How Small Business Can Use ChatGPT to Reduce the Burden of Writing Content
ChatGPT has taken the world by storm – from individuals tinkering around with usage while giant businesses such as Google and Bing pour billions into further developing AI technology.
But what about small businesses? What can the advent of ChatGPT and similar AI tools mean for them? If you ask us, ChatGPT means a level playing field.
In this post we’re going to get you thinking about how you can use ChatGPT (currently a free tool) to help reduce the burden of creating content for your business and close the gap between you and some of the big players across industries.
What is ChatGPT?
The low-down, simplest way to describe ChatGPT is an automated chat bot that uses machine learning to scan through millions of search results to answer your questions. As of this post’s writing, this tool is free to use over at OpenAi’s official website. While OpenAI has existed for years, it wasn’t until the launch of ChatGPT that the power of AI really launched into the mainstream.
What’s even crazier is that the current version of ChatGPT is still just a prototype. There’s even more this tool will be able to achieve by the time we’re looking at a full release (along with, presumably, paid features.)
Why is ChatGPT so revolutionary?
Well, let’s ask an unbiased source.
That’s ChatGPT’s automated response to my question, and it generated it in about 2 seconds while I was cracking my knuckles and watching on, fascinated. The answer is clear, detailed, and informative – everything that a person asking the question would be looking for. It even understands when it’s getting long-winded and can sum things up with an “and more”!
Now let’s start from scratch with something non-ChatGPT related, and explore how ChatGPT can evolve its research as we dig deeper with our questions.
Let’s say you run a, oh, I don’t know, digital marketing firm. The most important aspect of driving business to your company (according to us, though perhaps we should ask ChatGPT to confirm our suspicions) is making your value clear to your prospective customers. Why should they invest in a digital marketing firm at all?
Well, let’s see what the machine learning AI thinks after combing through millions of results.
Couldn’t have said it better ourselves (well actually, we arguably could – but more on that later.) What’s important is that ChatGPT has done the research in a few seconds flat, and managed to get the general gist of why our business niche is important to our prospective customers. If you’re a small business owner and know that your business has value, yet aren’t quite sure how to convey that value, something like ChatGPT is a godsend.
But what if you didn’t fully understand the results that ChatGPT returned? Maybe you’re a digital marketing firm but you’re not entirely sure what exactly “email marketing” would entail (this is just an example, we assure you that Flamingo Theory is well acquainted with email marketing). Can ChatGPT not only research for us, but educate us?
Without starting a new question, ChatGPT being a chatbot allows us to bounce off ideas and dive further into the subjects we’re touching on, like so:
While the start of the conversation was a little redundant, ChatGPT quickly started to dive deeper into what exactly email marketing is – with the sort of content that could be further expanded into its own page on a digital marketing firm’s website to describe email marketing: its importance, the services they would provide, and why it was worth coming to that company for them.
And because it’s a chat bot – it’s never judgmental. You can ask it anything, even to help you come up with ideas for you to implement:
This is what ChatGPT does for small business owners: closing both the knowledge and skill gap between you and the big players.
Caveats
One thing you might have noticed is that though the answers ChatGPT generated were clear, they were lacking personality. ChatGPT is as much Chat as it is Bot, which means you can’t really expect to feel the personality of someone behind the content. There is literally no person (You can adjust ChatGPT’s tone by asking it to spit out information with some personality (“make this funny” “make this witty,” but results vary wildly). BUT – that doesn’t mean you can’t make use of the information being generated, molding it into your own words and brand identity. In a way, you could argue that’s all that researching for an article really is. ChatGPT just makes it about 1000x times faster.
That said, you do always have to worry about the lingering chance of inaccuracies. ChatGPT is really just pulling data from all over the place, and it’s tone is as confident for something it gets completely wrong as it is for things that are accurate. The more easily understood the topic, the better the odds are that its information is accurate (if not original). But when you start going into niche topics or even just “new” topics, it’s going to be more critical for you to back up what ChatGPT generates with your own research to make sure you aren’t accidentally spreading misinformation or misleading your consumers.
ChatGPT Changes the Game for Small Business Owners
The AI revolution is here, and these tools are only going to get more powerful as they continue to learn. The best thing small business owners can do for themselves is start making use of these tools in their day-to-day to speed up processes, save money, and close the knowledge and skill gap that bigger companies have been exploiting for a leg up for years. Tools like ChatGPT will become the great equalizer – and level the playing field for truly talented companies and individuals to get the attention they deserve.
