4 Ways to Use ChatGPT for Local Marketing
Digital agencies are embracing OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and so are local marketers. With its automation capabilities and natural language processing skills, ChatGPT has the potential to level the playing field for small and mid-size businesses as well as regional chains without agency support.
Since its debut last November, ChatGPT has quickly changed the way marketers generate copy across email, social media, and SMS. With advanced language models and natural language processing, tools like ChatGPT are able to generate huge amounts of high-quality content at a fraction of the time it takes humans.
As with most new technologies, though, the earliest adopters have been digital agencies and brands. SMBs and regional chains have been slower to test the waters when it comes to artificial intelligence, in part because there are still so many questions about how the technology can best be used.
Here are four examples of how small and mid-size businesses are using ChatGPT for local marketing in 2023.
1. Content creation for marketing materials
The most clear and obvious use case for ChatGPT in local marketing has to do with content creation. SMBs and regional chains without the resources of national brands can use ChatGPT to quickly generate high-quality content to publish across social media, as well as mailers and email newsletters. With the right prompts, users can generate content accurately and quickly — and at virtually no cost to the business. Businesses with their own branded podcasts can even use ChatGPT to generate scripts or questions for podcast hosts to ask their guests.
As should always be the case, content generated by ChatGPT must be reviewed by a human editor before it’s published. In addition to looking for accuracy, editors should also watch to make sure the content is in line with the voice of the company or brand.
2. Locally relevant web copy
Local landing pages are a key component of the multi-location brand’s digital marketing strategy. However, creating personalized content for hundreds or even thousands of local pages requires a significant investment of time and money. In a recent episode of “This Week in Local” a podcast hosted by Localogy analysts Mike Boland and Charles Laughlin, Local SEO Guide CEO Andrew Shotland spoke about the opportunities for marketers to use tools like ChatGPT to create content for local landing pages. With the right prompts, marketers can quickly generate location-specific versions of all different types of web content.
3. Speeding up mundane reporting tasks
Most local marketers don’t mind content creation. It’s the day to day minutia of composing reports in Google Analytics and remembering the right function names in Excel that drag down productivity. With the right prompts, ChatGPT can actually do a pretty good job of composing complex spreadsheet formulas and fetching data from APIs. For example, store owner who wants to fetch all of their store’s products from their website into a Excel file can generate a fully functional code just by using a prompt like, “Google app script that fetches all product names and prices from Shopify REST API and adds into a spreadsheet.”
Obviously, the specifics of the prompt will vary, however the primary point remains. ChatGPT is capable of quickly generating functional code that local marketers can use to speed up repetitive tasks and reduce the reliance on external developers.
4. Supporting search engine optimization
Most local marketers aren’t aware of ChatGPT’s ability to help with SEO strategy. As a best practice, many local marketers will still want to use tools like Semrush or AnswerThePublic to pinpoint which keywords to target. However, with ChatGPT, they don’t have to. A marketer working with a hotel can use the prompt, “related questions regarding sophisticated hotels in Arizona” and ChatGPT will pull up a list of queries.
Here’s where it gets fun. With those queries in hand, the marketer can then use ChatGPT to generate highly-relevant articles that answer the queries people are most likely to be searching for. Marketers can also generate blog posts that include keywords meant to drive content to their websites. For example, a potential prompt when creating SEO content for a local coffee shop might be: “I’m working with a coffee shop in Seattle, Washington. Please write a blog post about the history of coffee that includes the words sustainable, green, and Seattle’s best roastery.”
