#106 Words in Business & Chat GPT - with Rachel Rennie
I’m excited today to be joined by my very own copywriter, Rachel Rennie from Frankly Write, to discuss the importance of words in business and how to navigate the topic everyone is talking about now - ChatGPT.
As a copywriter, Rachel interacts with words on a daily basis. Her job is to craft compelling messages that engage audiences and motivate them to take action. Rachel takes us through how she creatively uses words in her copy to help sell products online without the icky feeling of being pushy or salesy.
But how does ChatGPT fit in?
ChatGPT is a tool created by OpenAI that you can keep in your toolkit to help you write your ideas. It works as an artificial intelligence (AI) language model that can generate human-like responses to text-based prompts. ChatGPT can be used for a variety of tasks, including writing, translation, and even answering questions.
From a copywriter's perspective, Rachel discusses how ChatGPT has several benefits. For one, it can help you generate ideas. If you’re stuck on a headline or a tagline, you can give ChatGPT a prompt and see what kind of responses it generates. While not all of the responses will be useful, some of them may spark an idea that you can build upon.
Another benefit of ChatGPT is that it can save you time. ChatGPT can help you automate certain tasks, such as creating product descriptions or writing social media posts. This allows you to focus on other creative and sales generating aspects of your job, such as brainstorming and engaging with clients.
While ChatGPT has many benefits, it's important to note that it's not a replacement for human creativity and expertise. ChatGPT's responses are based on the data it has been trained on, which may not always align with your brand's voice or tone. As a copywriter, it's Rachel’s job to ensure that the messaging she creates is on-brand and resonates with the intended audience.
Tune in to today’s episode to learn Rachel’s brilliant ideas about using words in your business to create a customer journey without feeling pushy and start playing around with ChatGPT to help out when you get stuck.
Full Transcript:
-
[00:00:00] Tracey: Hello everyone and welcome back to the Rise Up in Business Podcast. Today's guest on the podcast is my very own longtime copywriter, Rachel Rennie from Frankly Write. Rachel's been a part of my team for more than three years now, and it's safe to say that she's an integral part of my team in terms of copywriting content and SEO work.
[00:00:42] Tracey: Today Rachel and I are going to talk about the theme of words, the importance of words in your business, the right words in the right place at the right time. And we're gonna dive in and have a conversation around the very topical subject at the moment of chat, G P T. Rachel shares with us what she thinks. Chat GP T'S role can be for small business owners and she shares with us her insights on whether or not copywriters and other service providers need to be worried. I hope you enjoy today's episode. Let's dive in.
[00:01:14] Tracey: Hello everyone and welcome back to the Rise Up in Business Podcast. I'm so happy to have a guest join me today. You have heard me talk about this wonderful woman so often on here and over on Instagram, where I am a lot, and that is Rachel Renny from frankly Wright Rachel, good morning.
[00:01:35] Rachel: Good morning. How are you?
[00:01:37] Tracey: I'm great and so happy to have you on the podcast again. For those who don't know, Rachel has been a part of my team for more than three years now, and I couldn't do what I do in my business without her. Rachel is my copywriter and my SEO guru and my words guru and a whole bunch of other things, and I do have people reach out to ask me who does your stuff? How do you do all this? And so the secret of course is I don't do it all myself. I have a team and Rachel's a part of my team. So I'm so happy to have you here, Rachel, to share some of your magic and word wisdom with my listeners because I'm getting asked more and more about you and who does the things and this topic of words. I'm so happy to chat to you today.
[00:02:21] Rachel: I'm happy to chat to you. What a lovely intro. I'll listen to that every day.
[00:02:25] Tracey: It's so true. A hand on heart, and that's why I love having you on. We, as you know, and as people who have been listening to the podcast and reading all of the fabulous content over on the resources page, on the website, know that we've been talking about words and the importance of words for the last little while on here and, and over there. And those who listen to me know that I'm all about empowering business owners. So I use the law as a tool to educate and empower. And when it comes to words, there's no shortcuts and you can't underestimate just how important words are. So I wanted to talk to you today about words, not in a legal context, so it's not legal.
[00:03:09] Rachel: No, Not my expertise.
