Since ChatGPT’s release nearly two years ago, the focus has shifted from knowing what it is to learning what it could do and integrating it into your everyday 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 individuals have integrated ChatGPT into the daily tasks for both themselves and their employees?” I saw just a handful of hands up. Heading into 2025; those who can integrate and take full advantage of generative AI will have a huge advantage over those who can’t. Let’s take a quick look at how you, your marketing team, and the agencies you work with can use generative AI to improve dealership marketing efficiency.
Before we jump in – here’s 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 2 months). The previous record holders 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 smarter. The GPT-4 model (released in 2024) was able to get a 75% score on AP Chemistry, while the prior GPT-3.5 model only achieved a 25% (a failing grade). The latest models can 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 used 1 trillion. For most dealership marketing operations, even the most basic model will help create a 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 of 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 of the history of 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 to 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 example below:
Social Media (& Multimedia)
Social media is perhaps an even better use of Generative AI than 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. 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 make your presence on Microsoft Ads more important than ever.
If you’re not advertising on Microsoft Ads, you are doing yourself a grave disservice. Now let’s talk about several 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.
Let’s get some ad-copy ideas for those keywords that are now organized into ad-groups.
We’re not done yet! Let’s perform ad-copy A/B testing.
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. It checks all the pages we’re sending traffic to and checks it daily to make sure none of the pages are not causing 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.
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 it would correctly say myself and my brother Michael. However, it would also add a 3rd sibling, Yana Melen. The problem with this is 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 Generative AI has been caught suggesting people eat rocks or smoke while pregnant.
When used correctly, generative AI can 10x your marketing efficiency. Those who use it correctly and integrate it into their operations will be hundreds of times more efficient than those who don’t. As we head into 2025, the AI landscape can be best compared to the Internet boom of 1995. Thousands of companies and tools appear and disappear 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 with the most value. This approach gives you a competitive edge in a market that will continue to be increasingly competitive.
Where should you start? Below is a quick snapshot of some of the best tools available 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. 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 to those reading. Not that different from Google’s guidelines for SEO content creation. Enjoy!
