What ChatGPT Means for a Local Business (So Far)

Since the holidays, ChatGPT has come up in nearly every meeting I’ve had. Sometimes the owner is excited. Sometimes they’re worried. Usually they want to know if they should be doing something with it.

The honest answer is that it’s early. The tool has only been public for about two and a half months. But I’ve spent enough time with it to share what I’ve seen so far.

What it is, in plain terms

ChatGPT is a chat tool from a company called OpenAI. You type a request in regular language and it writes back. Ask for a paragraph about your spring special and you get one in a few seconds. Ask it to make that paragraph shorter, friendlier or more formal, and it does.

It learned to do that by reading an enormous amount of text. That’s why it sounds so fluent. It’s also why it has limits, which I’ll get to. Microsoft and Google have both announced plans to bring similar tools into their search products, so this isn’t going away, even if it’s hard to say yet what it becomes.

Where it helps

For a small business without a marketing department, it can take the edge off a blank page. Here’s where I’ve found it useful so far:

• First drafts. A job posting, an FAQ answer, a product description, a thank-you email. It gives you something to react to instead of nothing.
• Brainstorming. Ask for twenty headline ideas for a fall promotion. Most won’t work. Two or three might start something.
• Tightening. Paste in a long paragraph you wrote and ask for a shorter version. This is one of its better tricks.
• Organizing notes. Turn a messy list of bullet points into an outline for a blog post or a staff email.
• Questions to ask. Have it suggest questions for a customer survey, then pick the ones that fit.

Think of it like a new assistant who writes quickly and has never met your customers.

Where it falls short

That last part matters. A few limits have shown up again and again:

It’s generic. Ask it to write an ad for a plumber and you’ll get something that could be for any plumber in any town. That’s the average of everything it has read, and average is exactly what you’re trying to get away from.

It’s sometimes wrong, and it doesn’t sound wrong. It can state a made-up fact, a fake statistic or a business detail that isn’t true with complete confidence. Anything it writes needs to be checked by someone who knows.

It doesn’t know your business. It doesn’t know your hours, your prices, your service area, the problem your best customers came to you with or why they came back. It will also tell you that its knowledge stops at a point in the past, so it won’t know what happened in Michiana last week.

And be careful what you type into it. I wouldn’t paste in customer names, emails or anything you’d want kept private.

The message still comes from knowing your customers

Here’s where I land for now. ChatGPT can write a sentence. It can’t decide what’s true about your business, what your offer should be or why someone in Granger should call you instead of the next company on the list. That comes from talking to customers, reading your reviews, listening to the questions people ask on the phone.

If you know those answers, a tool like this can help you say them faster. If you don’t, it will cheerfully fill the gap with something that sounds good and says nothing.

So try it. Use it for drafts and ideas. Then edit hard, check every fact and make sure it sounds like you. I expect I’ll have more to say about this as it settles.

If you want to figure out what your message should be before you ask anyone, human or machine, to write it, start with the Marketing Checkup.