[00:03:11] Tracey: Not legal. So this is the thing when I started talking on the podcast about words and the importance of words legally and why it is I do what I do in my drafting. Lots of clients have said to me, "gosh, I just didn't realize how important these particular words are in the legal documents", because they just knew that words were really important in their branding and in their copy and in their journey and their client journey in their ---businesses. That's where you come in.
[00:03:38] Rachel: Obviously words can be incredibly empowering on the branding and marketing side as well, so the two will always go hand in hand and that's why, you know, when we look at the work that you do, when you are putting that non, what do you call it, legalese into your documents - you're not putting legalese in. And so we are the same when it comes to marketing. We're about using words that feel right and feel genuine and are easy to read and enjoyable to read as well.
[00:04:06] Tracey: Why is that important?
[00:04:07] Rachel: When it comes to, you know, writing your own words and writing your own copy, I think that, a lot of people are scared to put themselves out there in their business in a way that is also making them sales. People wanna use their words to make a connection and to build a community and all of that is really, really good. But words are also there to make sales, and you can use genuine words that feel good to also make your sales in marketing. It doesn't have to be one or the other.
[00:04:40] Tracey: I love that you've said that about sales because I, I know I've had these conversations with you earlier on in my journey. Clients say it to me, "I wanna sell. I don't wanna feel salesy. I don't want my website and my copy to feel like I'm pushing on people". I'm here to say words can help you not feel salesy. It doesn't have to be like that. What do you say about that Rach?
[00:05:03] Rachel: Oh, a hundred percent. We live in a patriarchy. Okay , that's my base. So when it comes to business and sales, it's traditionally seen as a really masculine thing to do in, in that pushy light, "I'm gonna sell to you, I'm gonna push, and this is all about sales" and, and I think if you are more femininely inclined, not in a traditional gender sense, but just that kind of feminine energy. Then to try and make sales and absorb that masculinity and kind of go ahead and be real brash and, and do it, it can feel really yuck and people don't like doing it. And that's where we come in because we like to use words that feel good for you, whatever your energy is, wherever it sits on that spectrum, and you can still make sales out. But you feel good when you're doing it. You're not feeling like you are, I don't know, Jim, the CEO of something . You feel like you, and you're still gonna make money from it as well.
[00:06:01] Tracey: It sounds magic. It sounds like a little sprinkling of magic when you say it like that. You make it sound so easy.
[00:06:06] Rachel: Wow. If it was easy, I wouldn't have a job. But there are tools and techniques that you can do when you're writing your words from a marketing point of view that you can adapt to yourself and you can kind of just have in your, in your back pocket that make it easy to do that as well, so that you're still thinking, "okay, I'm here for a reason. I'm marketing my business because I wanna make sales". So there's all these different tools you can have that you can pull out, in various stages of the customer journey to make sure that you're doing it, in a way that feels authentic as well.
[00:06:39] Tracey: A lot of the small business owners that I'm working with often make comments to me that they just didn't appreciate the significance of the words that I use legally. And then when we dive deeper, the words in relation to their business positioning more generally. And so that's why I wanted to bring you on, and this is really valuable because what you're doing is you're explaining to business owners what it is that they need clarity around, right at the beginning, so that they can bring the customer along on the journey to build the trust so that they can buy, because ultimately that's all we wanna do. And the takeaway is that the right words in the right place at the right time is super important in making those conversions.
[00:07:15] Rachel: It is. And do you know the way to start knowing what your customer journey is the number one thing that we see all the time is not knowing who your customer actually is. Who are you actually selling to? It's people love to talk about themselves. It's fine. We are human, that's what we do. But you can't do that in business all the time. And when you do it in your marketing, it has to be really strategic. So if you are not looking at who your audience actually is, you can't build out an effective customer journey. If you're doing it from your viewpoint, it's not gonna work. You have to do it from your audience's viewpoint.
[00:07:54] Tracey: Wow. That's a key takeaway from this. The next logical question, Rach, is when we're talking about this and we're talking about authenticity, and we're talking about our brand, and we're talking about our ideal customer and that customer journey. Where does ChatGPT come into this? As far as you are concerned? Because this topic is everywhere at the moment every place I turn, someone's talking about ChatGPT.
[00:08:16] Rachel: Yeah.
