The reason most ChatGPT marketing copy sounds the same is that most people give it the same input: “Write a Facebook post for my plumbing business.” With nothing to go on, it writes the average plumbing post on the internet. Friendly, upbeat, full of exclamation marks, and impossible to tell apart from anyone else’s.
The fix isn’t a magic prompt. It’s context, a specific request, and an editing pass. Do those three things and ChatGPT becomes a genuinely useful assistant for the small, repetitive writing jobs that eat into your week.
Give it the context once
ChatGPT doesn’t know your business, your customers or how you talk. Tell it once, properly, and reuse it.
Write a short business brief and save it somewhere you can paste it from, or put it in ChatGPT’s custom instructions or a Project (at the time of writing, both let you store context so you don’t have to repeat it every chat). A good one looks something like this:
Business: Coastline Plumbing, a two-person plumbing business in Ballina NSW.
Owner: Dave. Apprentice: Josh.
Area: Ballina, Lennox Head, Alstonville, Wollongbar. Not Byron.
Work: hot water systems (mostly heat pump replacements lately), blocked drains,
bathroom renos with a local builder, general maintenance for 3 real estate agents.
Customers: homeowners 35 to 70, a lot of retirees, plus property managers.
What they care about: turning up when we say, clear quotes, not making a mess.
How we talk: plain, friendly, a bit dry. Australian. No hype, no exclamation marks,
no emojis except maybe one. We say "hot water system", never "hot water solution".
Never claim: cheapest, best, 24/7 (we're not), any award, any number we haven't given you.
The last two lines do most of the work. Telling ChatGPT how you don’t talk is as useful as telling it how you do. And telling it never to invent claims cuts down the most dangerous habit these tools have.
Ask for something specific
Vague request, vague result. Every prompt should say what it’s for, who it’s for, what happened, and how long it should be.
A social post about a real job
Using my business brief, write a Facebook post about a job we did this week.
Details: replaced a 20-year-old electric hot water system in Lennox Head with a
heat pump. Owner was worried about noise. We put it on the side of the house
away from the bedrooms. Took one day.
Under 80 words. First line should make a local homeowner stop scrolling.
No hashtags. End with a soft line about getting a quote, not a hard sell.
That works because the details are real. ChatGPT is good at arranging true facts into a readable post. It’s bad at inventing interesting ones. Our guide to captions that sound like a person wrote them covers the caption side in more depth.
A reply to a Google review
Write a reply to this Google review. Keep it under 50 words, warm but not gushing.
Mention the specific job. Don't repeat the review back to them. Sign off as Dave.
Review: "Dave and Josh replaced our hot water in a day and cleaned up everything.
Great communication."
For a negative review, add: “Acknowledge the problem without arguing, don’t admit legal fault, and invite them to call me directly on the business number.” Then read the result very carefully before posting.
An email to your customer list
Write a short email to past customers reminding them that heat pump hot water
systems may be eligible for NSW rebates. Don't state any rebate amounts or
eligibility rules; I'll add those from the official website. 120 words max.
Subject line options: give me five, under 45 characters, no clickbait.
Notice the instruction about rebates. Anything involving money, rules or eligibility should come from the official source, not from ChatGPT. It will happily give you a confident, out-of-date number.
A rewrite of something you wrote
This is the most underrated use.
Here's a paragraph I wrote for my About page. Fix the grammar and make it flow
better, but keep my words and tone wherever possible. Don't make it sound more
corporate. Show me what you changed.
You keep your voice, it tidies the mess. “Show me what you changed” means you can reject the edits you don’t like.
The editing pass
Never post the first draft. This pass takes two or three minutes and makes the difference between copy that sounds like you and copy that sounds like a chatbot.
- Check every fact. Names, places, prices, timeframes. If you didn’t give it the fact, delete it.
- Cut the first sentence. AI drafts often warm up with a throat-clearing opener. The second sentence is usually a better start.
- Cut the last sentence. Same problem in reverse: a neat summary nobody needed.
- Read it aloud. Anything you wouldn’t say to a customer at the counter, rewrite or remove.
- Add one detail only you know. The dog that supervised the job, the street with the tree roots, the reason you recommend a particular brand. One real detail beats a paragraph of polish.
- Strip the giveaways (list below).
Phrases that give AI copy away
These are the tells people now recognise instantly. If you see them in a draft, cut or replace them.
“Nestled in the heart of…” Nobody describes their own shop like this. Say the street or the town.
“We pride ourselves on…” Show it instead. “We send a text when we’re on the way” says more than any amount of pride.
“Rest assured…” Sounds like a call centre. Just make the promise.
“Your trusted partner for all your X needs” Means nothing. Say what you actually do.
“Not just a X, it’s a Y” A very common AI sentence pattern. Once you notice it, you’ll see it everywhere.
“Are you tired of…?” and “Say goodbye to…” Infomercial openers. Real people don’t talk to their customers like that.
“From X to Y, we’ve got you covered” Usually followed by a list of everything. Pick the thing you’re best at.
Three adjectives in a row. “Reliable, professional and friendly.” Pick one and prove it.
“Furthermore” and “Moreover” Fine in a report, odd in a Facebook post.
Long dashes everywhere. AI tools love a long dash mid-sentence. A full stop or a comma is usually better.
Emoji bullet points and hashtag blocks. A tick emoji in front of every line and ten hashtags at the bottom is the visual equivalent of all of the above.
A word on privacy
Don’t paste customer names, addresses, phone numbers or health details into ChatGPT. Strip identifying details from reviews or emails before you ask for help with a reply. Check the data controls in your account settings, which let you choose whether your chats are used to improve OpenAI’s models. If you handle health or other sensitive information, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner has guidance on your privacy obligations that applies no matter what tools you use.
Where ChatGPT fits, and where it doesn’t
It’s good for: social captions from real details, review replies, email drafts, rewriting your own writing, subject line options, and turning a rambling voice memo into tidy notes.
It’s not a substitute for: knowing your customers, real photos, real testimonials, or the judgement about what to say in the first place. For website pages specifically, the stakes are higher because the content sits there for years. Our guide to where AI helps and hurts with website content covers a fuller workflow.
Try it this week with one job: write your business brief, then use it for your next three review replies. You’ll see quickly where it saves time and where it needs you. If you’d rather hand the regular marketing writing to someone who already knows how to make it sound human, that’s part of what our social media management team does, and you’re welcome to have a chat with us about it.