NotebookLM: Purpose, Users, Benefits, and What Makes It Different From ChatGPT

NotebookLM is a personalised AI research and writing assistant from Google designed to help you connect ideas and get insights from your documents. 

Think of it as an AI-powered notebook that builds its intelligence entirely from the documents you upload: PDFs, Google Docs, notes, reports, and more. 

Whether you’re a research student or a marketer planning Q3 strategy, NotebookLM turns your documents into an interactive research assistant.

Who is NotebookLM for? 

NotebookLM is intended for a wide range of users who work with large amounts of information and need to synthesise it, including:

• Students: To understand complex academic papers, find connections between lecture notes, and generate study guides.
  
  
• Researchers & Academics: To analyse qualitative data, surface themes in literature reviews, and draft new hypotheses based on their collected research.
  
  
• Writers & Journalists: To organise their research, find supporting quotes, and explore different narrative angles from their source materials.
  
  
• Business Professionals & Analysts: To analyse reports, meeting transcripts, and financial documents to identify key trends and generate summaries.
  
  
• Hobbyists & Lifelong Learners: Anyone looking to explore a topic in-depth using their own curated collection of articles, books, and notes.

What does NotebookLM do? 

NotebookLM acts as an intelligent interface for your documents. You upload your sources like PDFs, Google Docs, or text files, and it becomes an expert in that material. 

You can then:

• Ask specific questions about the content of your sources.
• Generate summaries of individual or multiple files.
• Create outlines, timelines, and FAQs.
• Identify hidden connections across different sources.
• Brainstorm ideas and get different perspectives grounded in your research.

Every answer generated by NotebookLM includes citations, allowing you to instantly click back to the exact passage in your original source material to verify the information.

What are the top benefits of NotebookLM? 

The primary benefits of using NotebookLM are:

• Verified Facts: Based only on the documents you provide. Dramatically reduces the risk of the AI inventing facts (“hallucinations”).

• Faster Analysis: Read through dense material. Save hours of manual reading and note-taking.
  
  
• Deeper Insights: Uncover new ideas and relationships within your information that weren’t immediately obvious.
  
  
• Improved Productivity: Streamline the research and writing process. Organise, understand, and synthesise your material efficiently.
  
  
• Personalised Expertise: Transform your collection of documents into a personalised, interactive knowledge base you can consult at any time.

How is NotebookLM Different from ChatGPT?

Here’s how NotebookLM is different from ChatGPT:

Training Data

• ChatGPT: Trained on publicly available internet data.
• NotebookLM: Operates only on the documents you upload.

Primary Use Case

• ChatGPT: Great for general knowledge, ideation, and creative writing.
• NotebookLM: Designed for in-depth research, summarisation, and insight extraction from your personal content.

Trustworthiness

• ChatGPT: Can sometimes “hallucinate” or generate inaccurate facts.
• NotebookLM: Cites every answer directly from your uploaded material. 100% traceable and verifiable.

Role

• ChatGPT: Functions as a creative brainstorming partner.
• NotebookLM: Acts like a dedicated research analyst with perfect recall of your sources.

ChatGPT is your creative co-pilot; NotebookLM is your personal research specialist.

Why This is a Game-Changer for Marketing & e-Commerce Leaders

NotebookLM empowers marketing teams to turn data into strategy at scale:

• Trustworthy insights grounded in your real data
• Faster synthesis of customer feedback, sales reports, and campaign performance
• Uncovered connections across disparate documents
• Private & secure, ideal for sensitive internal reports

7 Actionable Use Cases for Your Marketing Team

Here are some powerful use cases for your marketing team: 

1. Persona Creation

• Goal: Develop rich, data-driven customer personas.
• What to Upload: Customer surveys, support chat logs, product reviews.‍
• Example Prompt: “Summarise the top 5 pain points from all sources.”

2. SEO & Content Strategy

• Goal: Identify content gaps and new blog opportunities.
• What to Upload: Competitor blog posts, your keyword research list, current blog URLs.
• Example Prompt: “Suggest blog topics my competitors cover but I don’t.”

3. Competitive Intelligence

• Goal: Understand a competitor’s strengths and weaknesses.
• What to Upload: Competitor annual reports, press releases, and product/pricing pages.
• Example Prompt: “Create a SWOT analysis for [Competitor].”

4. Ad Copy Mining

• Goal: Source authentic messaging for ads and landing pages.
• What to Upload: Testimonials, case studies, and 5-star customer reviews.
• Example Prompt: “Extract quotes about life after using our product.”

5. Campaign Post-Mortems

• Goal: Reflect on what worked and what didn’t after a campaign.
• What to Upload: Campaign performance reports, project briefs, and debrief notes.
• Example Prompt: “Summarise performance vs. goals.”

6. Market Research Synthesis

• Goal: Identify trends and stats in complex industry research.
• What to Upload: Market research PDFs (e.g., Gartner, Forrester reports).
• Example Prompt: “List the top 5 ecommerce trends across all reports.”

7. Team Onboarding

• Goal: Get new marketing hires up to speed quickly.
• What to Upload: Brand guidelines, playbooks, strategy docs.
• Example Prompt: “Summarise our tone of voice in 5 bullets.”

How to Get Started in 5 Minutes

• Go to the NotebookLM website.
  
  
• Create a new “Notebook” for a specific project (e.g., “Q3 Content Strategy”).
  
  
• Upload your sources from Google Drive or your computer (PDFs, text files, copied text).
  
