There is a lot of buzz in the online world lately about AI – how to use it, if you should use it, fear of using it — it’s a little bit scary and a little bit interesting and tempting all at the same time – not to mention absolutely completely overwhelming because well… it’s all new and it changes quite a lot of things!
And you may be wondering:
Should I use AI for my handmade business?
and if so . . .
HOW should I use AI for my handmade business?
That’s exactly what we are talking about in today’s article — keep watching and you will find out!
So, ready? Let’s dive in.
When the whole AI thing started exploding online I personally felt very overwhelmed. I didn’t have time to look into it, but it felt like such a huge thing – like a huge Pandora’s box – and a massive rabbit hole to fall into if I was to do proper research about it.
I also felt pretty overwhelmed for what it could mean in my business and also what it means for us as a society at large.
Now, this is obviously not the channel to talk about the effects of AI on our world, but I do think that is a very interesting topic. If you are interested in what the heck AI means for our society as a whole I will link below to some videos from the Center for Human Technology that I’ve really appreciated and highly recommend.
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Now I want to be very clear that what I’m commenting on is what I’m seeing now – at the time I’m writing this article – and it will probably be outdated in a few months, things are changing so quickly in the AI world.
OK, maybe not a few months, but you get what I’m saying – a year ago we weren’t talking about how the regular person can use AI and now we are, it’s changing and evolving all the time.
Now that we have that out of the way, I want to quickly talk about AI tools in general.
When we say AI tools, the one that most people think about – and the one I’m mostly going to be referring to today – is ChatGPT, but there are many others that can help you do things – from creating videos to generating music to creating logos.
We aren’t going to cover all AI tools today because there are MANY of them; but I will say that all of the things that they can do are absolutely mind-boggling!
One example would be a program called Anyword, which generates copy for ads, emails, landing pages, and content — PLUS it supposedly gives you predictive metrics and insights into which part of the message works and for whom. Whoa.
Another app called Pictory turns your text and blog posts into videos or generates images for your content.
Now I haven’t personally used those tools so this is not me backing them, I am just giving you a couple of random examples in a thousand of what’s out there already.
Finally, there is Midjourney which is frankly mind-boggling good already at creating art from creative prompts. Here are a few examples:
Of course, that causes a lot of fear and concerned conversations in the art niche because it’s easy to think “well, if machines can create art and photos and paintings now, what’s the point of us?”
We won’t be covering that question in today’s article, but if you’d like me to write an article about this let me know in the comments below because I’d be happy to do that!
Today, though, I want to focus on AI for business and marketing purposes and give you my thoughts about how to best use the business marketing AI tools for your handmade business – particularly Chat GPT – to help you be more productive and efficient and get better results in less time.
ChatGPT is the AI tool that we’ve all heard about, and its growth has been crazy. It was released on Nov 30 2022, and estimates say it reached 100 million monthly active users in January 2023, making it the fastest-growing application in history.
To put that into perspective, TikTok took 9 months to reach 100 million users . . . and Instagram took 2.5 years!
So it really did explode, which means that a lot of the people who you are competing against probably have started using it. Hence the conversation we need to have today, which is what does it mean for you? And how can you use those tools yourself and do so in a manner that actually is going to be effective?
Now, my general thought about this whole AI thing is that I don’t think AI tools like ChatGPT are going to replace us, but they are certainly changing the way we work already, and they will keep doing so as they improve and get smarter.
So it’s not so much that you’re competing with AI, I don’t think that’s actually possible. But you are competing with other business owners who are using it. So for that reason, I think that yes, you absolutely should be using it . . . don’t panic if you haven’t even started looking into it, but definitely start now.
Next week, I’ll be writing an article that will dive into practical examples and show you the kind of prompts that you can give ChatGPT to give you the output that you are trying to achieve.
But for today I just want to give you an idea of what I think that you should be using those tools for — which is essentially anything that can help you cut down your time OR get better results and outcomes for the same amount of time.
First, let me quickly tell you how I don’t recommend using AI, and that is using it to write full blog posts or just completely replace you when it comes to writing copy for your business. I know it’s really tempting, but there 1. could be copyright issues and 2. It’s honestly not going to be as good as it could be if you use chatGTP alongside YOUR knowledge and input etc.(we’ll come back to that)
Sometimes there have been cases where it pretty much ripped off the content from an actual blog that someone else wrote, and that’s not good.
Think of it this way:
You can’t believe those ads that promise you that you can “completely” automate everything in your business using ChatGPT – not until you can actually plug it into your brain so it can suck out your unique perspectives and experiences and use them… which who knows, might very well happen one day, but we’re not quite there yet!
Think of AI as a tool that helps you improve your content — not as something that can completely replace you or the work of planning your strategy and adding your unique value.
Soooooo knowing all this, how CAN you use AI?
Ideation and content writing and copywriting is the first thing that I would use it for, like helping you generate ideas for blog posts and social media content.
Think about how many times you’ve sat at the computer with a blank brain thinking “What can I actually write about? What should I post?” ChatGPT can give you ideas for that.
When you are writing long content like blog posts – like I said earlier – I do not recommend having ChatGPT write your whole article without any input from you. First it’s going to sound … boring and like any other blog your competition could have written. You can use it for drafts and inspiration but you need to infuse your own special sauce to any copy you write and truly make it your own.
It can be very handy, though, for things like product descriptions, social captions for Instagram or Facebook posts, or even Pin titles and descriptions (I’ll show you examples of these exact 3 things next week so make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss that article when it comes out).
