Lately, artificial intelligence (AI) exited our laboratories to enter our smartphones, our offices…and our gelato shops too. From being a technology exclusive to engineers and multinational corporations, it has become a practical, concrete and accessible tool. And, more importantly, a great ally for marketing.
Today AI can help a gelato shop’s owner to better understand its audience, to optimize communication, to create effective contents and, in some cases, to find new ideas. We’re not talking about delegating everything to a machine, but to be supported by a tool that makes things faster, better and more stimulating.
Just like a good employee, artificial intelligence – if used well – can make communication more fluid and coherent, leaving us with more time to do the best thing about our job: create authentic gelatos and relationships.
IA: a new ally for gealto shops
Lately, artificial intelligence (AI) stopped being a futuristic concept to become a concrete tool at the disposal of many professionals. Even within the scope of small businesses, such as a small gelato shop, it can be an immediate and real advantage, especially when managing social medias.
In this article, I’d like to share some practical ideas on how to use tools such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and others in order to make your gelato shop’s communication more effective, constant and original. Without losing sight of what’s really important: your identity.
We’ll see how artificial intelligence can help us:
- analyze your gelato shop’s online presence;
- create new ideas;
- create texts and images;
- organize your editorial plan.
Analyzing your online presence with AI
The first thing that AI can do, which is very useful, is analysis. You don’t have to be a marketing expert to understand how communication is going with your gelato shop: AI can give you an objective, easy and concrete view. Here’s four ways you can use it for this purpose:
- Analysis of the social contents of your gelato shop: One of the most common issues for those who are managing their business’s social media communication is to understand whether they’re doing the right thing or not. Is the way you speak coherent? Do people understand who we are? Are the contents always the same or do they have a sense of variety?
- You can do a little experiment with ChatGPT: copy and paste the latest 5-6 posts you posted on your gelato shop’s social media (or paste the link to your page) and make AI analyze the by using a prompt such as:
- “I’m looking for a professional feedback about my Instagram posts. Here’s the 6 most recent posts I published. The aim was to show what’s new in my shop this season. Can you tell me if the tone is coherent, if it efficiently shows the identity of an artisan gelato shop and if there are some elements I could improve to sound more authentic and engaging?”
- The result will be an overview that could be useful to reflect on how you’re presenting yourself online. Sometimes small changes are enough to improve a lot the impact your communication has.
What’s a prompt?
A “prompt” is a simple request that we send to artificial intelligence to get a specific answer. It’s our way to talk with this tool, telling it what we want to obtain: a text, an image, and editorial plan, a translation. The clearer and better formulated the prompt is, the better the answer will be.
- Analysis of your gekato shop’s Google My Business’s profile: the analysis doesn’t stop to Instagram, Facebook or TikTok contents, as AI can help you evaluate your gelato shops’ presence on Google My Business (now known as a Business Profile on Google). It’s enough to give ChatGPT your profile public information – such as name, description, category, reviews, opening hours, photos – and ask for a targeted analysis. Such as:
- “This is the link to my gelato shop’s Google Profile. Can you help me understand if it’s optimized to attract new clients? I’d like to know if the description is effective, if there are some elements I should change or improve and if reviews are managed in a way tha is coherent to my identity.”
- You often get concrete suggestions: add missing links, add seasonal photos, answer more emphatically to reviews. An useful tool to be found (and chosen) even by those who are simply looking for “gelato shops near me” and to reflect on how you’re presenting yourself online. Sometimes small changes are enough to improve a lot the impact your communication has.
- Evaluate the job of the agency that manages your socials: if you are collaborating with a social media manager or company, but you lack the competence you need to evaluate their job, AI could give you a first objective opinion. You will just have to give to AI the published texts, the general tone of communication and the visual contents, ans ask for a coherence and effectiveness analysis, depending on your objectives. This will allow you to ask more conscious questions, identify areas that can be improved and to better manage your relationship with these professionals.
- Analysis of the competitors: You can also use ChatGPT to analyze the online presence of other gelato shops in your area. You will just have to search the name of your gelato shop competitor, paste their profile description, their latest posts, their web site contents or the link to their social to ask:
- “Here’s how this gelato shop competitor presents itself on social media. Could you tell me what are their strengths and if there are some things I could take inspiration from, while maintaining my own communication style?”
