8 easy ways to use ChatGPT to make your small business more efficient

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Key business takeaways:

• Use ChatGPT to help you with business tasks, such as writing social media posts and responding to emails
• Write strong, detailed prompts to get effective results from ChatGPT
• Exercise caution and always fact check when using ChatGPT as the chatbot’s responses may be inaccurate

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Artificial intelligence (AI) is the latest hot topic in business. Since Open AI released ChatGPT in November 2022, the chatbot reached more than 100 million users just two months after launching—making it one of the fastest growing software products of all time. And it’s not just corporations or tech businesses using this tool: ChatGPT is gaining popularity across the business world for a variety of capabilities, such as content creation and data analysis.

AI technology may sound intimidating, especially with concerns about its potential impact on the job market, misinformation, and consumer privacy. However, there are many ways you can use ChatGPT to your advantage while still being aware of its limitations. Think of it as a tool that can help you do your job more efficiently and speed up simple tasks that you already perform regularly. In fact, a 2023 Forbes survey found 64% of businesses expect AI to increase productivity. 

Despite the benefits of this technology, less than 30% of small businesses are investing in AI, according to Gannett’s 2023 research. Get ahead of the game with this small business guide to ChatGPT, and learn how to use it to help your small business’s operations.

Editor’s note: ChatGPT is used as a specific example in this post to help clearly demonstrate chatbot functionality, but it is just one of many chatbot solutions. This article is not endorsed or sponsored by ChatGPT.

What is ChatGPT?
How to write a strong ChatGPT prompt
8 ways small businesses can use ChatGPT
Limitations of ChatGPT

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What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a generative AI chatbot that uses machine learning to produce content, such as images, text, and videos.  To use ChatGPT, you simply enter a question or prompt, and it will answer with human-like responses. Using it feels similar to customer service chatbots, but it has far more capabilities and knowledge. 

What sets it apart from other AI tools? ChatGPT is a large language model trained with human feedback, meaning you can have a human-like, real-time conversation with it. It also has the ability to search the internet for information to complete tasks. ChatGPT can:

• Answer questions
• Summarize information
• Synthesize different pieces of data
• Create written content, including blog articles, emails, and social media captions

You can create a free account or upgrade to ChatGPT Plus for $20 a month, but the free version includes enough useful features to satisfy small business needs. Within seconds, you can get answers to your business questions in a conversational format and leverage the chatbot to get assistance with regular business tasks. 

How to write a strong ChatGPT prompt

Because ChatGPT is a generative AI bot, its effectiveness depends on the wording of the prompts you give it. It’s important to give clear, detailed prompts in order to get the results you desire. In general, longer, more detailed prompts work better, up to 3,000 words. 

Use Trust Insight’s Role, Action, Context, Execute (RACE) framework to write effective prompts:

• Role: Start with a role statement that tells ChatGPT what role it should play. For example, “Pretend you are the owner of a landscaping company in Miami that focuses on landscape design.”
• Action: Describe what you want ChatGPT to do in an action statement. Use specific verbs like “write,” “summarize,” “extract,” etc. based on the task.
• Context: Use a context statement to provide the important background information that ChatGPT needs to complete your task. For example, if you are asking ChatGPT to come up with a product description, you would list details of the product here in bullet form.
• Execute: In the execute statement, reiterate the task ChatGPT will be performing and list any other specifications, such as formatting and tone. The execute statement is optional for shorter prompts, but it is essential for longer prompts to remind ChatGPT of your task. 

After receiving a response in ChatGPT, you can continue messaging it to fine tune your request and better guide the type of answers you receive. Remember, ChatGPT’s responses are only as good as the prompt you give it, so if you’re not getting what you need, try giving it more specific directions or asking it to take a different approach.

8 ways small businesses can use ChatGPT

Many small business owners struggle with delegating tasks or outsourcing help. While ChatGPT is not a replacement for your team’s expertise, you can use it to fulfill simple tasks and streamline your marketing efforts. Below are eight actionable ways for implementing the chatbot to make your business more efficient. 

1. Brainstorm ideas

In a rut and struggling to think of creative solutions for your business? ChatGPT can act as your business partner and quickly generate detailed lists of ideas based on your needs. This is especially helpful for brainstorming creative marketing campaigns or social media ideas—see more on this below.

Another use case for small business owners is creating new products, services, or menu offerings. Say you own a sushi restaurant and are trying to refresh your menu. You can provide ChatGPT with a list of items on your current menu and ask it to come up with new ideas. While these ideas may not always be practical based on your needs and budget, you can use them as a starting point.

