Get the most out of tools like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini AI without falling for common generative AI pitfalls.

AI marketing tools are transforming how businesses communicate, including the beauty industry. Businesses are using them to improve their marketing campaigns, brainstorm new ideas for blogs, and deliver better service to clients.

Those who know how to play to the strengths of platforms like ChatGPT and Google Gemini will get the best results. Read on to learn how to put this powerful new technology to work for your beauty business.

Key takeaways:

• Get the best responses from ChatGPT by offering context in your prompts and honing results with follow-up questions.

• Use ChatGPT for market research to help you create better surveys, analyze client feedback, and learn more about the competition.

• Google Gemini AI can automate many parts of running your back office, like summarizing large documents or giving you a rundown of your daily schedule first thing in the morning.

• Avoid making generative AI mistakes like using boring-sounding copy, not double-checking ChatGPT output for inaccuracies, and asking AI marketing tools to handle large creative tasks on their own.

Get the best responses from ChatGPT

Generative AI marketing tools, such as ChatGPT, work like souped-up, conversational search engines. You provide it with a question or a request, and ChatGPT uses a powerful algorithm trained on a massive data set to give you an answer. 

It can feel like magic. But like any tool, it works best when you know how to use it and understand what it can do best. For example, ChatGPT doesn’t know anything on its own. It’s using a pool of already-existing information and providing you with an answer based on that info — it can’t create anything brand new. It can also “hallucinate,” or confidently provide you with wrong information.

To get the best results out of ChatGPT, you don’t just need to know what to ask for; you need to know how to ask for it. Here are some tried-and-true methods for getting the most accurate responses, especially when using AI for business needs.

• Offer more context: ChatGPT thrives on specificity. Sure, you can ask it to “give me a plan to get people in my salon,” but you may not get a useful answer. Try asking “help me come up with a social media strategy to bring in upper-class professionals aged 18-34 for a haircut,” and you’re more likely to get a response you can act on. Include the tone of the messaging, the goal of your material, and even cite examples of ad copy you like to give ChatGPT more information to work with.

• Hone your response: If you get a useful response from your first question, great! Otherwise, you may need to put in a little more effort to get exactly what you’re looking for. Start by telling ChatGPT what’s wrong with its response, or ask it to adjust its output in another direction.

• Make the response yours: ChatGPT has a lot of information to work with, so its responses tend to be pretty broad. Offering details about your business — its values, service offerings, and other unique characteristics — will help tailor its response to fit your specific needs. Only give ChatGPT information you’re comfortable handing over, though, as using the platform means you’re handing over permission to use it as training data.

Read The 25 Best ChatGPT Prompts to Supercharge Your Medspa Marketing Content for examples to get your generative AI journey started right.  

Use ChatGPT for market research

While some of the most common use cases for generative AI tools are ideation and content creation, they also excel at analyzing data for potential trends. That means they can help you find out more about your current and potential client base.

Before you launch your next marketing campaign, try asking ChatGPT to help you with the following:

• Create better surveys: Survey data is only as good as what you put in the questionnaire. Feed ChatGPT your list of questions and ask for critiques to find out which questions are too complicated or won’t give you the data you need. You can also ask it for advice on ways to increase survey visibility to boost response rates.

• Analyze client feedback: While you should avoid uploading private data to ChatGPT, you can ask it to sift through online reviews to uncover feedback trends. Are appointments taking a little too long? Is a particular stylist providing exceptional service? ChatGPT can find common points of feedback across hundreds of reviews in the time it might take you to read a single one.

• Learn about the competition: Keeping up with your competitors can feel like a full-time job. Luckily, the analyses you run for yourself can also work on your competition. Use ChatGPT to find trends in their online reviews, look at which services they’re offering, and discover potential gaps you can fill to get a leg up.

Check out Using ChatGPT for Market Research: 5 Tips for Understanding Your Audience for even more ways you can leverage tech to find new clients.

Delete tedium with Gemini AI

You got into this business because you want to help clients look and feel their best, not to handle a bunch of time-consuming back-office tasks. Still, managing your website, planning your social media schedule, and other daily admin duties are essential.

Luckily, Google’s Gemini AI can help. Like ChatGPT, you can use conversational prompts to generate a response, whether to answer a question, help you brainstorm ideas, or even create images. Unlike ChatGPT, Gemini AI can leverage many of Google’s productivity tools, like Google Docs and Google Sheets, to summarize documents or even analyze reports without the need for tedious copy and pasting.

Gemini AI is available in two flavors: a free version that offers some core functionality in exchange for collecting any data that you share with it, and a paid version that provides beefier creation tools along with a private workspace that’s all yours to explore and create within.

Want to clear out more time for giving clients a phenomenal experience? Ask Gemini AI to help you with jobs like:

• Brainstorming copy: Generative AI is great at writing quick, to-the-point messages like email headers and social media copy. It’s more likely to lose the thread with long-form content like blog entries. Instead, try using it to brainstorm a bunch of topics you can flesh out with your business’s unique ideas and voice.

• Automating tasks: Because Gemini has access to all of the tools in your Google Workspace, you can use it to surface the most important information from your inbox, summarize your schedule, or even help you pick the right photo for a project. You can even set up automated processes to handle those tasks at specific times of the day, so you can get that schedule run-down first thing in the morning. 

• Staying on top of trends: Beauty trends move fast. One minute, there’s a TikTok that goes viral, and the next, you have a dozen clients asking for it before you even have a chance to check your FYP. Good thing the best AI tools for beauty businesses specialize in detecting patterns — just ask it to surface the latest trends and you’ll have an answer in seconds.

Read The Glow-Up Guide: 5 Ways Salons Are Leveraging Gemini AI to learn more about how Google’s AI platform can keep your beauty business in the sweet spot.

Using AI marketing tools? Don’t make these mistakes

GenAI flubs aren’t uncommon, but they’re often the result of users trying to do something the tool just wasn’t built for. If you plan on incorporating generative AI tools for marketing into your beauty business, stay vigilant and follow this advice:

• Don’t use boring content: By default, ChatGPT aggregates a ton of data to give you a highly generalized response. Unless you’re asking specific questions and feeding it elements of your brand identity and voice, you’ll likely get generic content back. Keep refining your results — either through additional prompts or by revising it yourself — until you get content you’re happy with.

• Fact-check everything: AI is very good at presenting information as fact, but it can’t think for itself. Sometimes the information it gives you may be wrong. Always double-check data you get from genAI sources before you use it. You don’t want to end up like that lawyer who cited a court case that didn’t exist.

• Leave creativity to the humans: AI marketing tools can fill gaps or generate ideas, but they’re not as good at developing creative projects from start to finish. Use these tools as a springboard, but avoid making them the backbone of any project that requires creativity or insight. Otherwise, you’ll end up with something that lacks the unique spark your brand brings to the table.

Read Real or Robot? 5 AI Best Practices to Avoid Marketing Pitfalls for more ways to improve how you use AI marketing tools.