How to use chatGPT and copywriting AI in marketing your small business

I don’t know about you but is it getting busy? I mean when it comes to content marketing and what we are meant to accomplish, along with, you know, ACTUAL PAYING WORK?

I’m very conscious that it’s easy to feel overloaded when it comes to content creation. Of course, I am my own worst enemy. I record a podcast once a week, write a column for stuff, this column, a weekly newsletter, and then there are the daily or almost daily posts.

This year I want to add some youtube on a regular basis, maybe some private podcasts for subscribers only, and more content. Add to that the content I create for my coaching clients, and for events and conferences and it’s… A LOT.

Before I was a marketer I was a writer. I got paid to write for other people. Magazines. Businesses. So content writing is my first love when it comes to marketing. It’s why I get a bundle of joy from this substack every week – I feel I gifted myself with a fun task for my week out of a pile of “should”

And let me tell you – the comments and the emails I get from you on occasion to tell me what you think and how the content helps – well you light me up! Thank you

So several years ago, when I started to hear about AI and its possible impact on copywriting I was not happy

I first heard about it when a marketing agency owner told me he’d managed to “get rid” of three copywriters by using an AI tool. I was STEAMY.

Then I had a couple of amazingly technical team members who weren’t natural wordsmiths. So we looked into AI and we started to use a paid platform for Facebook ad copy and google ad copy. We tested it against the copy we wrote and the copy our clients wrote. Often it outperformed it (I suspect because it was written without too much emotional weight of “this better work dammit!”)

Recently chatGPT has been mentioned everywhere. It’s currently free (FYI: Don’t expect it to be that way forever. It had a million users sign up in a few weeks. So get in and use it for free while you can. At some point they’ll need to monetise it – likely after we’ve all fed it with a bunch of lovely fresh data from all using it.

This week’s podcast is all about how I’m using it, and some of the drawbacks.

What a podcast can’t do is show results – so I thought I’d add in some things I tried it out with

Before we jump into that though, if you want to give it a go here are a few guidelines

WHAT YOU NEED TO HAVE CLEAR BEFORE USING CHATGPT FOR CONTENT MARKETING

1. Be really clear on the outcome you want from it
2. Know its limitations (it’s still a machine)
3. It can’t research. It can only summarise the information it already has
4. Start with an overall goal, then narrow it down in the following searches
5. Tell it the tone or style you need it written it
6. Be prepared (and expect) to rewrite or shape the material it produces
7. If you don’t know what good content looks like, make sure you’ve got someone around you who does. Content writers will still be needed for a good while

BENEFITS OF CHATGPT FOR SMALL BUSINESS MARKETING

1. It saves you time
2. It saves you money
3. It saves you energy
4. It can provide the structure you can easily flesh out
5. It can help you brainstorm ideas around a topic
6. It can take your idea and flesh it out
7. It can help you brief a VA or assistan
8. tIt can summarise the content
9. It can give you copy to easily rewrite

Trust story: I used chatGPT to brainstorm and give my podcast and column and this newsletter some insight – instead of hitting Google for the same info.

What I didn’t do however is get chatGPT to write this column because if I did it wouldn’t be authentically me. And that’s the key to using AI. Use it to generate ideas, help with structure, nut out a new way to explain something but then use that to create your own thing.

We don’t want to just read AI created work

I USED CHATGPT TO CREATE THE FOLLOWING CONTENT MARKETING WORK

Facebook post

I tried a few varieties of this and they were all disappointing. I don’t trust it for Facebook and social media posts. I’ll keep working at it but it felt really basic and very fluffy. The sort of thing a very cheap social media assistant would write – generic and not brand appropriate.

Nurture sequence outline

This was a win – it was very similar to what I’d personally include, with a few exceptions and made it really easy to think about what it would look like

Emails

I then took each one of these and asked the chat to write me the email. These were also pretty good, and easily customisable for my needs

Webinar outlines

I asked it (with typos which is a bit of a no no) to write a webinar outline that included where I’d sell. Personally I’d have added a sales component in a little earlier too, but as an outline it’s not bad. Again I can see this helping complete beginners get a structure in place or tired/ time poor creators having something to spring from

Video ideas

This was another win for me. I first asked for hooks for a topic and the results were ok but not fabulous. I then decided to ask for twenty content ideas under a specific niche and was rewarded with a list of very usable ideas.

Video scripts

I took those video ideas, and asked chat to write me a script. These were very good. They were more detailed than I expected and I plan to use them as a framework to create some video in the next few weeks and test them. I’m also going to use them as a starting point for captions – far better than the facebook post I started with

Podcast outline and blog outlines

I used chat to build out a podcast outline, and then one on a blog outline. Both were completed in under a minute and made content creation fast easier

I also used it to WRITE MY BIO

I’ve tested it on writing product descriptions, writing ad copy (not that impressed with that so far), summarising blogs and information, writing captions for Pinterest and youtube videos, and more. I stopped halfweay through this to ask it to give me thirty questions I could ask on Facebook to improve engagement (with my core audience). It delivered a pretty good list!

Out of these, are there any you would like to try?

Which one makes you the most excited?

Let me know!