3 must-know generative AI prompts to help small business owners during the busy holiday season

One of the first steps you might take to prep for the holidays, whether you run an in-person or e-commerce shop, is getting your online product descriptions optimized for search engines. What does that mean? Search engines like Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo (to name just a few examples) use the text, headings, images and their alt text, and other key information from webpages to understand what that page is about and whether it meets a user's search intent. 

Optimizing your product descriptions for standard search engine optimization (SEO), large language model (LLM) search, and generative engine optimization (GEO) can help boost your pages so they rank higher in search results. This is ultimately great for your customers—having search-optimized pages helps them find the type of product they're looking for.

Let's say we own Luz's Lit Candle Co., and we have a new Festive Pine candle that we'd like to get ranking high in search results ahead of the holidays, especially for our local customer base. We don't have the budget for a marketing professional, so we're going to tap ChatGPT for assistance.

To prompt ChatGPT well, we need to give it as much specific information as we can:

• The name of our business
• Our business website, so it can analyze existing content and tone
• Who our audience is
• Direction on the tone of writing for the product description (sassy? friendly? professional?)
• Preferred length of product description
• Instruction to make it optimized for search engines and LLMs
• That we're generating this product description for the holiday shopping season
• Name of the product
• Details about the product that need to be included
• Ask it to check its understanding before starting work

We'll work the above information into a single prompt for ChatGPT, being conversational and clear while using short sentences to enhance its understanding of the prompt:

Ready to try it yourself? Copy and update the sample prompt text below:

ChatGPT asked a great question after it checked its understanding: Which audience would we like to prioritize, local or national? We'll let it know to use the geo-targeted search engine optimization (SEO) language, because we have a better chance of ranking high in local search results than competing with national candle brands for the broader search terms. Try responding with something like:

At a glance, this looks great, right? But remember that GenAI is infamous for hallucinating, or making things up, at rates of up to 79%. Our output includes some assumptions that we didn't give it:

• That we hand-pour our candles
• That the scent profile is of fresh-cut pine, Christmas tree farms, or reminiscent of Southern holidays
• That locals love gifting it—we hope they do, but it's not on the market yet!

We can ignore ChatGPT's question about the SEO meta description in favor of asking it to refine that first result it gave us. We can confirm that we do indeed hand-pour our candles, and then we can correct it on the scent profile of the candle. We could ask it to cut the sentence about local gifting of our candle, but that's an easy edit we can make to the final description later. We could also have an edgier tone to the text. Let's prompt it again:

This is pretty good. There's a little bit of AI weirdness—what does "flexing your festive side" even mean?—but the additional details helped it nail the candle's scent profile. We might be worried that we've lost some of the original search engine value from our original request though. After all, it only mentions Nashville once and not Tennessee at all. We'll try another prompt to be sure SEO and GEO remain top of mind in our final description.

OK, we've gotten to a pretty good place: the tone is fun and edgy, and it's hyper-localized to Nashville. We also have a couple of sentences we can edit with a human touch where the language feels a little silly, stilted, or inaccurate. Thinking critically about GenAI's output and checking its accuracy is always the last step before we publish something an AI tool has written.

Forget the boring mall candles—Festive Pine is Nashville’s holiday candle with attitude. Hand-poured in Tennessee, this 16 oz soy wax beauty mixes pine, warm vanilla, and a hit of pumpkin pie spice that smells like Nashville Christmas magic with a little rock ‘n’ roll edge. Locals call it It's the ultimate Nashville holiday candle, perfect for anyone locals hunting unique Christmas gifts you can actually feel good about giving. Whether you’re grabbing one from our Lower Broadway candle shop for a White Elephant swap in East Nashville, bringing a hostess gift in to Germantown, or shipping to friends nationwide from our Nashville candle shop, Festive Pine brings Southern holiday vibes straight to your door living room. Made with nontoxic fragrances and plenty of sass, it’s the local Christmas gift that burns cleaner, smells bolder, and makes holiday candles everywhere else look basic. Light it up, Nashville—this is how we do the festive season.

Not bad! If SEO isn't our thing, we've now got a search-optimized product description that we can upload to our website with our new product. We can also check the other text forms available on the back end of our website and ask ChatGPT to optimize for those, too. Check your website to see what text you can optimize, then try some follow-up prompts like:

There's a lot that goes into creating job postings and sifting through resumes to make great hires for the all-hands-on-deck chaos of the holidays. Whether you need extra help packaging shipments in the back room, helping holiday shoppers navigate the storefront, or working the registers to make those final sales, the process starts the same way: Write a job description, recruit for it, and review the possible deluge of resumes in response.

GenAI is well-positioned to help with hiring seasonal employees: first by helping you write a clear job description, and then by helping you sort out unqualified applicants.

Let's say we own Elliot's Bake Shop in downtown Boulder, Colorado. We're famous across the greater Denver area for our sufganiyot, rugelach, Hanukkah cakes, and holiday sugar cookies. During the holidays, we need seasonal help with baking, packaging orders for local and national delivery, and working the front of the shop. Let's write a job description for that floor associate position.

