As we approach almost two years since the release of ChatGPT, the focus has shifted from knowing what it is, to learning what it could do, do integrating it into your every day tasks.
At a recent speech at DigitalMarCon, I asked how many know about ChatGPT and use it regularly—virtually the entire room raised their hands. Asking the same question in a different way: “how many have integrated ChatGPT into the daily tasks for both themselves and their employees,” I saw just a handful of hands up.
As we head into 2025, those who can integrate and take full advantage of generative will have a huge advantage over those who can’t. In this article, let’s take a quick look at how you, your marketing team and the agencies you work with can be using generative AI to make your dealership marketing more efficient.
AI History
Before we jump in—a quick history of ChatGPT & Generative AI. OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, has been around since 2016. The initial GPT model has been out since the middle of 2018 (followed by GPT-2 in early 2019 and GPT-3 a year later). ChatGPT, the interactive iteration of the GPT model was released at the end of 2022 and quickly became the fastest platform to ever reach 100M users (in less than two months!). The previous record holder were: TikTok at 9 months, Instagram at 30 months, Pinterest at 41 months and Spotify at 55 months.
Since then, Generative AI has gotten exponentially smart. The GPT-4 model (released in 2024) was able to get a 75 percent score on AP Chemistry, while the prior GPT-3.5 model only achieved a 25 percent (a failing grade). The latest models are able to pass almost all standardized tests with flying colors.
To look at it another way, ChatGPT-1 used 117 million parameters, ChatGPT-3 used 175 billion, and ChatGPT-4 uses 1 trillion. Exponential growth. For most dealership marketing operations, even the most basic model will help create tremendous amount of efficiencies. Let’s take a look.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most obvious uses of AI. Let’s take it from the top.
- Site Page Ideas: What website pages should you have?
- Content Ideas: Give me a list of blog post suggestions.
- Content Creation? This one gets a little tricky. To my surprise (and the surprise to many in the SEO community), Google came out in February 2023 and said they will not penalize AI content and will continue to reward high quality content, regardless of how it’s written. In a March 2024 update however, they clarified that they will reward “helpful content created for people in search results”. What’s the difference? They are now more actively penalizing spam content created for the sole purpose of creating content. In other words, I would caution anyone using ChatGPT (or any Generative AI) to create your content. However, it can be used for ideas, outlines and perhaps a first draft. In that regard, ChatGPT can save a lot of time. For example, let’s have it write us an outline on the history off the Mercedes GLS:
- Better yet – don’t forget to use “tones”, “styles” and other customizations, for example, let’s do the same blog post in the style of Shakespeare!
- Link building! Yes, Link building continues to be a big part of SEO (for a deeper dive into the ranking signals that matter to Google, check out my best-selling book on Automotive Search Marketing). For link building, we can ask ChatGPT to generate some suggestions for websites that can link to you, for example:
- Reputation Management! Not directly tied into SEO but a big part of your online reputation and your Google Business Profile. ChatGPT can be very powerful in not only helping you respond to online reviews but also helping employees respond to customers in a neutral non-escalating way. For reviews, you can simply ask it to respond to a review for you, like the below example.
Social Media (& Multimedia)
Social media is perhaps an even better use of Generative AI then SEO since you don’t have to worry about content penalties here. Let’s take a look at some real world examples here.
- Facebook, let’s get 100 words of facebook ad copy
- How about 5 funny tweets to use on Twitter?
- Want to post on Tiktok but not familiar with the hashtags? Let’s see if we can get ChatGPT to help out.
- Now that you have the posts, let’s get some images. In this case, let’s get some images for our facebook job post that we asked about earlier
Paid Search
Last but not least, you can be a lot more efficient with your paid search with generative AI. First of course, I would be doing a disservice by not pointing out Microsoft’s partnership with ChatGPT. Microsoft has now integrated their version of ChatGPT (Microsoft CoPilot) into Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Windows and many more products. I believe this will continue to give Microsoft extra market share and will make your presence on Microsoft Ads more important then ever. If you’re not advertising on Microsoft Ads you are doing yourself a grave disservice. Now let’s talk about some ways to step up your PPC game with Generative AI.
- Campaign Ideas! Do you even know what kind of campaigns you should be running?
- Keywords! Give me a list of buyer-intent keywords.
- Now group them into logical ad-groups.
- And let’s get some ad-copy ideas for those keywords that are now organized into ad-groups.
- And we’re not done yet! Let’s do some ad-copy A/B testing
- Now for those who want to get very advanced: we can do creative things like ask ChatGPT to help us write and implement a google adscript that will check all the pages we’re sending traffic to and check it daily to make sure none of the pages are not found or giving errors. From our audits, over 15% of dealerships are sending traffic to pages that no longer exist or cars they already solved. The below ChatGPT prompt will help you implement a script that will send you daily alerts to make sure you’re never wasting money on dead pages.
Now before you dive head first into Generative AI and roll it out across your organization there are a few things to keep in mind. For example, Generative AI is only as good as its interpretation of its own data. One of my favorite examples (now corrected) would be to ask ChatGPT if there are any countries that start with the letter V. It would of course say “no” since Vietnam is not really Vietnam but the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
It also tends to “hallucinate”, in another (just corrected) example, I would ask who founded SmartSites and while it would correctly say myself and my brother Michael. It would also add a 3rd sibling, Yana Melen. The problem with this? I don’t have a 3rd sibling – nor could I find where it was even sourcing this information. For similar reasons, Google’s implementation of GenerativeAI has been caught suggesting people eat rocks, or smoke while pregnant, as can be seen below.
That being said, when used correctly, generative AI can 10x your marketing efficiency. Those who are using it correctly and integrating it into their operations will be hundreds of times more efficient than those who are not. As we head into 2025, the AI landscape can be best compared to the internet boom of 1995 with thousands of companies and tools appearing and disappearing monthly.
My best advice? Follow the trends, make yourself and your dealership more efficient and work with those who are using these tools to provide you the most value and give you a competitive edge in a market that will continue to be more and more competitive. Where to start? Below is a quick snapshot of some of the best tools out today. As for us (SmartSites), we will continue to be the leader in using AI to generate the best value for our clients.
P.S. For those wondering – this article was written completely in the old school method of manually typing out each word. No AI was used in the creation of this content. Why you might ask? The goal here is to bring unique content that brings the most value for those reading. Not that different for Google’s guidelines for SEO content creation. Enjoy!
Alex Melen is an award-winning entrepreneur, keynote speaker, best-selling author, and early digital pioneer. He is the co-founder of SmartSites, a digital marketing agency that has grown from a handful of digital visionaries to a team of over four hundred full-time employees, spanning six offices worldwide. SmartSites has been featured in AdWeek and the Inc. 5000 for numerous consecutive years as one of the fastest-growing digital agencies. SmartSites continues to be America’s top-rated digital marketing agency with a data-driven and customer-centric approach applicable to every industry. Alex is a sought-after thought leader in the digital space, keynoting almost one-hundred conferences in the span of the last three-decades. He has also been featured in dozens of publications including Business Week’s Top 25 Entrepreneurs, Forbes, Bloomberg, NPR, and more.
