts: Highlight phrases to use or avoid that ChatGPT tends to overuse. For example, it should avoid using generic phrases like "Navigating the realm of…" and “As we reflect back on…”
• AI Writing Tells to Avoid: If you’ve written enough content with ChatGPT, you start to pick up consistent patterns in the way it writes. Tell the GPT to avoid robotic phrases, patterned language, and being overly neutral. Encourage the use of vibrant, emotive language and varied sentence structures to make the content feel more human. Provide it examples as you start to learn them. Check out this blog for a few examples.
• Instruct on Knowledge Use: Clearly describe how the GPT should use uploaded documents to inform its responses, ensuring accuracy and relevancy.

Step 2: Prepare and Organize Your Training Data

In order to train your GPT, it’s ideal to have a robust dataset that represents your brand’s communication style across various platforms. Start by gathering up existing content samples that exemplify your brand’s voice, such as:

• Blog articles
• Social media posts
• Email newsletters
• Customer Service email threads
• Website content

Now you can categorize these samples by content type and tag them with relevant descriptors like "blog", "social media", or "email". This helps the GPT learn contextually from specific examples. Be sure all content is formatted in a manner that ChatGPT can easily process or accept. For details on acceptable formats, refer to Step 4 where you'll upload and configure your training data.

Step 3: Create Conversation Starters

Here, you can draft specific prompts or conversation starters that you commonly use in your marketing efforts as a shortcut. These will guide your GPT in generating the types of responses or content pieces you need. For example:

• “Write a blog post about the latest trends in [Your Industry].”
• “Create a tweet promoting our new product launch.”
• “Draft an email for our upcoming holiday sale.”

Step 4: Upload Training Data and Configure Settings

Upload Files:

Now it’s time to upload the organized files you prepared earlier. These documents serve as the core training material for your GPT. The “knowledge” your GPT uses is essentially derived from these training materials — it learns from the specific examples, phrases, and styles found in your uploaded content, thereby aligning its outputs more closely with your brand’s voice and the way you’d like to to communicate.

Preferred Formats:

Convert all collected texts into preferred formats such as plain text files (.txt), Word docs (.docx) or document formats which are easily processed by most AI training platforms. 

Set Capabilities:

Choose the capabilities you want your GPT to have. For a brand content creator, you might enable:

• Web Browsing: If real-time data or current events impact your content.
• DALL·E Image Generation: For creating relevant images to accompany posts or articles.
• Code Interpreter: Useful if your content includes data analysis or tech-focused content.

Step 5: Train and Test Your GPT

Once your GPT is configured with the initial settings and data, you’re ready to play with your newest marketing tech toy! Begin by using the training interface (preview) to teach your GPT based on the uploaded files and conversation starters. Ask it questions and regularly test the outputs for accuracy and alignment with brand tone. Refine the training materials and instructions based on your prompts and the GPTs responses. This is probably the part of the setup where you will spend most of your time and frustration. But if you put in the time to get it right now, it could save you thousands of hours (and dollars) in the long run.

Step 6: Deployment and Ongoing Optimization

And that’s it — after testing, you’re ready deploy your GPT! Be sure to continuously monitor its performance and gather feedback from your content team and audience. Keep a log of feedback and keep updating the instructions and training files to address said feedback and include new content styles or promotional campaigns.

Start Building Your Competitive Edge

Setting up your custom GPT is a strategic move. Now is the time to get ahead of the curve and outpace your competitors. Tomorrow’s leaders are making moves today — so don’t be the one that gets left behind. Remember that today's AI is just the beginning…it's the worst it will ever be, and it’s only going to get better and smarter.

All this talk and technology can be overwhelming, especially if you’re just starting out, but you don't have to tackle it alone. That's exactly why partnering with Braive can make all the difference. We specialize in blending cutting-edge AI with highly informed marketing strategies to supercharge your efforts. By collaborating with us, you tap into a pool of expertise that transforms complex technologies into powerful marketing advantages.

Start Your Partnership with Braive - Take the step today that your future self will thank you for. Let's lead the charge together and craft a marketing strategy that not only competes but dominates.