2. Create copy for your website

ChatGPT is a helpful tool for creating or updating your small business website. For example, you can ask ChatGPT to generate a punchy description for your business or a summary of your history for your “About” page. You can also use it to do keyword research for search engine optimization (SEO), which is a way to improve your ranking on search engine results pages.

Tell ChatGPT what your small business does and ask it to create a captivating description for your website. You can specify how long you want the description to be and provide additional details that you want included, such as specific keywords or pricing. ChatGPT will instantly respond with a fully fleshed out description that you can edit to your liking.

Save yourself even more time and effort by providing ChatGPT with copy you’ve already written. Your prompt could include content from your business plan or your “From this business” section on your Yelp Page. 

If you haven’t written your “From this business” section yet, ChatGPT can help with that too. Tell ChatGPT who you are, what you do best, and how you got started, and ask it to craft entries for each of the three fields: Specialities, History, and Meet the owner/manager. Always make sure to edit any AI-generated content to make sure it is accurate, flows well, embodies your business tone, and appeals to your target audience.

You can also use ChatGPT to generate descriptions for products or services. Say you’re the owner of a small spa specializing in massage therapy. An example of a prompt you can use for this task is: 

“Create descriptions for Swedish massages, hot stone massages, and reflexology for my spa’s website. Keep the descriptions to 2-3 sentences.” 

ChatGPT will fulfill this simple task and save you time as you’re working on your website.

3. Generate social media content

One of the most daunting parts of social media for many small business owners is writing copy. Luckily, ChatGPT can simplify the process and help you create copy for your social media posts using content you already have. 

As a small business owner, you have likely already put in a lot of work creating longer-form content, such as a business plan or website. ChatGPT can take the legwork out of repurposing that content and easily distill it down into snappy copy such as captions. 

Need help with creating a bio for your social media platforms? Give ChatGPT your business description from your business plan and ask it to create a short Instagram bio in return. ChatGPT will cut the longer description down to the most important details.

Need help with ideas on what to post? If you are feeling creatively stuck, ChatGPT’s ideas can help with your social media and digital marketing efforts—just ask ChatGPT to brainstorm concepts for X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram posts and captions.

Say you own a hair salon and have a promotion for potential customers to get 10% off haircuts for the month of November. You’re not sure what visuals to use for your feed. You can ask ChatGPT to “brainstorm 10 creative ideas for Instagram posts for a 10% off haircuts promotion and create captions for these posts.” ChatGPT will return ideas that you can build off of. 

4. Understand complex topics 

Perhaps ChatGPT’s most useful capability is distilling complex or lengthy information to digestible portions. Rather than having to search the internet for answers to your complex business questions, you can ask ChatGPT to perform its own search on your behalf. 

ChatGPT is great at presenting detailed information in digestible formats. For instance, if you are confused about insurance for your business, you can ask ChatGPT: “Can you explain the types of small business insurance to me?” It will return a succinct response that highlights the main points, as shown below. 

Another area that business owners often struggle with is finance, especially if they don’t have an employee dedicated to managing finances. It can be difficult to understand the different kinds of financial statements and how to organize them. You can ask ChatGPT to explain these concepts to you in simple terms to make it easier to understand. 

5. Write emails

As a small business owner, you have many responsibilities, and it might be hard to stay up-to-date on all email communications. To make this process more efficient, have ChatGPT help you with email writing so you can respond faster and improve your customer satisfaction.

For customer support issues, ChatGPT can help you create quick responses to emails from customers. Provide the chatbot with the customers’ message and notes of what you want covered in the response. It is generally recommended to not include any sensitive or personal information given most AI tools are not confidential.

Say you own a plumbing company and fixed a customer’s toilet, but they emailed you that it is still leaking. You can send the scenario and customer email to ChatGPT and ask it to come up with a friendly, solution-oriented response to the customer’s email. 

You can even use ChatGPT to generate templates to address recurring customer inquiries. For instance, ask ChatGPT to come up with a template for toilet leak inquiries for your plumbing business. Just remember to use the generated template as a guide and edit it for accuracy and personalization to keep that personal touch for direct customer interactions. 

Another common email is media inquiries to get the word out about your business. If you are looking for media coverage for your business, you can use ChatGPT to create email pitches to local publications. 

Say you own a pet grooming business that donates 10% of sales to local pet shelters and you want to get the word out about your fundraiser. You can ask ChatGPT to write a template for emails you’ll send to local publications about your business. 

