How to use custom GPTs in your public relations practice

Maddie Knapp is a senior media relations strategist at Intero Digital Content & PR Division, formerly Influence & Co. 

AI in public relations isn’t just changing the game — it’s completely rewriting the rules. In 2024, AI’s imprint on PR will be profound, offering tools and techniques that are reshaping how we pitch topics, monitor media, and build relationships. A 2023 Muck Rack survey found that 61% of PR pros were already using AI or planned to explore it.

Now, understanding how to use AI in public relations isn’t about technology taking the wheel; it’s about us driving smarter, with AI as our supercharged GPS.

Custom GPTs: Tailoring pitches with AI precision

Custom GPTs in PR are like having a secret weapon in your arsenal. These AI-driven tools are designed to create content that fits your exact needs, illustrating how to use AI in PR. Let’s break down their impact across four key pitch types:

1. Expert pitches: Think of custom GPTs as your expert whisperer, crafting pitches that sound like they’ve come straight from the horse’s mouth. AI can analyze the latest trends, reports and expert articles, ensuring your pitch reflects current industry insights. It can even mimic the tone and style of industry leaders.

Imagine you’re preparing a pitch about sustainable energy. While you might not be the top expert in this field, you can still create an impactful and authoritative pitch. Start by gathering a diverse range of recent articles from reputable publications on sustainable energy. This collection should include various formats like opinion pieces, news reports, and interviews. Use ChatGPT to analyze these articles, focusing on their language, style, recurring themes, keywords and overall tone. The goal here is to understand how sustainable energy topics are typically presented and discussed in your target industry.

Then, train a custom GPT model using these insights. This model will learn to replicate the writing style, thematic focus and tone observed in your research. By doing so, your custom GPT can generate pitch drafts that resonate with the style and substance of existing industry content. Your pitches will be more aligned with industry standards and targeted to your audience. This strategy enhances your efficiency, allowing you to focus on refining and personalizing your pitch rather than starting from scratch.

2. Data-driven stories: AI’s ability to process and analyze large datasets is unparalleled, helping to identify compelling patterns and trends and turning them into narratives that are both informative and captivating. These stories can be used to back up claims with hard data, making your pitches more credible and authoritative.

And by analyzing a journalist’s past work and preferences, AI can tailor pitches that resonate on a personal level. It moves beyond throwing darts in the dark to using a guided missile that hits the bullseye of relevance and engagement. Personalized pitches cut through the noise, increasing the likelihood of your story being picked up.

Let’s say you are leading a supply chain company’s PR. To make an impact, start by gathering all kinds of related data. You want the nitty-gritty on how global supply chain hiccups are playing out, how the company is excelling in logistics, and what customers are saying. Next, use AI to sift through the data and unearth nuggets that prove that the company is outperforming the chaos better than the competition. With these insights, craft a pitch that’ll make a big splash, showing off stats and numbers that back up your claims. This approach does more than tell people that the company is top-notch; it shows them.

3. Announcements:Need to make a quick announcement? AI’s efficiency ensures your news hits the mark, fast. Whether it’s a corporate update, an important event, or a crisis response, AI can quickly digest the necessary information and produce clear, concise and impactful announcements.

Imagine you’re the PR strategist for a tech company that is about to announce a huge partnership with another organization that will optimize technical systems. The main goal is to spread the word in a way that is catchy, fun and gets everyone buzzing. Use AI to take a deep dive into the latest market trends, competitor news and past successful announcements. Next, give AI all the exciting details about the partnership so it can craft an engaging announcement that nails all the key points while keeping it on-brand.

AI can take the messaging one step further. You know the message needs to hit different notes for different folks. AI can help you spin your message a few ways — more in-depth for the technology crowd and more formal for the business audience. The message ends up sharp, adaptable and in sync with your target audiences.

4. Influencer collaborations: The best part about using custom GPTs is that the more information and feedback you give them, the better they perform and the more personalized they become. And personalization is where AI really flexes its muscles. A custom GPT adapts to different influencer styles, making sure your brand message harmonizes with their content, style and audience engagement. This ensures that your message is not only consistent with your brand, but also resonates with the influencer’s followers.

Let’s say you are a PR professional working for a healthcare company that just released a wellness app. The goal is to drive consumer interest through the influencer market. After identifying a diverse group of influencers, AI can analyze the content and engagement style of each influencer, understanding what kind of messages resonate best for their followers. Using GPT insights, you can craft customized content for each influencer’s style and the specific media platform. As the campaign evolves, GPT monitors performance and suggests adjustments to maintain relevance. The approach ensures the wellness app’s message resonates with diverse audiences and enhances engagement across platforms.

Incorporating AI and PR strategies means striking a balance between automated efficiency and human ingenuity. AI can assist in heavy lifting, allowing us to focus on strategic aspects. This year, let’s harness AI to make our content more efficient, impactful, emotionally resonant, and ethically sound. That’s a narrative we can all get behind.