The conversation around artificial intelligence (AI) can feel relentless, and as a creative business owner, you’re right to be cautious. It’s critical to protect your unique, authentic brand – the last thing you want is to allow your brand to get lost in an ever-growing sea of AI-generated sameness.
How can you take advantage of the efficiencies of AI, but fully preserve your brand’s voice and personality? It’s all about prompting.
In order to master prompting, it’s important to understand the basics of AI and how to apply them in your business. By using prompts that are tailored to your specific needs, you’ll get help for your (mundane marketing) tasks while keeping complete control. See our member resource for copy+paste AI scripts tailored for Craft Business Owners.
AI essentials for business
Imagine a tireless intern who is incredibly eager and mildly competent. While you’re happy to have an extra set of hands, you wouldn’t give them any very complex jobs or confidential information. You also know they’ll require oversight and training.
AI is that intern who’s just getting started.
Like every trainee, it’s key to identify exactly which tasks you would like help with, and describe the help you need in as much detail as you can muster. Leave too much to the imagination, and well… results may vary.
All of the tasks we discuss are ones you can do for free on the leading AI apps: ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, or any number of others. We’ll cover the differences between these different apps, but they work in a similar fashion, and you don’t need to worry too much about the differences.
How can AI help with your marketing? Here are a few common use cases:
- Analyze your audience and their pain points
- Create a tone of voice guideline for your brand
- Brainstorm content ideas
- Critique content you’ve written from different points of view
- Rewrite sentences for clarity
- Repurpose content (like blog posts) into different types of content (like an Instagram caption)
When using AI for your business, it’s important to be aware of the potential risks and downsides.
Bias. All AI models are created by training on large amounts of data. Picture the population of Silicon Valley tech companies. Imagine what type of data AI is usually trained on.
Whether intentional or accidental, AI is typically modeled on a world that’s disproportionately represented by people who are American, male, white, cisgender, straight, professional, not disabled, who speak ‘standard American English’, I could go on. That means most results will reflect this worldview.
While you can override this bias by specifically including information in your prompt, such as “Please include consideration of an audience from a diverse background,” it’s essential to keep in mind that this is the starting foundation we’re working from.
Training cutoffs. Many models are trained on a bunch of existing data, which naturally (due to the very nature of time) has a cutoff. If you’re using a model that was trained in December 2024, then it can’t know about anything that happened in January 2025.
While an increasing number of models are operating in a way that continually learns (and therefore has no cutoff), it’s important to keep in mind that there are limits to what AI may know about.
Hallucinations. Nothing knows everything. And many AI apps don’t have the ability to say that they don’t know – they’ll simply make something up. These are called ‘hallucinations’ because the model hallucinates, or imagines, an answer that doesn’t really exist.
I recently used an AI prompt that I wrote to help me draft a YouTube description for a video I had created. I included examples of other best practice YouTube descriptions. I was surprised when the generated video description included timestamps… because I hadn’t given it a timestamped transcript. The generated description contained hallucinated timestamps that the AI simply made up because each of the examples I included also had timestamps.
The lesson? Always check generated content for accuracy, particularly when it includes facts, stats, or claims.
A brief introduction to writing great prompts
Using AI always begins with a ‘prompt,’ it’s simply the instruction you give the AI, telling it what to create or do. And just like the instructions to your new intern, the more specific you are about what you want, the better the results will be.
The craft of writing prompts is called ‘prompt engineering,’ and here are the 7 steps to create a great prompt.
- Give the AI a persona. For example, “You are a ‘Craft Marketing Strategist'” with 15+ years of experience in the handmade product market, adept at crafting compelling narratives for small craft businesses across various marketing channels. You excel at helping craft businesses articulate their value proposition, resonate with ideal customers, and drive sales and brand loyalty.”
- Provide background. The more, the better. As an example, “Brooklyn Soap creates exquisite, handcrafted soaps. We believe that everyday cleansing should be an experience, not just a routine. Each of our soap bars is lovingly made in small batches, using only the finest natural ingredients like nourishing shea butter, invigorating essential oils, and botanicals carefully selected to pamper your skin.”
- Be specific. Instead of “Write a social media post,” try “Write a 3-sentence Instagram caption for a new line of handmade soaps, highlighting the new lavender scent, ending with a call to action to visit my website.”
- Specify the format. This is less important if the format is obvious from the prompt (such as ‘write an Instagram caption’), but is worth clarifying if the format is undetermined. For example, “Generate five unique headline ideas, each no more than 10 words, for a workshop on natural dyeing,” or “List three bullet points summarizing the benefits of handmade jewelry.”
- Include examples. Explain how you want the result to sound. For example, “Here’s an example of our brand voice in a product description: [insert description].”
- Include brand voice. Include a description of how your brand voice sounds. For example, “Write in a tone that’s friendly and easy to understand, like you’re talking to a very knowledgeable but kind friend.”
