13 ChatGPT Prompts That Could Help Grow Your Small Business

ChatGPT has quickly become a household name, with businesses of all sizes leveraging the AI-powered tool to automate tasks and advance their workflows. While its adoption has been rapid, understanding the best practices to maximize its benefits takes time.

Below are 13 useful prompts for ChatGPT, along with methods for fine-tuning them to get high-quality results that help grow your business.

[Read more: Getting Started With AI: Artificial Intelligence Applications for Small Businesses]

ChatGPT use cases and prompts for small businesses

Try one of these common small business use cases for generative AI by plugging in and customizing our example prompts.

Improve employee training programs

Elevate your employee training program by leveraging ChatGPT as an informational resource for employees. Incorporating ChatGPT into your training tools can provide employees with immediate feedback and answers to their questions via a chatbot. Plus, it can create new training materials, including tutorials and quizzes, to assist with onboarding.

Try this prompt: “Outline a multi-day onboarding program for a new employee in a [position] role. The program will last [length of time] and focus on preparing them for [specific tasks/responsibilities]. Include a breakdown of activities, resources, and goals.”

Perform a SWOT analysis

Evaluate your business’s standing by conducting a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats analysis (SWOT) using ChatGPT. This analysis helps businesses uncover areas of opportunity and instances where money may be inefficiently used, allowing for a more strategic allocation of resources and improved operational efficiency.

Try this prompt: “Conduct a SWOT analysis for my [product/service/company], taking into consideration both external and internal factors that affect business operations in [your industry]. ”

Enhance pitch presentations

Writing an effective pitch requires understanding your audience’s needs to demonstrate how your business can be of value in solving their problems. Use ChatGPT to cater your pitch to your target audience, incorporating persuasive elements and articulating a compelling value proposition.

Try this prompt: “Identify areas where I can improve my pitch presentation to demonstrate my value proposition to [your target audience]. My goal with this presentation is to [specific goal].”

Track social media engagement

Boost your brand visibility by using ChatGPT to track your social media engagement and strategize ways to improve your business’s social media. By analyzing your social media profiles, ChatGPT can offer recommendations on crafting content that resonates with your target audience, thereby increasing engagement.

Try this prompt: “Strategize ways to increase my [product/service/company]’s engagement on [social platform]. I want to target [audience or demographic] over [amount of time].”

Improve communication with your team

Consistent internal communication ensures that everybody is working efficiently toward a shared goal. ChatGPT can help improve team communication by creating templates for training materials, company updates, and other important messages. It’s also useful for translating technical details into plain language, simplifying cross-team collaboration.

Try this prompt: “My team is working on a specialized project that’s difficult to explain to others. Help me create an in-person presentation, along with a detailed one-pager, that describes what we do in a way that’s easy for the rest of the company to understand.”

[Read more: AI Tools That Can Help You Start, Run, and Grow Your Small Business]

Analyze your competition

By using publicly available data, ChatGPT can assess your competitors, identifying their strategies, customer demographics, market position, challenges, and successes. It can then provide insights based on these analytics to boost your business’s value and differentiate it from competitors.

Try this prompt: “As a small business in [industry], help me identify my top competitors, both direct and indirect. Then, provide a detailed analysis in line with that of a market research consultant to highlight key differentiators I could emphasize in my own marketing and branding.”

Plan strategic meetings

Keep your meetings on track by creating an agenda focused on company goals. Having a structured plan for meetings ensures efficient use of everyone’s time and maintains focus on the agenda, preventing deviations from the topic at hand.

Try this prompt: “Build an agenda that highlights discussion points for a meeting about [topic of meeting]. The meeting’s goal is to [explain the goal].”

Prepare for investment meetings

ChatGPT can also find talking points and strategic insights that engage potential investors. It can draft a solid business plan focused on realistic growth and progress and highlight your business’s market potential.