  
• Use the auto-generated suggested questions or start asking your own.
  
  
• Use the “Noteboard” feature to pin key insights, quotes, and summaries as you work.

NotebookLM isn’t here to replace marketing creativity or strategic thinking. It’s a force multiplier that automates the most time-consuming part of strategy. It frees up marketers to do what they do best: build compelling campaigns, connect with customers, and drive growth.

NotebookLM’s Audio Overview Feature For Podcast-Style Content

If you thought NotebookLM was only for reading and writing, Google has a new dimension to it: Audio Overview. The feature turns your document-based research into natural-sounding audio summaries. It’s like having a personalised podcast summarising your most important files.

What is Audio Overview?

Imagine uploading a 50-page market research report, a dozen competitor blog posts, and your latest campaign brief. Instead of just getting a text summary, you can press a button and NotebookLM will generate a natural-sounding audio discussion based on these sources.

Think of it as NotebookLM creating a private podcast episode just for you, summarising the key points, identifying themes, and explaining the connections within your documents. 

It’s an incredibly powerful tool for auditory learners and busy marketers on the go.

How e-Commerce & Ads Teams Can Use Audio Overviews:

This feature moves beyond simple text-to-speech and opens up a new frontier for content creation and internal communication.

Here are some use cases:

• “Turn written content into an ‘audio article’.”
• “Create an internal ‘daily stand-up’ podcast.”
• “Streamline podcast guest research & prep.”
• “Synthesise market research on the go.”

10 Actionable Use Cases for e-Commerce & Google Ads Teams

Here are 10 advanced use cases for Google Ads & e-Commerce Teams:

1. Google Ads Search Query Report (SQR) Analysis

• Goal: Identify wasted spend and optimise match types or negatives.
• Prompt Example: “Based on the SQR, list all queries containing words like ‘free’, ‘jobs’, ‘how to’, or ‘tutorial’.”
• Why it matters: Pinpoints irrelevant traffic and reveals optimisation opportunities.

2. Performance Max (PMax) Asset Optimisation

• Goal: Fine-tune headlines, descriptions, and creatives in PMax campaigns.
• Prompt Example: “Compare top-performing vs. low-performing headlines.” OR “Based on the video transcripts, what were the key hooks used in the opening 3 seconds of the best-performing video assets?”
• Why it matters: Focuses creative efforts on what drives clicks and conversions.

3. Review Mining for Ad Copy

• Goal: Source authentic language for ad messaging.
• Prompt Example: “Extract ‘quality’ descriptors from customer reviews.” OR “For ‘Product X’, what are the top 5 benefits mentioned most frequently in 5-star reviews?”
• Why it matters: Captures real customer sentiment to enhance trust in ads.

4. Keyword Grouping at Scale

• Goal: Organise large keyword lists into actionable themes.
• Prompt Example: “Group this list of 500 keywords into logical, thematic ad groups.” OR “For the theme ‘men’s running shoes’, which keywords from the list have commercial or transactional intent?”
• Why it matters: Streamlines campaign structure for better Quality Score and relevance.

5. Competitor Landing Page Analysis

• Goal: Understand how competitors position their offerings.
• Prompt Example: “Summarise 3 value props from each landing page.” OR “Analyse the ad copy from these competitors. What are the most common offers, CTAs, and trust signals (like ‘free shipping’ and ‘reviews’) they use?”
• Why it matters: Helps sharpen your own unique selling points and messaging strategy.

6. Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO)

• Goal: Spot elements that influence conversion performance.
• Prompt Example: “Compare trust signals on high vs. low conversion pages.” OR “Rewrite the introduction from the low-converting page using the style and benefits highlighted on the high-converting page.”
• Why it matters: Optimises UX and messaging for better conversion outcomes.

7. Turning Google Guides into Action

• Goal: Convert dense Google Ads documentation into usable checklists.
• Prompt Example: “Summarise this entire document into a 10-point checklist to set up a new PMax campaign.” OR “According to this guide, what are the top 5 mistakes advertisers make with Broad Match keywords?”
• Why it matters: Speeds up implementation and reduces misinterpretation of best practices.

8. Deeper Customer Persona Insights

• Goal: Better understand customer motivations and emotions.
• Prompt Example: “What emotional words and phrases do customers express after using our product?” OR “What are the biggest anxieties or hesitations mentioned in these sources before making a purchase?”
• Why it matters: Humanizes targeting and messaging for more effective creative.

9. Demand Generation Ad Hooks

• Goal: Craft compelling narrative angles for top-of-funnel content.
• Prompt Example: “Based on the market research, what are three surprising statistics I could use as a hook for a YouTube ad?” OR “What common myths or misconceptions about our product/industry are mentioned in these sources that we could debunk in an ad?”
• Why it matters: Improves click-through rates and message resonance in awareness campaigns.

10. Cross-Campaign Insight Summarisation

• Goal: Spot macro trends across multiple campaigns or reports.
• Prompt Example:“Compare the final CPA in the reports to the target CPA mentioned in the campaign brief. Summarise the results.” OR “Analyse the performance trends across these three monthly reports.”
• Why it matters: Supports strategic planning and continuous improvement.

Need a fresh perspective? Let’s talk.

At 360 OM, we specialise in helping businesses take their marketing efforts to the next level. Our team stays on top of industry trends, uses data-informed decisions to maximise your ROI, and provides full transparency through comprehensive reports.