- More than one-third of small business owners surveyed said they had tried ChatGPT for their marketing content.
- AI tools can save you valuable time, but they take practice to use effectively.
- Small business owners should also understand the limitations of ChatGPT.
- This article is part of the series “Marketing for Small Businesses,” in which SBOs explore the basics of marketing strategies to acquire new customers and grow their businesses.
Hayley Slade was initially against ChatGPT. The founder and CEO of copywriting agency Slade Copy House believed that artificial intelligence tools could not replace human copywriters. While that may still be true, she now realizes it can be a business asset.
“The reason I started using it was with this idea of 'board or get left behind,'” Slade told Insider. “I realized that in order to weaponize a platform, you have to understand it.”
ChatGPT, which was generally available in late 2022, is an artificial intelligence chatbot that uses a large-scale language model to summarize information and create human-like responses. They can answer questions and draft written content such as social media posts and emails, but they don't truly think like humans.
In an Alignable survey of U.S. small business owners published in July, more than half of respondents said they had tried ChatGPT, and one-third used it to create marketing content. I answered that there are some things.
Slade uses ChatGPT to help research, strategize, and prepare copywriting projects. More recently, she said, email has helped her brainstorm topics for her campaign and even suggested the ideal number of emails to send.
“It would have taken me more time to plan, but with ChatGPT, I can do it in seconds,” she said. Ta.
Using ChatGPT well takes practice, and it doesn't work for all marketing tasks. Here are his three tips for getting the most out of this tool.
1. Experiment to find the right prompt
Chris Winfield, co-founder and CEO of Super Connector Media, an AI marketing and branding company, says that to generate the most useful information from ChatGPT, it's important to understand which inputs produced the best content. I said it was important.
For example, Winfield gives the chatbot a persona along with the request to ensure the response includes the appropriate perspective.
“I tell them, 'You're one of the best social media marketers in the world and I hired you to come up with 30 days of Instagram content,'” he told Insider. “We'll have a lot of different ideas coming back, but we'll take the really good ones.”
At ChatGPT, Slade says experimentation is just part of the process.
“The more you learn how it responds and how it understands your users, the better you can create prompts,” she said. “But you're always going to tweak it.”
2. Save time on prep work
Slade has found ChatGPT to be great for “prep and research” like generating topics and creating outlines, rather than writing entire blog articles or social media posts.
Slade added that the content generated by ChatGPT is often deadpan, overly literal and uses strange language. Also, if multiple people are entering similar prompts, your chatbot may return the same results you are giving to others, creating a blog post that is too similar to your competitors' blog posts. there is.
“We don't rely too much on it, because we don't have that necessary humanness,” Slade said.
3. Make the content your own
Winfield said it's best not to use content created with ChatGPT as is. His team often runs copy through writing tools like Grammarly and Writesonic, also powered by his AI, to shape the language.
“You lose your own voice, which is what makes you special as a company and as a writer,” Winfield said. “That's a potential pitfall.”
Chatbots can also generate incorrect information. If you're not familiar with what you're asking, Winfield recommends fact-checking the answers or using a plagiarism checker like Copyscape.
ChatGPT can save small businesses time and marketing costs, but it's not a silver bullet. It takes practice to get it right. “You still need a human touch,” Slade said.
Axel Springer, Business Insider's parent company, has a global deal that allows OpenAI to train models based on its media brands' reporting.
