Ep 119 - ChatGPT or Claude? Which is best for freelance dietitians - PART 2

Claude has quickly become one of the most powerful AI tools for business owners, but many freelance dietitians still aren't using it.

In this episode, Sarah explores the features that make Claude particularly useful for saving time, creating better content and reducing the mental load of running a nutrition business.

From writing in your brand voice and working with long documents to automating repetitive tasks and connecting with the tools you already use, Claude can do much more than simply answer questions.

Listen to Part 1 here.

In this episode:

• Why Claude can be particularly powerful for writing and maintaining your brand voice.
• How to use Claude with long reports, research papers and clinical guidelines.
• How Claude Skills can save you from repeatedly explaining how you want a task completed.
• How multiple Skills can work together to create content that reflects your writing style, visual branding and offer messaging.
• What Claude Connectors can do when linked with tools such as Google Drive, Gmail, Canva, Asana, Airtable, Kit and Kajabi.
• How scheduled tasks can automate regular business activities such as analytics reports, competitor research and business reviews.
• How Claude's daily briefing can bring together your calendar, emails, news and other information in one place.
• What Claude Design can do for lead magnets, presentations, handouts and other branded resources.
• The difference between Claude Chat, Claude Cowork and the Claude browser extension.
• How Claude can move beyond content creation and become a strategic business assistant.
• Why giving AI enough context about your expertise, ideal clients and brand voice is essential for getting better results.

Sarah also shares how she's using Claude to build a "business brain" that can work across different areas of her business and spot patterns she might otherwise miss.

Free resource: Download Sarah's free PDF here to learn how to prompt AI so it understands your clinical expertise, ideal clients, brand voice and business goals.

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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BeyondTheClinicPodcast

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Transcript

Sarah (00:45)

Welcome back to part two of my ChatGPT versus Claude mini series. If you haven't listened to part one yet, I'd definitely go back and listen to that one first because last time we were talking all about ChatGPT, including some of my favourite ways that I use it in my own business to save hours every single week and the features that have been a total game changer for my clients. And also a few things that you can do with it that you might not even realise are possible.

But today we're moving on to Claude, a tool that I think has become very popular very quickly, but when I chat to my freelance dietitian colleagues, they just aren't using it yet. Now Claude has some really, really powerful features, most of which you probably have no idea about, and in some areas it actually outperforms ChatGPT.

And this is why I wanted to split these into two episodes. I have been knee-deep in learning all about AI tools for the last two years or so, learning how I can use them in my business, as well as how I can create AIs to support my clients in their business development too. And honestly, I have to say I have become a bit of an AI geek and I want to share some of this passion with you too.

So by the end of this episode, you will have learnt some new features that you can use inside Claude to save you a lot of time and energy in your business.

When you understand the strengths of each of the different AI tools, that's when AI can become so much more powerful for you. It's when it can help you save time and create better content. It can help you think through ideas faster and take a lot of the mental load off running your business.

So Claude, let's see what you can do.

We're going to start with what I think is probably the biggest strength, the writing. Claude has become pretty well-known for this. A lot of writers, authors and marketers prefer Claude because the writing tends to feel much more natural and much less AI-ish. It's particularly good at holding onto a very specific tone of voice. So if you give it examples of your writing, your brand style or the type of language that you like to use, it's much better at maintaining it. And this is super important for you as a freelance dietitian because if you think about it, your words are doing a lot of the trust building before someone ever books a consultation with you. they're probably reading your website. they're reading your emails, they're in your blogs.

And all of those little interactions are helping them decide, you know, do I trust this person? Will they actually understand me? Would I actually feel comfortable working with them? So this is where Claude can be super powerful. You can use it to help you write social media posts and emails and website copy and make sure that it still sounds exactly like you. But honestly, don't just take my word for it.

Go ahead and take the exact same writing task and give it to both ChatGPT and Claude and look at the output side by side. You will see which one feels more natural, more like you and more like your brand. I think you'll find that Claude is much more your cup of tea when it comes to writing.

Now, Claude's second biggest strength is working with long documents. As dietitians, we are constantly working with information.

Now, luckily, Claude is incredibly good at taking large amounts of information and helping you make sense of it. you could upload a 40-page report, a set of published guidelines, a really long research paper, and ask it for things like, 'Please summarise the key points' or 'Turn this into a client-friendly resource' or 'What are the practical actions that I should take from this?' or 'Create an Instagram carousel based on this information.' And the best part is it can keep the bigger picture in view, and it's much less likely than ChatGPT to lose important context halfway through.