[00:08:17] Tracey: I don't have a view on it yet, but do you?
[00:08:19] Rachel: I do love it as a tool, but that's all it is. It's a tool that you can have in your back pocket. It's not going to put your spin as a professional in your industry on a topic and it's not gonna have any strategy behind it. So you could use it until the cows come home to write blogs. Sure. But 1 they're going to be lacking your expertise. They're going to be lacking your experience and your thoughts on things because you're a human with original thoughts. Your audience wants to hear that.
[00:08:52] Tracey: And I imagine also there's gonna be gaping holes when it comes to your brand voice as well.
[00:08:58] Rachel: Ah, it's not gonna have anything. So you can train it. So I've used it and you know, we've experimented with it on quite. Probably bigger basis than a lot of people. And you can train it as you go through the conversation. So you know, you can say, write about this, and you can say, can you be more colloquial? You can even say, use the tone on this website, X, Y, Z, and rewrite what you've just written me with this tone. And you can keep training it and keep trying to refine it, but by the time you refine it to that, You could have written that article better a million times over. It just never really gets there. It never has a human touch, it never flows perfectly. It, well for frankly right, it refuses to swear and it refuses to talk about cults. So our whole marketing strategy, a big chunk of it gets thrown out the window. But it just, it's missing nuance and it'll pick funny things out of a website as tone, because it's not a human, it just doesn't recognize how humans, interact with words and with copy. So it's a great tool. Like use it. It's great. I use it. All my marketing friends and copywriter friends use it, but it says it's like Google. It gathers information.
[00:10:17] Tracey: Okay. I like that. I like that you've just, you've actually now talked in my language because I did find it a bit confusing at the start. It's like Google, so it's a tool to use if you're gathering information. If you wanna put a rough draft together of a blog that you might be working on, or if you wanna repurpose content, I understand that it can be used for that, but on a really raw level from what you're saying. So it's a raw level and it's not gonna have those nuances, that personality, that brand voice or anything like that, which you need if you want to be up-leveling in your business and focusing on that client journey that we've talked about,
[00:10:47] Rachel: Yeah, exactly. Specifically with that customer journey, you could input a blog that you wrote with all your humanness and you could say, break this up into Instagram posts for me. Is it gonna do it? Yes. But talking about that placement, it's gonna break your text up into, yeah, into but yeah, talking about that placement and writing the right way for the right platform, you only get a snippet you can put on Instagram, but it's not going to pull the customer in in the right way on Instagram because it doesn't know how to write specifically for platforms.
[00:11:22] Tracey: That's helpful. That's helpful. It's a tool. Let's take the takeaway. It is a tool, and it's not going to give us the magic that we need to create what we wanna create when we're uplifting our business and using the right words in the right place at the right time. Love it. Rage. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for joining me. I think we've covered exactly what I wanted to cover in this episode so that my audience, again, get to hear from you. Pure genius value that you add to my business. We've talked about ChatGPT which I've been dying to do, so thank you. I think that's really valuable. Can you just share with listeners if they wanna reach out to you and check out more about the work that you do, frankly, right. Where can we find you?
[00:12:03] Rachel: So our website is franklywrite.co.nz. but also we are very active on Instagram and we love voice messages. So you can just find us on Instagram, which is frankly.write send us a voice memo slide into our dms.
[00:12:19] Tracey: Thanks, Rachel. We'll put those details in the show notes as well so everyone can find you, as always, thank you so much for joining me for another episode of the Rise Up in Business podcast. I hope you have found this to be a value, and I'll catch you next time.
LINKS:
Connect with Rachel Rennie:
Website: www.franklywrite.co.nz
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/frankly.write/
Get your copy of my Annual Legal Checklist here
Website: tmsolicitor.com.au
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tmsolicitor/
Book a Strategy Session with me here
Rate, Review and Follow me on Apple Podcasts
If you are loved this episode, please consider rating and reviewing my show! This supports me in helping to empower more coaches, creatives and consultants - just like you - protect what they're building, and move forward with confidence in their business. It's quick and easy - click here, scroll down to the bottom, tap to rate with 5 stars and select 'write a review'. As always, I'd love to know what you think, and what you loved most about this episode. Also, don't forget to follow the podcast to stay up to date with the latest episodes.