6. Analyze customer feedback 

Your business can’t grow in a vacuum. To continually improve your customer experience, it is important to make feedback central to your business. ChatGPT can make the process of analyzing customer feedback easier and less time intensive. 

Instead of scrolling through review after review on Yelp, use ChatGPT to summarize the most important points and analyze trends in your reviews. You can also use transcripts of customer service conversations, whether over the phone or email, and ask ChatGPT to distill the most important themes. 

When analyzing Yelp reviews, you can use the following strategy from AI researcher and entrepreneur Alyona Medelyan. Start by writing the following prompt in ChatGPT: 

“Analyze the customer service survey responses below. Aggregate themes by frequency and list them separately for compliments and improvement suggestions. List from most to least frequent, with the number of comments in brackets.”

After writing the prompt, provide ChatGPT with your Yelp reviews before clicking enter. There is no easy way to download all your reviews, but you can copy and paste from your Yelp Page. Sort by date with “Newest First” to get the most recent reviews and input as many as you’d like. 

Remember that most AI tools are not confidential. Because reviews can sometimes include customers’ contact information, it is generally advisable to remove any sensitive or personal information. 

ChatGPT will return a list of the most common themes mentioned in your reviews and areas for improvement, as shown below.

In addition to these helpful trends, you can follow up with more questions, such as “What menu items generate the most complaints?” to give you more insight. Overall, this will simplify the way you look at customer feedback and save yourself time while improving your customer service. 

7. Analyze competitors

In addition to analyzing your own business, you can use ChatGPT to learn from other businesses. Because ChatGPT is great at distilling large pieces of information, it’s very useful for performing a competitive analysis, or the process of identifying competitors and comparing their sales, marketing strategies, and products or services with yours. While you still need to identify competitors yourself, ChatGPT can speed up the rest of this time-intensive process by summarizing information and giving you the main themes.

First, use ChatGPT to analyze competitors’ websites and business descriptions. You can ask ChatGPT to look for trends in business descriptions and product or service offerings. This will give you a better understanding of how your competitors’ offerings compare to yours. For example, if you own a small cafe, you can ask ChatGPT to analyze descriptions from multiple other cafes and identify common themes, strengths, and potential weaknesses, as shown below. 

You can also use ChatGPT to analyze and learn from competitors’ marketing strategies. You can upload social media copy from other businesses and ask ChatGPT to extract key insights and identify trends. This information will help you assess competitors’ strengths and weaknesses on social media. 

Lastly, just as you analyze your own business’s reviews, you can also analyze your competitors’ reviews to see what they are doing well. You can apply the same methodology as described in the section above for analyzing their customer feedback. Remember to take out any personal information you see from customers’ reviews. 

8. Create interview questions

If your business is growing, and you need more employees, ChatGPT can simplify the hiring  process for you. Instead of taking time to brainstorm questions, you can ask ChatGPT to generate a list of interview questions for a specific role at your business.

Say you own a yoga studio and are looking to hire a front desk manager. You can tell ChatGPT to create a long list of questions specific to the role. You can easily pick from this list for your interview. 

This is especially helpful if you are starting your business and have never hired before. ChatGPT will provide popular interview questions that help you get a feel for different candidates’ qualifications and values. 

Limitations of ChatGPT

While ChatGPT is a very advanced chatbot, it is still new to the AI scene, and the use of ChatGPT has several limitations:

• Accuracy problems: ChatGPT does not have a 100% guarantee of accuracy. It is prone to hallucinations, which are instances where it states factually incorrect information. Make sure to proofread and factcheck everything you use from ChatGPT.
• Limited knowledge: Although ChatGPT has access to a large amount of information, it does not have access to all the human knowledge in the world. Its data is limited to before September 2021 and therefore is not always up to date. If your industry has evolved quite a bit in the last couple years, ChatGPT likely won’t be able to deliver highly relevant results.
• Lack of emotional intelligence: Since ChatGPT does not possess true emotional intelligence, you could be losing an important personal touch in your business communications. If you are using ChatGPT to help you interact with customers, the responses could come across as robotic. To avoid this, use ChatGPT responses as a guide or template and edit them with your personal voice. 
• Privacy concerns: ChatGPT isn’t confidential, so you shouldn’t provide personal or sensitive information, such as your business’s private financial information or customers’ names or contact details. If there is a security breach, your personal information could end up in the wrong hands. As a precaution, you can turn off “Chat History & Training” to prevent ChatGPT from saving all your chats. 

Overall, ChatGPT is a useful tool to speed up your business operations and make work more manageable for you. Just be sure to approach it with caution and consistently monitor its performance.