ChatGPT: How Small Businesses Can Begin Leveraging AI

If you’re a small business owner (or employee), you’re probably acutely aware of the challenges that small businesses face with limited resources, be that financial or human, while often competing with larger companies that have entire teams dedicated to separate business needs like marketing and customer support. With the release of ChatGPT last month, developed by OpenAI, heralding a new dawn for powerful, publicly-available artificial intelligence, it has never been more important for forward-thinking small business owners to educate and familiarize themselves with how this powerful technology can be leveraged to improve their business capabilities.

ChatGPT's language model is capable of processing natural language input and generating human-like responses, making it an ideal tool for small businesses looking to improve their operations, marketing, and customer service. By integrating ChatGPT into their business strategy, small business owners can level the playing field and compete with larger companies, while also providing their customers with an exceptional experience despite limited dedicated resources.

The possibilities with ChatGPT are truly endless, and by embracing this technology, small businesses can quickly start to position themselves for long-term growth and success. As a founder of multiple small businesses, though, I know that the best value to be offered at this point is in a few key examples of how you can start using ChatGPT today to operate and grow your business.

Content Creation

I want to start this list with what I consider to be one of the lowest barrier-to-entry methods of utilizing ChatGPT to help you grow your business. Content creation is a critical aspect of any small business's marketing strategy in this digital age, and ChatGPT can be an incredibly valuable tool to help small businesses streamline and improve their content creation process. Here are some ways that ChatGPT can help small businesses with content creation:

Content Ideation

As someone who manages the marketing strategy for three separate small business, I can say first-hand that trying to consistently generate new ideas for content that would engage with customers used to be one of the more time-consuming aspects of the process. With a little help from some basic SEO research to identify key phrases and questions that our target market is searching for information for, ChatGPT can then be used to generate relevant ideas for blog posts, social media updates, and other types of content by simply providing ChatGPT with some basic additional information about your business, such as its industry, target audience, and brand values.

Content Optimization

As much as SEO may confuse and frustrate even the savviest of small business marketers, it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere in the near future! For small businesses trying to develop SEO-friendly content without the assistance of an SEO professional or marketing partner, ChatGPT can be an incredibly valuable tool to bridge the knowledge gap and amplify the efficiency of your SEO efforts. By analyzing a piece of content, ChatGPT can identify the keywords and phrases that are most relevant to the content's topic and suggest changes to improve the content's ranking in search engines.

Automated Writing

ChatGPT's language generation capabilities can be used to automatically generate content for a small business, such as product descriptions, educational articles, or social media posts (just to name a few!). By providing ChatGPT with some basic information about the topic and use (i.e. article, social media post, etc.), it can create a complete piece of content that is nearly ready to be published.

I say “nearly ready” with an important asterisk, as it is HIGHLY recommended that any content developed by ChatGPT be thoroughly reviewed to ensure accuracy prior to publishing. If content needs to be revised (which it often does – though to varying degrees), there are two primary ways of doing this. If the content is close to what I’m looking for, I’ll often simply edit the content myself to touch it up to my standard and expand on the content that ChatGPT generated. The other approach is to provide ChatGPT feedback within the same “conversation” – ChatGPT remembers what you have said previously and can revise its responses with additional input – to alter or expand on its original responses, or generate something else entirely, but that is related to the original content.

Editing and Proofreading

ChatGPT is, at its heart, a heralding of the next generation of language models, building on its predecessors like ELIZA and more recently, Siri and Alexa. With these next-level language processing capabilities, ChatGPT can effectively edit and proofread content, offering a powerful tool for small businesses looking to improve the quality and professionalism of their written materials.

By analyzing a piece of text, ChatGPT can quickly identify grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and other issues, and offer suggestions for corrections and improvements. This can save small businesses valuable time and resources, allowing them to produce polished content that presents a more credible and trustworthy image to their audience.

Furthermore, as ChatGPT continues to learn and improve through machine learning, its editing and proofreading capabilities are likely to become even more accurate and efficient, further benefiting small businesses and other users.

Translations

With ChatGPT's advanced language processing capabilities, small businesses can leverage this powerful tool to reach a more diverse and global audience. By using ChatGPT to translate content into different languages, small businesses can overcome language barriers and create a more inclusive experience for their customers. Whether it's product descriptions, social media updates, or customer service responses, ChatGPT can help small businesses communicate effectively with customers from all over the world or in their own multi-lingual community. This can be especially valuable for small businesses looking to expand their operations into new markets, or those operating in areas with a high level of linguistic diversity. In short, ChatGPT's translation capabilities offer small businesses an incredible opportunity to connect with a broader audience and create a more welcoming and accessible experience for all.

With such a wide variety of potential uses (and many more that I couldn’t fit in this article), ChatGPT can be an incredibly useful tool for small businesses looking to streamline and improve their content creation process. By leveraging its capabilities for content ideation, optimization, automated writing, editing and proofreading, and translations, small businesses can create high-quality content more efficiently and effectively, allowing them to focus more time and attention on other critical aspects of their business.

