Promptology

Let’s look at some ways to improve the quality and usefulness of answers that you can get from an LLM by changing our prompt (what we ask it)!

Let’s imagine we want MyGPT to help developing a marketing strategy for a new drug that helps against hearing loss. Start by asking it directly:

Briefly outline a marketing strategy for our hearing-loss drug, Audipep.

We are going to try out a few prompting techniques to develop our strategy. The final goal of this exercise will be developing a target audience, along with a strategy on how to reach that audience.

Context

A great place to start an LLM interaction is to give it as much context as possible. A useful way to look at LLMs is as competent interns. In order to generate an outline for the marketing strategy and what people might be interested in the product, it is first important to give it as much context as possible.

So: who is selling the drug? What are potential side effects of the drug? What country are we trying to sell the drug? What are you trying to achieve? Who are you and what is your background? The more context the better!

Here’s some example information to get you started. Feel free to come up with some more details! Paste this context in the same chat, and ask it to revise the marketing strategy:

Here is some additional info:

• Audipep is a hearing-loss drug sold by Sotelab Pharmaceuticals
• Our main target market is the US, initially
• Audipep has side effects of drowsiness and sleepiness

Please revise the marketing strategy based on this info.

Asking Clarifying Questions

In the context you’ve provided, there might still be some informational gaps. In order to deal with this, a great way is to tell the LLM to ask you some clarifying questions, based on your previous conversation.

Answering them won’t just help the LLM to understand you and your goal, but it’s also a good way for you to understand your own needs and constraints better! Paste this in the same chat:

Please ask me five clarifying questions that will help you improve this marketing strategy.

And then follow up by answering those questions that you find relevant. (You can also tell it to ask further questions.)

Saving context as a prompt

In this conversation, we’ve built up a lot more detailed knowledge about the marketing strategy and the context of Audipep. This context is very valuable for any future conversations about this topic with MyGPT.

This is where custom prompts come in: they’re a great place to save contexts you’ve built up about certain topics, to easily reuse them in future conversations. And who might be able to help you distill your current conversation into a solid custom prompt? Well, you guessed it of course: MyGPT itself!

In your current conversation (that includes the context you provided, and your answers to the clarifying questions), ask MyGPT:

I want to save the insights from this conversation to a custom (system) prompt. Based on this conversation, reply with a concise but thorough prompt that contains any important information I’ve provided regarding Audipep. (Don’t include the marketing strategy itself.)

It should provide you with a solid custom prompt. You can save this as a custom prompt in MyGPT, and then start new conversations about Audipep without having to provide the assistant with the same details every time.

Further techniques

Here’s some more techniques that you can experiment with, if you have time left!

If you created a custom prompt in the previous step, try starting a new conversation with that prompt, and notice how MyGPT will immediately start generating well-informed, high-quality replies.

Ideation

Similar to what we did in the brainstorming exercise before, you can boost creative output by asking it to come up with a range of diverse ideas. It helps to ask for a concrete number.

Generate 5 unique marketing campaign ideas for Audipep, each targeting a different demographic or communication channel.

Roleplay

A popular technique is assigning a role to the LLM, and interacting with the LLM while they are embodying that role in order to better understand a particular target audience. (As you can imagine, the LLM can do a better job at this if you have provided it with plenty of context about your target audience.)

Ask the LLM to roleplay the earlier identified target audience and ask it some questions in order to develop your plan. Here’s an example:

Please roleplay as someone with moderate hearing loss who might be interested in Audipep. I’d like to ask you some questions to understand your perspective better.

Questions:

1. In what ways does your hearing most inhibit your day-to-day life?
2. What concerns might you have about using a medicine for your hearing loss?
3. What would convince you to try a new hearing loss treatment?

Please answer these questions as if you were the target audience for Audipep.