- This will help you stay up to date, to differentiate yourself and maybe to fine new ideas to adapt to your identity.
- In general, the clearer, the more contextualized, structured and detailed the prompt (and therefore the request you make to AI), the better the answer will be.
CREATE IDEAS WHEN YOU’RE LACKING INSPIRATION
In all we have seen, the central concept is “prompt”: a simple request that we send to artificial intelligence to get a specific answer. It’s our way to talk with the tool, telling it what it should produce: a text, an image, and editorial plan, a translation. The clearer and better formulated the request, the better the results we’ll get. The intense weeks spent in the laboratory, the employee management, the supplies…quite often social media creativity comes last.
But it’s important to post regularly, and ChatGPT could be a concrete help to unleash inspiration. A useful prompt to find new sources of inspiration for your socials could be:
“I’m the owner of an artisan gelato shop who offers seasonal flavors, granita, artisan gelato sandwiches and gelato cakes. I need 10 ideas for Instagram posts for the month of August. I want to alternate promotions, fun facts about ingredients, behind the scenes in the laboratory and moving contents. Could you suggest me different formats (reel, stories, carousels)?”
Or:
“I’m going to put on display the flavor “fig and honey”, a well-loved creation of me. I’d like to tell its story, the values linked to its seasonality and territory and to create contents that would encourage people to try it. Will you help me make an effective post?”
Whatever the use of artificial intelligence, remember that it doesn’t replace your personal touch, but it gives you suggestions, narrative points of view and phrases you can use as starting points.
It’s like a quick brainstorming session with an expert colleague.
CREATING TEXTS AND IMAGES WITH AI
Captivating the people who follow us on social medias doesn’t just depend on what we say, but also by how we say it: images, texts and formats must work together. Artificial intelligence can help us with there three things, with easy to use tools and ideas you can personalize. To create images you can use platforms such as Canva AI, DALL-E or Midjourney. You just have to describe the desired object, the colors, the scene and the atmosphere in the prompt and in a couple of seconds you’ll get a visual response that is suitable to your style. For example:
“Create an image with summer vibes that shows a three-flavored (lemon, strawberry and mint) cup of artisan gelato placed on a small table facing the sea, with a fresh color palette and a discrete logo placement, that you can find attached. The atmosphere must give a sense of relax, hand-made products and quality.”
Artificial Intelligence such as ChatCPT can be a valid assistant when you have to create texts, too.
Suggesting impact sentences, carousel titles, captivating descriptions for special flavors or engaging captions. What’s important is to remember that AI doesn’t write “for you” but “with you”: you have to give it the tone, direction and style. Working together with such a powerful tool can make communication more efficient without losing your authenticity.
ORGANIZING AN EDITORIAL PLAN
Another area in which AI can give its contribution is the organization of an editorial plan. Planning the contents you are going to post ahead of time is essential to communicate in a regular, varied and strategic way. However, due to the hectic rhythm of daily production and management, planning gets postponed.
AI can support you in this phase, helping you distributing your contents through time, alternating different goals (visibility, customer fidelity, promotional materials), formats (reels, stories, single posts, carousels), and topic (seasonal flavors, behind the scenes, events, fun facts, F.A.Q.s, etc).
It’s not just “filling all the squares of a calendar”, but building a coherent narrative, that describes your gelato shop on all sides: the product, the human value, the passion, the seasonality. Ai can help you see from an outside perspective your communication, identifying your imbalances (i.e. too much promotional materials, too little empathy) and suggesting new things to add.
With few inputs you can get a weekly or monthly draft you can adapt to your reality. This way, you can save time while staying coherent with your social strategy.
BE CAREFUL: ONLY YOU REALLY KNOW YOUR GELATO SHOP
No machine, no matter how powerful, will ever be able to really describe your gelato shop for you.
Artificial intelligence is a tool: useful, concrete, surprising. But the voice, heart and identity are in your own hands.
Only you know the story of a flavor that comes from a memory, the ingredient choice, the link to the territory. Only you can answer to your clients with the right tone, choose a photo that describes your philosophy or tell about a day when everything went wrong, but you could smile anyways.
AI helps you save time, create ideas and improve organization. But it cannot replace what makes your communication unique: your authenticity. And this is, at the end of the day, the quality that your clients really perceive. Even online.