Try this prompt: “Help me prepare for an upcoming investor meeting about [topic of meeting]. Highlight growth strategies, evaluate the market opportunities, and integrate insights on our business model’s scalability and sustainability.”

Design customer surveys

Create engaging, straightforward, and relevant survey questions aimed at collecting valuable information to support your business’s growth. ChatGPT can even create dynamic surveys, where questions adapt based on customer responses.

Try this prompt: “Build an engaging customer survey for [product/service/company] that collects insights on our brand’s advantages, areas for improvement, and customer satisfaction.”

[Read more: What's the Difference Between Traditional and Generative AI?]

Craft financial projections

Achieving long-term success hinges on effective financial management. ChatGPT can simplify that process for businesses by creating a comprehensive financial model with budget management systems and communication strategies for engaging stakeholders and investors.

Try this prompt: “Draft a financial projection model for a business in [your industry] that spans [length of time] and focuses on [specific goal].”

Generate new product ideas

ChatGPT can be an excellent co-pilot for brainstorming new product ideas. If you provide specifics, such as your target audience, price point, and business objectives, it can help to generate lists of ideas that get the ball rolling for you and your team.

Try this prompt: “Inspired by current consumer trends, come up with a list of [industry] product ideas for [your audience] that consumers would be excited about in 2025.”

Write marketing copy

From effective keyword usage to compelling call-to-actions, ChatGPT can help businesses draft marketing copy that helps them stand out from their competitors. The tool can help even the most novice writers draft copy that conveys their brand’s message clearly and succinctly while ensuring their brand voice remains intact. Just be sure to give it a thorough proofread before using.

Try this prompt: “Craft [specific descriptor] marketing copy to be shared [online/in print] to promote our [business/product/service]. It should convey our brand’s mission and voice and direct readers to [specific action].”

Manage email campaigns

There’s a lot that ChatGPT can do to help launch a strong, effective email marketing campaign, from drafting intriguing subject lines and persuasive copy to planning send times and segmenting audiences. What’s more, it can help with A/B testing, enabling marketers to refine their campaigns before releasing them to the public.

Try this prompt: “We’re in the A/B testing phase for our email campaign, which targets [audience] and encourages readers to [specific action]. Using this [campaign brief], draft several variations we could test for higher open rates.”

How to fine-tune ChatGPT prompts for industry-specific insights

While basic prompts like those above are a good starting point, they’re not ready for ChatGPT just yet. To get relevant, useful results, you need to fine-tune your prompts with detailed, business-specific context. ChatGPT isn’t a mind reader—it draws only from the information it’s been trained on, as well as what you share.

Begin by providing ChatGPT a primer before posing a question. Outline key business details like your company’s objectives, customer demographics, brand voice, timely industry insights, and additional context important to your business’s operations. Below is an example.

Example prompt

Let’s say you’re looking to ChatGPT for help crafting a new specials menu for your restaurant. A prompt like this may seem sufficient:

“Help me generate ideas for a new specials menu that will entice customers to choose our Phoenix-based family-owned restaurant over competitors in the area.”

While it is a good start, the prompt overlooks key business differentiators that could significantly impact your results. Here is a more fine-tuned version:

“We run a small, family-owned restaurant located in Phoenix, AZ, serving casual American diner food. Our customer base is mostly aged 35–60, often dining with children. We offer a variety of options to accommodate dietary restrictions, including vegan options and meals safe for individuals with shellfish allergies.

“Using this information, create a specials menu with four appetizers, six entrees (including a BBQ option), three desserts, and four drinks—both alcoholic and non-alcoholic options. This menu should feature fun, light, and refreshing items suitable for warm weather, while staying true to our casual diner brand. Here is our current menu for reference on formatting, tone, and customer expectations.”

The second prompt is far more specific, allowing for results that are more personalized to your business and customers’ expectations. Adding this extra context takes just a few minutes, but it makes a major difference in the quality of the results.

CO— aims to bring you inspiration from leading respected experts. However, before making any business decision, you should consult a professional who can advise you based on your individual situation.