ChatGPT has been making headlines since it became publicly available a few months ago. People have been using the technology to generate different types of content for personal and business use. But will it help your business grow?
The answer is that it depends. There are many ways that small businesses can use ChatGPT to promote growth.
A Refresher on ChatGPT
Before getting into how you can use ChatGPT to grow your small business, make sure you understand what it is. The program is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot. This means that it creates unique answers when users input different queries or prompts. Thanks to the vast amounts of data it was trained on, ChatGPT can create a response to nearly any prompt.
Improve Customer Service Responses
As a chatbot, one of the most obvious applications of ChatGPT is customer service. You can use it to respond to customer queries, especially simpler ones that don’t require the unique knowledge of your team. Popular options would be to incorporate ChatGPT into your website. You can also use it to generate templates for common customer service emails.
Gather Feedback
The customer service responses in the previous point are more focused on converting leads. But ChatGPT can also help small businesses gather feedback once a customer purchases your product or if they decide not to.
Use ChatGPT to generate questions to ask customers about their buying experience or the product itself. Then, use the feedback to evaluate what improvements are necessary. Thanks to ChatGPT, boring surveys can become engaging conversations. That should increase your response rate and give you more detailed answers.
Create Social Media Posts
Advanced AI like ChatGPT is also an excellent tool for streamlining your social media marketing. You can use it to create content for your posts. From there, use automated systems to schedule and post your content.
Just remember to always check the social media posts ChatGPT generates for you. That’s the only way to ensure that the post is accurate and in line with your vision.
Generate Leads
By helping you communicate with customers and post social media content, the chatbot can help you generate more leads. The first of these lets you pivot the conversation toward collecting contact information. Meanwhile, social media posts encourage engagement and, therefore, leads.
Generate Summaries
As a small business owner, your time is limited. You may not have the time to write textual summaries based on articles, meetings, or even research notes. But ChatGPT can do this for you.
However, there is one important caveat. You can only input a certain amount of text into ChatGPT at a time. As such, you may have to break your meeting notes or article into smaller bits to take advantage of this feature.
Find Keywords
The vast amount of data that ChatGPT has access to means that it is great at helping you choose keywords. It will likely deliver similar results to what you would get with any traditional keyword research tool.
Just keep in mind that you won’t get as much detail about the keyword. Instead, you would likely have to separately ask ChatGPT for metrics such as competition level, top-ranking websites, and other data about a given keyword.
Create Outlines for Content
You could technically use ChatGPT to create blog content for your website or even for your main website pages. But this is less than ideal, as ChatGPT doesn’t always provide accurate information. However, it excels at creating outlines for those topics.
If, for example, you want to write a blog post for your website or make an eBook for your customers, you can ask ChatGPT to create an outline for it. From there, you can adjust the outline to fit your needs.
Automation
You’ll notice that most of the above points rely on ChatGPT’s ability to automate repetitive tasks. Whether those tasks are communicating with leads, engaging with people on social media, or interacting with customers, you will see all of the benefits associated with automation.
To start, automation has incredible time-saving benefits. You can spend time on the most important tasks of running a small business instead of routine, low-value tasks.
Improve Recruitment Processes
ChatGPT can help you with the hiring process. If you aren’t sure what questions to ask during an interview, ask the program to generate some. Then, use those as a starting point to get to know applicants better.
Some Important Precautions
While ChatGPT can support business growth if used correctly, you should also be cautious when using it. ChatGPT can occasionally provide wrong information and do so confidently. It can also take a tone that isn’t in line with your brand voice. It may also respond to questions that put sensitive information at risk or even be offensive.
As such, always use ChatGPT with caution. It’s best to use it for content that can be proofread ahead of time instead of real-time communication, at least for now.
The Bottom Line
ChatGPT can help savvy small business owners grow their businesses. You can use it to generate leads, find keywords, and talk to customers. Just be aware that the chatbot is not foolproof, so it is still best to use it in contexts where you can check the content before the customer sees it.