If you’re more into reels and Tiktok, you can actually also ask for ideas for content for those platforms. You can use the tool to help you script complete videos or write scripts for a UGC content creator you would want to work with.
AI can also help you write outreach emails – maybe you are writing one to get featured in a certain magazine, or you need help writing a cold outreach direct message to send to someone you want to partner with.
It can also help with your email marketing by giving you content ideas for your emails and ideas for lead magnets — and even write the subject lines and the copy for those emails.
Another way AI can help is for customer service.
It can help you write out an answer when you have that customer that’s a little bit tricky to handle, you can literally ask it to help you sound friendly and kind and polite, but also firm.
You can use prompts to have ChatGPT help create the tone for pretty much anything you write. So for example, you can write your response and then run it through ChatGPT and say, “Hey, how does that sound?” or “How can we make it a little more friendly?” Or “How can we make it a little bit more <insert the tone of voice that you want>?”
Finally, AI can also generate product ideas like cross sells and upsells.
So for example you could say, “Hey, what are five ideas for products that I could sell in my store that are complementary to my current products?” Or, “What are some complementary product ideas I could sell if I partnered with other makers to make those products?”
The list goes on and on and on and on, there are so many time consuming things that you are doing right now that can be greatly shortened by using tools like ChatGPT.
And how much time is that going to save you? A LOT!
This is just really a little GLIMPSE of what it can do. And if any of that sounds a little bit crazy, it is — but you’d be crazy not to use it.
So now that I’ve hopefully got you a bit excited about AI, I’m going to balance that out by talking about what it cannot do for you.
First and foremost, it cannot think for you. When you work with ChatGPT you still have to ask the right questions and give the right prompts. If you do that AI can get you 90% of the way there.
So you still need to come up with the strategy and the goal you are shooting for, and you still need to input the knowledge: as in giving it information about your brand voice, customer avatars, unique products features, etc.
This forces you to articulate what you want.
Once you have your AI output, you need to look at what it gives you and ask yourself what would you improve and how you want to tweak it.
So for example, let’s say you ask Chat GPT “Hey, can you please come up with 10 captions for Instagram about this product highlighting these features” And it will write those captions for you.
BRILLIANT! BUT….
… you need to be able to read them and say “wait, you know what – they don’t sound like my brand, and that’s not going to resonate with my ideal customer.”
You have to use your deep understanding of what your tone of voice is for your brand, who your ideal customers are, what they deeply think and believe in, and how they write and how they talk, so that your tone of voice matches all of those important things. And that’s not something that the tool can figure out on its own, that’s something that you need to tell it.
So ChatGPT helps you cut down the time and effort spent on working out those deep strategic things about your business and products. Once you know those important details about how you talk and engage with your customers, you can give them to the tool that will then create some really nice, engaging copy that works for that tone of voice and for those customers.
Using ChatGPT is really about knowing what to ask and how to ask it so that GPT it generates the content you need in the voice that you need.
If you’re like me, the whole concept of AI can be a bit creepy, and a bit worrying.
I’ll give you a personal example:
When I first discovered that I could go to ChatGPT and type in “Please write a 2000 word blog post about Etsy SEO” and it would write it in less than 30 seconds I felt completely irrelevant.
I thought, “Well, what’s the point of me writing these articles anymore if this can just do it for me, instantly! Is my content going to lose its value?”
But then I looked at the article it had written. It sounded kinda bland and boring. It sounded like… the help section of Etsy. Helpful but not so helpful also. Why? Because it didn’t include my own experience, or the experiences of all the people that I’ve worked with, and the stories and knowledge I have accumulated in my years of working with sellers.
And that’s my worth – AI can’t replace that.
Whether AI is creating art or product descriptions or captions, these tools don’t know your story, your product stories, your brand stories, your customer stories, and your own experiences – both at work and in life. No tool can provide that. They can give you ideas and help you along, but you need to add your knowledge and experience, and fact check things to be sure they are correct.
YOU have the deep strategic understanding of your market, your audience, your product, your goals, and no tool can guess until you tell it what it is.
So using ChatGPT in a way that makes you stand out from others and ahead of the competition involves infusing what makes you human into the content that these tools create for you.
It’s a little bit like asking a good versus a bad question. When you want feedback from someone, if you just say “Help my sales are down, what should I do?” that’s not as helpful as if you say “Over the last three months, I’ve seen a decrease of 10% in sales after we made changes in x and y, but I can’t determine what is causing the decrease in sales, can you help me troubleshoot?”
You are still going to need to understand and learn strategic things and be on top of your market and deeply connect with your ideal customers in order to use AI tools effectively.
So, my final thoughts about AI?
First, you should absolutely be using it. If you’re not, you are falling behind quickly
And me saying that says a lot, because I’m not like the FOMO girl, right? I’m not a “You should totally be doing that. And if you’re not, you’re missing out!” kind of person.
But in this case, I do think that you will be falling behind pretty quickly if you don’t start to leverage those tools now and see how you can include them in your workflow.
Now, to use AI effectively you do need to learn how to use it properly and you need to know how to prompt those tools to get the best output possible.
Next I’m going to give you examples inside of ChatGPT on how to use it for writing Instagram captions, Pinterest descriptions and product descriptions so you can see what I mean and use them in your own business.
Thanks for reading, make sure to check the links below, and until next time, aurevoir!
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