ChatGPT can help your self-care business learn more about your clients, your advertising campaigns, and your competition

If you run a self-care business, then you’re always on the lookout for ways to get new clients through your door. Artificial intelligence (AI) can be a powerful tool for perfecting your marketing strategy. Thanks to services like ChatGPT, you don’t need to be a computer scientist to make the most of generative AI. In fact, to use ChatGPT for market research, all you need are a few smart prompts and an active social media presence.

If you feed it the right data, ChatGPT can help you learn more about your regular visitors, spot hot new trends, and study your past marketing campaigns. You can even discover where competitors have fallen short, giving you a window to win over a whole new set of clients.

By following five simple tips, you can use ChatGPT to gain valuable audience insights without any tedious number-crunching. Then, you can put your new marketing plans into action.

ChatGPT in the self-care business

Before you learn how to use ChatGPT for market research, take a few minutes and review how it works. Once you know what ChatGPT can and can’t do, you can use it more effectively.

ChatGPT is a piece of generative AI software. Generative AI draws on a huge set of training data to create original text, images, audio, or video. These tools run on Large Language Models (LLMs), which allow users to give prompts and receive replies in plain English. When you ask ChatGPT a question or give it a set of instructions, it combs through its training data for relevant information, then puts everything together into a readable response.

Using AI in the self-care space has some big advantages. ChatGPT and similar tools can help you analyze lots of information quickly. They can also pick up on subtle patterns that a person might miss. There are also management platforms with AI features, which can optimize your schedules, chat with your clients, and enhance your marketing messages.

At the same time, ChatGPT has a few limitations and drawbacks:

• ChatGPT doesn’t know anything. AI algorithms don’t think about your prompts or reason through your problems. They generate responses based on whatever training data seems most relevant. ChatGPT doesn’t really “know” whether its responses are useful, or even true. (When an AI is confidently wrong, that’s called a hallucination.) 

• ChatGPT can’t be original. Generative AIs can access whatever information is in their training data, and that’s it. Unlike real people, they can’t come up with completely new ideas. You’re better off handling creative work, such as in-depth blog posts and art projects, by yourself.

• ChatGPT isn’t private. Whenever you use ChatGPT, you are giving it permission to keep your data for training purposes. You can opt out, but it’s a complicated process, and may not be 100% effective. If you want to analyze private data from your business, use a different tool.

5 ways to use ChatGPT for market research

1. Create effective surveys

Client surveys are a great way to learn more about your audience. Which services do your clients like? How much are they willing to pay? What else do they wish you offered? This is good information to have, but there are two big problems:

• About three-quarters of your clients won’t respond to your surveys.

• Depending on what you ask, the responses might not be useful.

This is one area where you can use ChatGPT for market research.

First, try creating a short survey, then uploading it to the program. (Ensure your rough draft doesn’t contain any private info about your business.) Then, prompt ChatGPT to give you feedback. Ask whether the survey would hold a client’s interest, and whether it would make them feel valued for taking the time to respond. See if any of your questions are unclear or too complicated.

Then, revise the survey and go through the process again. ChatGPT can’t control whether your clients will actually respond, but it can tell you how similar surveys performed in the past.

2. Analyze client feedback

While you shouldn’t upload private data to ChatGPT, public data can be one of your most powerful audience research tools. If your self-care operation has been in business for a while, you’ve probably received dozens (or hundreds, or thousands) of online reviews and social media comments. Reading through every single one would probably take days of work, and you wouldn’t be able to remember how every single commenter felt.

Luckily, AIs can process information much faster than the average person. They’re also excellent at picking up on patterns. If you copy and paste your social media posts and online reviews into ChatGPT, you can then ask it as many follow-up questions as you want. How do clients feel about your business in general? What do they like and dislike? Are there things you could do better? This process is called sentiment analysis, and any business with an online presence can benefit from it.

3. Identify new industry trends

Trends come and go quickly in aesthetic brand marketing. Between Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, magazines, and blogs, it can be hard to keep track of what’s still in style and what’s on the way out.

Keeping track of every new trend would be a full-time job for a person, but ChatGPT can do the work in just a few minutes. Ask what’s currently popular on your clients’ favorite platforms, as well as which self-care keywords are trending up or down over time. If you’re specific with your prompts, you can even ask ChatGPT to compare new trends to old ones and try to predict the next big thing for salons, spas, and other self-care businesses.

4. Study your old marketing campaigns

If you give ChatGPT a generic prompt, expect a generic response. When you give ChatGPT prompts for market research, the best thing you can do is ask specific questions about your business. If you feed it some information first, ChatGPT can analyze your previous marketing campaigns to see which ones worked and which ones didn’t.

This process can be a little tricky, since you don’t want to add private data to a public AI tool.  What you can do, though, is describe what kind of campaign you ran and when you ran it. You can then ask ChatGPT to measure your social media buzz and online reviews during that period.

If your campaign got a lot of people saying positive things, something about it clearly worked. After you do this, you should also see whether you earned more money during that time. Just be careful to keep your financial records private.

5. Learn about the competition

Scoping out the competition is a great way to get some new ideas for your own business. Instead of copying and pasting your website, social media, and reviews into ChatGPT, do an online search to find your competitors’ info.

Then, ask ChatGPT whatever you want to know. What do people like and dislike about the competition? How have opinions changed over time? Are there any services clients wish your competitors offered? Pay close attention to that last one. If there’s a gap in the market, you can swoop in and fill it.

Using ChatGPT for market research is a very helpful way to build your marketing plans. Still, AI will never do the hardest — and most rewarding — parts for you. How you execute those plans and build relationships with the new clients you bring in will show what makes your business truly one of a kind.