ChatGPT and Your Brand: What Small Businesses Need to Know About Using AI
Whether you’re a founder, marketer, or small business owner, you need to understand the ways Artificial Intelligence tools — like ChatGPT — can help your business. And the ways it can hurt your business too.
As someone who makes a living telling brand stories and crafting brand content, and crafting brand messaging, I use ChatGPT too. Honestly, there are ways that these AI tools can really help you out, speeding up your content creation and filling in some gaps.
For small businesses, in particular, I understand the urge to go full thrusters with ChaptGPT. I hear it from clients all the time: “We’ll just ChatGPT that”. (Yes, it’s so common, it’s become a verb). And I support the use of AI in writing… but you need to use it properly.
Let’s break down how small businesses can use AI tools wisely — and where to proceed with caution.
The Sparkle of AI for Small Businesses
There’s a reason AI is appealing. Especially for small businesses. Time is tight. Budgets are tight. Staffing is tight. The promise of instant content and automated ideas is hard to resist.
With tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Jasper, Copilot (and others) businesses can:
Save time generating rough content drafts
Reduce costs associated with outsourcing or hiring
Accelerate brainstorming for marketing, product naming, and campaign ideas
Speed up repetitive tasks like summarizing data, formatting emails, or repurposing content
That all sounds great — and it can be. But AI is only great for your content if you know how to use it properly. You should use it to assist you. But you should never use it to simply do the work for you.
3 Ways You Should Use AI to Help Your Brand Content
If you’re running a business and trying to do All The Things, here are a few smart, strategic ways to use AI to make your life easier. These are some of the key ways you should be using AI to improve your output:
1. Brainstorming Content and Campaign Ideas
AI is fantastic for riffing on themes, angles, or creative directions when you’re stuck. It can generate dozens of options in the blink of an eye to help you break a mental block and spark new thinking. What might take you and your team hours to create, AI can do in mere seconds. These won’t always be the best collection of ideas (there might be some real boneheaded AI-generated ideas), but there will certainly be some solid ideas and maybe some you’d never have considered on your own. This is a great way to get your content started.
2. Basic Blog and Email Drafting
When you need a quick starting point for a newsletter or blog post, AI can produce a serviceable first draft. But — and this is crucial — you will still need to edit it. Having used AI for tasks like this many, many times, I’d say that AI can get you maybe 50-60 percent of the way there (even when you’ve “trained” your AI and it understands your brand, this is the best you should expect). Please never publish AI content without a read-through and edit from a real human. You don’t want your brand looking 50-60 percent good, so take some extra time to get it as close to 100 as you can.
3. Product Descriptions and Social Captions
If you feed your AI the right info (details, tone, target audience), it can draft captions or eCommerce blurbs which you then refine. For short tasks like these, AI is exceptional because it’s so fast and often these pieces of content need less expert oversight. Nonetheless, think of the AI output as a rough sketch, not a finished painting. You still always need to review and revise, as needed.
Don’t Fall Into These 4 AI Traps That Could Hurt Your Brand
Despite the obvious pros to using AI to help your brand content, there are also plenty of cons (or, if not cons, then definitely concerns). Here are five serious limitations that small businesses need to watch out for.
1. Poor Prompts
Great results don’t come from sh*tty prompts. To get usable outputs, you need to know what to ask, how to ask it, and how to guide your AI tool through multiple iterations. If you don’t put the work in to guide your AI, it won’t know what to write. But that won’t stop it from churning something out for you. You need to know what to prompt and then you need to read the AI’s response to make sure it’s on the right track. If it’s not correct, you’ll need to re-prompt it. Hint: if you don’t quite know what to ask of your AI and how to prompt it well, you can ask the AI to help design your prompts and then use those.
2. Bland, Played-Out Content
AI pulls from what’s already out there in the World Wide Web — so its ideas and writing can sometimes feel bland, clichéd, or recycled. It takes what’s been said and done before and tries to find ways to create something original for you, but it generally defaults to reproducing dominant patterns in how a topic is talked about and what has historically worked elsewhere. It often uses generic or familiar phrasing, which can be a dead giveaway that the content is written by a bot (e.g. “In today’s fast-paced world…”) Audiences with even a halfway-decent radar can usually tell when something was AI-generated.
3. Inaccuracy and Errors
AI makes factual errors. And, actually, it does this pretty often. AI like ChatGPT struggles with nuance, gets timelines wrong, and can even “hallucinate” (a real AI term) facts that aren’t real. Basically, it messes stuff up because it’s trying to write what it “thinks” humans want to read. AI generates information that sounds plausible because the model doesn’t “know” facts in the way humans do. So, instead, it tries to predict the next word or phrase or piece of evidence based on patterns it has “learned”. When it can’t find the right information to support a topic, it may confidently make up names, stats, quotes, or details that seem correct. Your key learning here: use AI with caution, especially when producing high-stakes content.
4. Tone and Emotion Gaps
AI doesn’t know your brand, your customers, or your why. It has no lived experience. It doesn’t run a business, pitch clients, or sit in stakeholder meetings. It doesn’t feel pressure, fatigue, joy, or friction. Without truly understanding human emotions, AI attempts to predict what we want to read based on algorithm that lacks heart. This means AI-produced content often includes examples that are too safe or sterile, a neutral tone that’s not compelling to unique, and advice that might be correct but won’t be memorable. Tip: If you’re finding this is the case with your AI content, try feeding it some anecdotes, beliefs, and opinions of your own, so your personality begins to come through.
A Hybrid Approach Is the Sweet Spot
Here’s the smartest move for most small businesses: Use AI to start the job. Use a qualified human to finish it.
Let AI help you brainstorm faster
Let AI give you a first draft
Then, step in to:
Refine the tone and accuracy
Infuse brand voice and storytelling
Edit for flow, clarity, and cohesion
Add real-life insights and experience
What AI Can’t Replace
No matter how good the tech gets, it can’t: understand your brand’s deeper purpose, write with lived experience, catch subtle audience cues, build emotional connection through insight.
This is a big part of the value offered through Clap Clap Creative is helping brands say what only they can say, not just what everyone else is saying. AI can help you do some things quickly, but it struggles to help you stand out.
That layer of human clarity, excitement, discernment, sophistication, and distinctiveness? AI can’t manipulate or fake that.
I used AI to help me write this blog
You’ve got to practice what you preach, right? I used ChatGPT to help me write this blog. And it got me about 50% of the way to what you’re reading now. This blog still required hours of my own time to refine, research further outside AI, rewrite (almost entirely) the content, and seek further clarifications from ChatGPT. Remember: AI is just a tool, like a pencil or a computer. You need to know how to use it, and you need to bring the human touch to it if you want the tool to function at its best.
Want to use AI in a smart, brand-safe way? Or need help turning rough drafts into real-deal content? Let’s talk.