Just like before, we want to give our AI tool as many details and as much background information as possible to get the most accurate and helpful output. This time we're going to prompt Claude, another GenAI solution with a free tier.

You might have some previous job postings to work off of—meaning that you could feed those into Claude to give it examples of how your business has structured job postings, context about the business, and what benefits you offer, such as holiday pay.

There are several components to a job posting, so we can provide more structure in our prompt to get what we're looking for. Markdown syntax is a surprisingly simple way of organizing content. A pound symbol (#) represents each section, and two pound symbols (##) represent subsections. We can go into even more detail by continuing to add pound symbols. Our first prompt could look like this:

Try it yourself with a seasonal position you need to create a job posting for:

Claude provides its written output in a separate panel on the right-hand side of the webpage. Here's what it generated for us:

Seasonal Floor Associate - Elliot's Bake Shop

Job Overview

We are seeking an enthusiastic part-time seasonal floor associate to join our team during the busy winter holiday season from November through the first week of January. This position offers an opportunity to work in a warm, community-focused bakery environment while helping customers discover our beloved holiday treats. The ideal candidate will provide excellent customer service and support daily operations during our busiest time of year.

Job Responsibilities

• Greet customers warmly and create a welcoming atmosphere
• Offer samples of baked goods to help customers make selections
• Answer questions about our products, ingredients, and specialty items
• Restock displays and display cases throughout the day
• Maintain cleanliness of the storefront and customer areas
• Operate the point of sale (POS) system accurately and efficiently

Qualifications

• Minimum age of 16 years
• Willingness to work nights, weekends, and holidays
• Previous food service or retail experience preferred but not required

Benefits

• Competitive pay at $16 per hour
• 30-minute paid meal breaks for shifts of eight hours or more
• Employee discount on all baked goods

Next Steps

To apply, please submit your resume outlining your qualifications, past work experience, and availability during the seasonal period (November through first week of January).

About Elliot's Bake Shop

Located in the heart of downtown Boulder, Colorado, Elliot's Bake Shop has been a beloved community gathering place since 2018. Founded by a passionate husband and wife team, we've gained recognition throughout the greater Denver area for our exceptional sufganiyot, rugelach, Hanukkah cakes, and festive holiday sugar cookies. Our commitment to traditional baking techniques and quality ingredients has made us a destination bakery for both locals and visitors. During the holiday season, our shop becomes especially bustling as families come to us for their celebration treats and gift needs.

Claude did a nice job building out the job responsibilities to sound warmer while not adding hallucinations. There's more room for it to have fabricated details in the job overview and about sections, so those are worth a close read for non-fictitious businesses. We might be ready to copy this text into our own document to make final edits before posting to job sites and our own website. To get the word out about the job opening, try a prompt like:

Here's what Claude shares about the two social media posts that it wrote:

And here are the drafts of the social media posts that Claude generated for us, ready for final tweaks for accuracy, length, and tone before posting to our business's social media networks.

When the resumes start rolling in, AI can lend a hand in filtering out the duds for us. (With online applications, employers are receiving increasing numbers of spam or low-intent applications.) Asking AI for a hand with resumes can be tricky—we don't want it to accidentally eliminate resumes of qualified candidates. But it can help us eliminate spam so businesses only spend their time reviewing legitimate resumes. 

To give Claude some examples to work with, I batch-uploaded a sample resume for a fictional food service worker, my own resume as an editorial business owner, and my partner's resume as a technology sales professional. Two of us don't have the requisite experience—and AI can help narrow down the list to save time reviewing resumes.

Claude was able to identify that the food service worker's resume appeared to meet our qualifications of being over 16 years old and experienced in food service. It even flagged a watch-out for us: the candidate is currently located in Houston.

Try batch-uploading resumes you've received for a job posting (Claude currently accepts up to 20 files at a time), and give one or two clear directives for organizing them:

AI should be assisting you in the process, not replacing human oversight and recruitment efforts. With the right prompts, it can save the humans in charge extra time and effort in hiring for seasonal holiday positions.

Generative AI doesn't only excel at words—it can also create graphics, illustrations, and stock images for businesses that can't otherwise afford design or visual services. Canva has long been a small business' go-to tool for templates and easy-to-edit designs for social media marketing assets. With a free Canva account and Canva AI, it's possible to get customized design templates queued up for holiday marketing. (Similar options to Canva include Adobe Express and Snappa.)

Using AI for on-brand design can be tricky, so we want to be as specific as possible about the design elements that we're looking for. This includes:

• The name of our business
• The message we're conveying, including that it's for the holidays
• Our intended audience
• Our intended destination(s) for the asset
• Our logo, if we have one to share
• Our brand colors, using the hex codes (formatted as #000000)
• Our brand fonts, if we have them
• Our brand guidelines, if we have them—these determine how colors, fonts, and design elements may be used
• The style of design we're looking for (an illustration? a photo? a line drawing?)
• Any examples of our past designs or other designs we like

Let's say we own a spa called Maribel's Zen Spa in Boston, and we'd like to offer a 10% discount on gift cards purchased from mid-November through December to encourage customers to gift massages, facials, and custom pedicures to their friends, family, and significant others.