Launched on November 30, 2022, ChatGPT reached the milestone of 1 million users in just a matter of 5 days. However, it took Netflix 3.5 years, Facebook 10 months, and Instagram 2.5 months to reach 1 million users.
As per the ResumeBuider.com survey of 1,000 U.S. business leaders, 48% of companies that are using ChatGPT have replaced workers with it, while 25% of companies have saved significant money with ChatGPT. Moreover, there is a growing buzz about ChatGPT replacing humans in all industries. For small business owners who have limited resources and big dreams, is ChatGPT the all-in-one platform for marketing? Let’s find out the usability of ChatGPT for marketing.
What’s Special about ChatGPT?
One of the main reasons behind the massive popularity of ChatGPT is the size of its dataset. ChatGPT is powered by the largest language-processing AI model called GPT-3 (Generative Pretrained Transformer 3), which is trained through a huge dataset of 570 gigabytes (equivalent to 385 million pages on MS Word). This huge dataset includes data gathered from articles, books, Wikipedia, social media, and similar other sources.
With the massive dataset, ChatGPT can answer queries and assist in specific/complex tasks for a wide range of industries. Moreover, its answers sound more human-like and accurate, and you can also continue conversations like you do with humans. Overall, ChatGPT has emerged as a game-changing platform in the field of natural language processing.
How Small Businesses can use ChatGPT for Marketing
Before ChatGPT, if a small business owner wants to create a blog post, sales copy, or other marketing material, he/she has to instruct the marketers to do so. However, now the small business owner can instruct ChatGPT to do it and get the results instantly. So, let’s highlight how small businesses can use ChatGPT for marketing:
Generate Marketing Content
You can use ChatGPT to generate marketing content for your business, such as blog posts, ad copy, product descriptions, social media captions, headlines, etc. For example, you can ask ChatGPT “write 500 words blog post on five benefits of using robotic vacuums”, and it will generate the exact blog post with a proper intro, body, and conclusion text. Afterward, you can refine the blog post, give it a personal touch, and publish it.
Get Content Ideas
If you want to get ideas about the marketing content for your products/services, you can use ChatGPT to get suggestions and then pick the best choices. For example, you can ask ChatGPT “I have a robotic vacuum product, and I need some suggestions on some sales copies”. Similarly, you can customize the responses further to get better content ideas.
Optimize Existing Content
If you have marketing content that is outdated or you think it is not catchy/professional, you can input that content to ChatGPT and ask it to refine the content accordingly. For example, you can ask ChatGPT “Make this content more catchy and engaging to convince readers to visit the website”.
Social Media Management
You can also use ChatGPT to facilitate social media presence. You can use it to generate professional responses for messages and comments. In addition, you can generate engaging content for social media posts with ChatGPT. For example, you can ask ChatGPT “write an engaging tweet for my robotic vacuum”.
Email Marketing
You can create personalized email campaigns with ChatGPT. You can ask it to create emails in special tones and related to customer interests. For example, you can ask ChatGPT “write a promotional email for 30% off on New Year’s Eve”. Besides generating the whole email, you can also ask ChatGPT to write specific parts of the email, such as subject line optimization, call of action, etc.
Can ChatGPT Really Help with Marketing?
If ChatGPT can assist in all the major marketing activities, then isn’t it the end of the marketing field for humans?
Well, ChatGPT looks attractive, and its responses look engaging, but ChatGPT is not a replacement for marketers at least for now. In fact, relying on ChatGPT for ALL of your marketing campaigns is a disaster waiting to happen.
Below are some of the main reasons why ChatGPT is not your content creation savior:
Trained Data Limited to 2021
Although it seems ChatGPT gives up-to-date content, it is not connected to the internet and is trained with the data till 2021. So, it fails to incorporate current events, trends, or anything valuable for effective marketing. What you see is an excellent placement of phrases in the exact way you intend to see them. For example, if you ask ChatGPT about “best marketing strategies,” it will also list some outdated strategies.
Inaccurate Responses
ChatGPT is getting widely criticized for inaccurate responses and factual inaccuracies. In fact, it itself warns the users that it can occasionally generate incorrect responses. However, ChatGPT presents its responses so professionally that finding wrong/incorrect information is often challenging. But these inaccurate responses can cause significant harm to your marketing strategy.
Doubtable Ranking
The content you generate with ChatGPT is not guaranteed to rank well. Google doesn’t love AI-generated content, and ChatGPT is also not an SEO expert. Even if you ask ChatGPT to place keywords in the content, it will not be search engine optimized. So, if you rely heavily on ChatGPT, then you might not get the ranking results that you can otherwise get with a human touch.
Privacy Concerns
ChatGPT also has many privacy concerns. Just if you look at its “privacy policy“, you will see that it mentions sharing personal information in certain conditions with third parties without further notice. In addition, the 570 GB of data used to train ChatGPT includes massive internet data, which means it incorporates many copyrighted content. So, you cannot authenticate that the content it generates for you is always unique and directly usable.
Content Hijacking
ChatGPT remembers every query it makes, as it is used to train and improve the model further. So, if you share your sales copy with ChatGPT for optimization, then that sales copy is now part of ChatGPT’s database. This means that if someone else requests a similar sales copy, ChatGPT might use a part of your sales copy. So, it is not recommended to share sensitive information with ChatGPT.
In short, ChatGPT is not the platform that small businesses can rely on entirely for the whole marketing campaign.
Wrapping Up – Humans are Irreplaceable by ChatGPT
Undoubtedly, ChatGPT has the potential to slightly improve the marketing approach, but small businesses should only involve it as an assistant for humans. Although it can support content ideation and content creation, there is still a need for the human touch to enhance its responses and develop a marketing strategy that aligns with the business vision and new market trends. To sum up, a small business should implement a proper marketing strategy before integrating ChatGPT and then support existing marketing processes with ChatGPT.