Why I Love GenAI for Small Businesses
Curious about Generative AI - but too busy running your small business to ask? Here's 9 prompts that will take some small biz burdens off you.
When I left corporate America last fall, rather than pursue a full-time job, I decided to start a marketing consulting agency, ostensibly to make time to write Musings of a Storyteller. That decision translated to having to promote myself to secure agency clients, fulfill the work I bring in, write for Musings — and build an audience around it.
To say it is all overwhelming is an understatement. “Self-inflicted,” my son Alex tells me. Guilty. Although my newly-recognized, post-menopausal ADHD superpower seems to help. As does generative AI (GenAI).
Working for AI companies schooled me on the promise of GenAI. I also knew the dangers, as well as the role it could play in large enterprises - everywhere from coding to building better chatbots (in an effort to keep you from ever getting a real person on the phone).
But exiting corporate America meant I left behind the ability to experiment - and expense those experiments. Like most small business owners, I am very conscious of all the necessary expenditures — collaboration tools, creation tools, billing tools, domains. Plus, when I busy doing my day job(s) it was hard to find time (and energy) to tinker with GenAI.
Apparently I am not alone. Despite the promise of saving time and money with generative AI, according to an Ascend2/Constant Contact survey, only 26% of small businesses are using AI. And whereas a couple years ago, there were scant options, now the world is brimming with them.
And while I desperately wanted to resist doing one more task - I knew that GenAI could provide an enormous assist. And indeed, in navigating all my (self-imposed) challenges, I’ve discovered that GenAI is a game-changer. From how to optimize articles, developing personas, researching, creating brand concepts – there is very little you can’t do with Generative AI — and for a surprisingly small investment.
Here are some ways you can make it work for you too.
I reached out to some enterprising friends to gather their best tips on using GenAI in small businesses. First, you will need to use a Large Language Model - an LLM. An LLM is a collection of algorithms that will create conversational answers to your answers. As a sophisticated AI tool, once you train it, it’s an incredibly capable assistant.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT was the first to really kick off consumer interest. There are several on the market now, like Claude, Gemini, CoPilot. Most have a free version. I’ve been using ChapGPT Plus at $20/month, and it pays for itself – daily. And there are a ton of applications out there - that use those LLMs as their core.
The way you interact with an LLM is through prompts. A prompt is a question - and you make that prompt as detailed as you want.
ProTip: The more details you provide it, the better the answer. If you don’t like the answer just type try again, or give it more information. If you are unsure you can always ask the prompt a better way to phrase it.
In any event, here are nine amazing ways you can tap Generative AI to take some of the burden of running a business off you.
1. Developing Personas
Scott Hall, publisher of the Get the Digital Edge, loves Google Gemini to develop personas in order to better target newsletters. “My prompt is to say I am trying to target this specific audience (name, age, role, occupation, interests, expertise) — and then I give that persona or avatar a name. Let’s call it Pat. I then will start a new prompt where I ask it to give me technology topics that might interest Pat.”
2. Re-tooling Your LinkedIn Bio
Andy Crestodina is an author and expert on content strategy and AI who regularly writes tips on using GenAI on his Linkedin account. He says a good place to start is with your LinkedIn page. Your profile page is probably out of date — listing skills that you put up there 3 jobs ago. To make sure it appeals to your current audience, modify your LinkedIn page in this way. Use the following prompt: “You are a _______ and ________ expert, skilled at ________. My ideal customer profile (ICP) is ___________. Here is a linkedin Profile. List 5 ways this profile could be more compelling to the persona, and list 5 least important elements.” Then edit your profile page accordingly!
3. Building a Marketing Strategy
Brian Piper, director of content strategy at the University of Rochester suggests using ChatGPT to develop a marketing strategy. “Tell ChatGPT about who your customers are, what problems they have that you (or your products/services) help solve, and tell it what your business goals are. Then ask it to come up with a marketing strategy for your business and to include tactics that you can use to help you reach your goals. It can even come up with a schedule, a list of deliverables for the different tactics, estimated costs, etc.
4. Role Playing Difficult Conversations
Another one from Brian: to role play difficult conversations you may need to have with employees, customers, your boss, etc. “Open up pi.ai on your phone, tell it about the situation you want to role-play and give it details about the role you want it to play, and then have the discussion. When you're done, ask it to give you suggestions on different ways to handle the interaction or to provide a summary of your conversation. It's a great way to come up with other ideas and to better anticipate questions or topics the other person might bring up.”
Pi.ai has a terrific interface - try it while it is still free!
5. Researching and Content Drafting
Shawn Lorenz is a veteran sales executive with a 9-person security start up. He wears 10 hats including having to handle all the marketing. He loves Perplexity to research very specific topics — like “what are the cyber security issues for the automotive industry.” Unlike ChatGPT, Perplexity provides links to all its sources. He can read through the citations and pull together a document. Then he puts his document into ChatGPT to make it more concise. Finally, he edits that output to add any stats, case studies, or quotes. “Instead of spending a lot of my time creating content from scratch, I spend a good enough time taking AI created content - and stripping away the AI.”
6. Developing Brand Concepts
Jenna Soard used her expertise to create a master class on building a visual brand. She gave me prompts for ChatGPT to develop a visual brand concept for my audience of 45-65 year olds (mainly women) looking for their next Next. She had me include the type of leader I wanted to project (fun and accessible), any imagery styles I liked (whimsy and fantasy) and colors. ChatGPT gave me suggestions that I could then refine. I use these prompts in Microsoft’s Designer to come up for the heroes for my posts. As my budget allows, I can
7. Modifying Artwork and Optimizing Articles
Adrienne J, author of
and digital marketer, is admittedly one of those small business owners who is “too busy” with the day-to-day parts of her job and life to give much time to learning a new GenAI tool. She uses Canva’s AI assistance to edit photos and graphics for her clients, removing backgrounds and changing colors in much less time than doing this manually with a photoshop tool. She is also enjoying using MarketMuse, an SEO tool that uses AI to semantically optimize her articles on Substack. “MarketMuse saves so much time, it removes the drudgery of having to research to better optimize my articles.”8. Jump-Starting Advertising Ideas
My friend Shari is the office manager of a small (but growing) landscaping company. She does everything from payroll, bookkeeping, accounting, scheduling — and of course, the marketing. “AI helps me shift gears. One minute I’m in bookkeeping mode, and then I have to be creative. I have no one to bounce ideas off of – I can spit ball with AI.” She uses Jasper.ai to help kickstart radio scripts. “I tend to rewrite them 100% - but it starts the process — and eliminates that horrifying blank page.”
9. Creating a Custom GPT for a Virtual Assistant
A prompt works best if you include all the information about your business, solutions and customers. Does that mean you need to repeat all this info with every task? The answer is no! You can customize it.
Robert Rose is an author, podcaster, noted content marketing expert and principal of the Content Advisory. “One of my favorite tools is OpenAI’s ChatGPT – and a custom GPT that I built. I ‘customized’ the learning model GPT to understand my basic tone, style, thoughts, and expertise. And you can make it specifically designed to answer questions as YOU would. Custom GPTs are VERY easy to build. The key is to upload your ‘knowledge’ in documents. So, for example, I uploaded the two books that I wrote, and about 300 blog posts that I’ve written over the last four years. Now when ever I want to craft something like an abstract to a webinar, or some web copy for my website – I can go to the custom GPT and ask, how I might write this.“
I totally agree, Robert. A custom GPT is an amazing shortcut to capturing your unique writing style and expertise!
I’d love to hear your stories—how are you using Generative AI in your own work? Share your experiences in the comments or reach out to me directly. Let’s learn from and encourage each other!
