How to Train ChatGPT for Small Businesses

Are you trying to use ChatGPT for marketing? You’re certainly not alone. Marketers everywhere are using ChatGPT and other AI/ANI tools to help with idea generation, keyword research, copyediting, and more.

But if your efforts with ChatGPT are falling flat, it could be because you’re not training it right!

Think of ChatGPT like an intern. The intern’s value is limited on day one, but after a bit of training, they begin to provide significant value. The same is true of ChatGPT and similar tools. The outcomes of these tools largely depend on what you put into them (i.e., the power of your prompting or “training”).

This guide explains five things you must do to train your ChatGPT for greater marketing success.

Five Things Your Small Business Can Train ChatGPT To Do

1. Explain Your Brand Guidelines

Start by helping ChatGPT understand your brand. Input your vision, mission, values, personality, messaging guidelines, and visual elements in the Custom Instructions feature. It will ensure all responses from the app will align with them. Once you input these guidelines, ChatGPT may serve up a few questions to clarify its understanding.

2. Input Information About Your Target Audience

Unless you input information from your customer personas into ChatGPT, it could generate ideas and responses that may not resonate with the people you’re targeting. You can remedy this by supplying the tool with information about your target audience. Doing so helps the artificial intelligence (AI) understand who it’s providing information for, making it possible for it to address their pain points, issues, and preferences. Inputting audience information will train ChatGPT to think and speak like your buyers rather than outputting generic ideas or content.

3. Templatize Your Instruction Prompts

It’s also a good idea to create templated instructions for different use cases, including creating a newsletter, coming up with social media ideas, or developing blog post titles and outlines. Templates can speed up your work by saving you from writing prompts from scratch repeatedly. Instead, you can select a template and customize it for a specific need. Templates will not only make your work more efficient — using them can also result in greater consistency in output quality.

4. Use Real Examples

Provide ChatGPT with a better understanding of your organization and marketing efforts by:

• Explaining the rationale behind your promotional campaigns

• Sharing real-life examples of how customers interact with your brand and purchase your goods and services

Taking this step will transfer some of your institutional marketing knowledge to the artificial intelligence backing ChatGPT and enhance its ability to generate high-quality output.

5. Improve Your ChatGPT Training Over Time

Training ChatGPT isn’t once-and-done. Much like training an intern or new employee, it should be an ongoing process to improve performance.

Regularly ask yourself the following questions to ensure ChatGPT is performing optimally for you:

• Is it generating relevant ideas and creating brand-appropriate (and accurate) content?

• Do the ideas and concepts created by ChatGPT align with your marketing strategies and tactics?

• Are customers engaging with the assets developed with help from the app?

• Has there been any decline in the quality of the output from ChatGPT?

If you identify any issues with your ChatGPT performance, supply it with information to course correct or reset the platform entirely to get things on track.

Marketing With ChatGPT: The Bottom Line

ChatGPT is only becoming more popular and useful. Still, it’s not perfect, and its success depends on your input. You might not see the value right away, but give it time.

In short, don’t give up on ChatGPT as a marketing resource; don’t solely rely on it to take over your marketing efforts, either. Instead, leverage the proven tactics in this guide to train this useful, promising tool the right way. The better you train ChatGPT, the better it will serve your brand in the long run.