Customer Service

At a time when economic influences are forcing small businesses to review their budgets and spend efficiency more than ever, while trying to maintain a high level of customer satisfaction, ChatGPT can be a huge asset in cost-effectively maintaining . One of the best aspects of this approach lies in its scalability, even with substantial or rapid growth. Once the technology has been trained on a set of your own customer interactions, it can quickly and effectively manage a very high level of customer interactions without the risk of compromising your unique brand voice.

Though the implementation and training of this AI tool still requires a significant familiarity with coding and APIs, small business owners would be wise to consider the ROI on a technology that seamlessly scales your customer service capabilities at a fixed (and likely, one-time) investment. This is likely not a 1:1 replacement for a customer support professional (or team, based on company size), but with proper setup and training, it can substantially reduce your cost to scale those capabilities while vastly improving the productivity of your human resources.

If you are familiar with basic coding and API implementations, and feeling up to the challenge of working with this emerging technology, there are a number of guides online that provide an outline of the steps required to do this yourself.

For some lower barrier to entry methods of utilizing ChatGPT to improve your customer support, consider some of the following use examples:

(1) Set up automated responses through your social media channels like Facebook, with responses to common inquiries developed with ChatGPT.

Prompt Examples:

• “What are some common questions that people might ask [business name] in the [_______] industry? Can you provide a list of questions that people may ask when they are seeking information about [business name]'s [services, products, pricing, etc.]?”
• “Write responses to the following questions for our social media page visitors when they ask:
• [Copy & paste list from above, or enter your own list of questions]

(2) Use ChatGPT to quickly develop customer service email templates.

Prompt Examples:

• "Write an email template to a customer confirming their appointment date and time. The email also needs to include fields for [specific needs for your business]."
• "Write an email campaign to customers following up on their [appointment, purchase, etc.] with emails at 7, 15, and 30 days, designed to [end goal – e.g. convert them to a member with a growing offer incentive]"

Business Research

ChatGPT can be a powerful tool for small businesses looking to conduct research and gather insights about their industry, competitors, and customers. By leveraging the advanced language processing capabilities of ChatGPT, small businesses can quickly and easily extract valuable information from a range of sources, including websites, social media, and customer reviews.

One example use case for ChatGPT in business research is to analyze customer feedback and sentiment. By inputting customer reviews or social media comments into ChatGPT, small businesses can quickly identify patterns and trends in the language used by their customers.

For example, a small clothing retailer could input customer reviews into ChatGPT to identify common themes and issues that arise, such as sizing or quality concerns. The business could then use this information to make improvements to its products or customer service.

Prompt Example:

• Analyze customer reviews for my business and identify common themes and concerns.
• [Provide a list of reviews]

Another use case for ChatGPT is to gather information about competitors and industry trends. By inputting specific keywords or questions into ChatGPT, small businesses can quickly find relevant information and insights from a range of sources.

For example, a small tech company could input a question like, "What are the latest trends in mobile app development?" into ChatGPT to gather insights and ideas for new product features or innovations.

Prompt Example:

• Provide me insights and current trends about __________ industry and competitors based on the following keywords:
• [Provide a list of industry-relevant keywords]

Closing Recommendations

In my brief time working with ChatGPT since its release to the public, I've had the chance to determine some of the strengths of this technology, as well as some of its limitations at this current stage in its development. With those in mind, here are a few overall recommendations to using this technology to help you accelerate your learning curve and get ChatGPT to produce the level of output you need:

(1) Even at the advanced stage that this AI technology is at, the content developed by ChatGPT is still not guaranteed to be entirely accurate, so anything generated with its assistance should always be reviewed and edited for accuracy before being used or published.

(2) When in doubt, I would err on the side of providing too much information to ChatGPT in your prompts. In my brief experience utilizing this technology, I have often found the best results tend to come when I am extremely specific about the output I want, as well as the information that ChatGPT might need to tailor the output to your specific needs or business.

(3) Don’t be afraid to offend ChatGPT! I say this halfway in jest, but in earnest, ChatGPT sets the golden standard for incorporating feedback into generating new content that more closely matches your specific situation and needs. Take advantage of this specific strength of ChatGPT and fine-tune your content by telling ChatGPT what it should do differently to improve its output.

It's clear that ChatGPT has immense potential to revolutionize the way small businesses operate, and it's exciting to imagine the possibilities this technology will bring. By leveraging its capabilities for content creation, customer service, business research, and even translation, you can start to overcome the challenges of limited resources and stand out in your respective industries.

As a small business founder and manager myself, I can attest to the importance of finding innovative solutions to stay competitive, and ChatGPT stands out as one of the greatest advances in AI available to anyone. I'm thrilled to see what the future holds for AI and small business, and I'll be sure to share any additional insights on this topic in future articles.