- Set the rules. Tell AI what not to do. For example, “Don’t use jargon” or “Don’t make up information.” With respect to the last item, you can make the suggestion, but always check!
This listing is a gold standard, and not all of the components are necessary. If you’re doing a small task, you may get pretty decent results by getting straight to the point.
Here is a short example of a prompt to write an Instagram caption (omitting sample writing for space reasons):
“You are a Professional Marketer with a decade of experience creating compelling copy for small craft businesses. My website is: [insert website URL]. Please write an Instagram caption for my new vanilla-scented handmade soy soap that highlights the following: [insert benefits and features]. Include a link to my shop as a call to action and offer a 10% discount for readers. Please write in a voice that is warm and personable.”
Give this a try with one of your products!
Remember, AI will always require human oversight, particularly for a small business with a unique brand voice.
Comparing pros and cons of different AI models
There are many AI apps on the market, each powered by ‘models’ – a Large Language Models (LLMs) that have been trained on a specific type of data. So while you’ll head to ChatGPT (the app) to chat to the chatbot, you’ll be using GPT-4o as the LLM underneath. Similarly, if you head to Gemini, you’ll be using Gemini Flash 2.5 as the model (at the time of writing, these are always getting updates!).
Each AI app has different strengths and weaknesses, as a result of its training focus. As we just discussed, you can change the results of your AI query output with prompt engineering, but it’s best to think of these as small tweaks. For example, you can put racing car tires (a small improvement, like an amazing prompt) on top of a VW Beetle, but you won’t see the same results as if you put the racing tires on a race car. The model (the car) matters.
Let’s review some common, free AI apps and their strengths and weaknesses.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT is the app that made AI apps mainstream. It’s designed for its conversational abilities and it’s suited for a wide variety of general-purpose marketing tasks, such as content generation, summarization, and brainstorming
As a downside, ChatGPT is known to hallucinate, so you want to be sure to verify any responses that have facts in them or need to be accurate. In general, this isn’t a problem for most marketing materials, unless you are writing an entire blog post (which I would recommend you get started with on your own!).
Gemini
Gemini is Google’s consumer-facing AI app, and it’s quite similar to ChatGPT in that its conversational skills are the main focus. Gemini integrates with other Google products (like Docs, Gmail, etc.) and has deep research capabilities, and it’s well-suited for largely the same suite of tasks as ChatGPT.
Gemini also hallucinates, and although it has advanced reasoning and provides sources, do always check the sources for accuracy.
Claude
Claude is an AI app created with a focus on ethics and safety. It excels in deep analysis and has better reasoning capabilities due to a longer context window (that is, it can take in more information). There is a free version available, although the upsell to a subscription is more pronounced than on other sites.
Many people rely on Claude for their general-purpose content generation work due to the lower likelihood of hallucinations and biased responses. But due to its less conversational nature, this may take more effort to create breezy, small bits of content.
Perplexity
Perplexity is known for its research and citation abilities. Its responses are directly tied to citations, making it easy to verify and check statements. It also uses real-time web information (that is, there’s no training cutoff), so the responses are up-to-date. Use Perplexity to assist with research tasks, such as finding interesting stats for a blog post or a fun fact for an Instagram post (if your audience is into that sort of thing!).
With a focus on research, Perplexity doesn’t excel at creative writing tasks or tasks that don’t have a clear output goal.
Which app you choose will depend on your task and personal preference. Give a few a try!
Make your AI app work harder: How to create an agent
AI apps are often like an eager assistant with severe amnesia – every time you open a new browser window, you’re starting the conversation all over again.
As you work through the sample prompts included in our member toolkit, you’ll notice there are lots of opportunities for including examples of similar work or a tone of voice guide to help the AI app do a better job for you. This is when having a memory comes in useful.
Many AI apps enable you to create your own AI agent, which in part gives you prompt power plus a memory. Gemini calls these Gems, ChatGPT calls them GPTs. And both come with templates for getting started so you’re not beginning with a blank slate.
As an example of these templates, Gemini has available a ‘writing editor’ and a ‘brainstormer’, which you can also edit to your specifications. The best part is that it will remember recommendations from previous conversations. Meaning you can:
- Give it a tone of voice guide
- Tell it options that you do like
- Give suggestions for options that aren’t quite right
- Refer back to previous conversations (within reason)
Additionally, as you gain experience writing prompts, you may find it easier to simply keep your favorite prompts in an agent rather than copy and paste them each time.
Ready to get started?
You’re busy, so your time is your most precious resource. Getting assistance with your more repetitive or mundane marketing tasks can help you gain some of that valuable time back.
Start small, experiment with the prompts, and see whether AI is an effective helping hand. With the right balance, you can lighten your load while maintaining authenticity and control over your brand voice and feel. Excited to hear your thoughts!
Stacey Trock
contributor