Now, the other thing Claude is really strong at is following detailed instructions. So you can give it really clear rules like, 'Don't use these phrases, write in this particular structure, keep the tone conversational', that's a good one. Always explain things in this way. And it tends to stick to those instructions really, really well without slowly drifting back into generic AI language.

And you know what, this becomes even more powerful once you've given it something really important, and that is your brand voice. Because when AI understands not just what you want written, but how you actually communicate, that's when it starts becoming much more like a genuine assistant rather than just a writing tool. And that brings me on to my favourite Claude feature.

Now this next feature is honestly one of the biggest reasons that I use Claude so much. Skills. Claude's skill is basically a set of instructions you create once. You teach Claude exactly how you want a particular task done, and from then on, whenever that type of task comes up, it automatically follows those instructions without you having to explain yourself all over again. So one of my favourite skills is my podcast newsletter writer.

If you're an avid listener, you will know that every Monday I send an email out to my audience about my latest podcast episode. Before Claude, I'd sit there for an hour or more trying to write it from scratch, or I'd spend ages editing what ChatGPT gave me. Now, I just simply paste in the podcast transcript, type a forward slash, which is the quick way to bring up your list of skills, select my podcast newsletter skill, and it already knows how I want that email written. It knows my opening style, it knows my closing style, it knows the structure that I use and the fact that I always link the blog, the YouTube version and the podcasts. The same thing happens with my visual brand guideline skill. I've taught Claude my colors, my fonts, my formatting preferences of how I like my documents to look. So whether it's creating a worksheet or a lead magnet,

It already knows how I like things to be presented. So every document or spreadsheet that Claude produces for me comes out looking exactly like my brand.

At this point, you might be thinking, "Well, hang on, Sarah, isn't this basically the same as a custom GPT?" And that is a really good question because yes, they are very similar. But the difference is with ChatGPT, you choose one custom GPT for one specific job. So you have to choose which one you want to use at that time. But with Claude, you can stack them. So it automatically combines the skills that are relevant for the job.

Now, ChatGPT can't do that.

Let's just say I asked Claude to help me write a brand new guide that I want to offer as a lead magnet. It won't just use my writing style and my brand voice and the words that sound like me,

It'll also pull in my visual branding guidelines at the same time. So the finished document looks exactly on brand. It will even pull on my offer messaging. Yes, I've got a skill set up for that. So the content in my new lead magnet will naturally lead readers towards taking the next step in my business. This is one of those features that doesn't really sound that exciting until you start using it and it blows your mind.

Another clever feature of Claude is what are called connectors. Not very many dietitians I've chatted to know about this feature, by the way. So this is a really big golden nugget of a feature. Connectors allow Claude to work with the tools and the systems that you already use in your business every single day. things like your Google Drive, Gmail, your calendar, Canva maybe. It could be a project management software. I use Asana. It can be databases. I use Airtable.

It can be your email service provider, I use Kit. It can be your CRM, I use Kajabi for that. Your social media accounts, and you know what, just practically loads of other business apps and tools. Now, really important note here before I go any further, if those tools contain personal or client information, you should only be connecting them once you're using the appropriate team or enterprise plan and have the correct data processing agreements in place. That is really important from a GDPR perspective because those tools will be accessing and processing other people's data on your behalf.

Once that's covered, Claude doesn't just give you ideas anymore, it can actually work with the information that's already inside your business. It can literally reach into those tools, read from them, and if you give it permission, actually do things inside them as well. Let me give you a real life example so you can see what I mean.

Every Monday morning, I get Claude to pull my Instagram analytics from the week before.

I've already given it a set of criteria for what I consider a successful post. It doesn't just tell me the numbers, it analyzes what worked and what didn't. It looks for patterns that it's noticing and what I should do more of the following week. Then it automatically sends that report to me and also to my team in a communication app called Slack. And then it files it neatly inside our marketing project in Asana. How cool is that?

This was a task that used to involve me opening multiple tabs, looking at a huge spreadsheet with data, writing up notes, filling in the blanks, sending it to my team, and now it all happens completely automatically. And this is where I think people sometimes underestimate AI, because it's not just about helping you write content, it's about taking repetitive tasks like this off your plate.

The next feature you've got to check out inside Claude is called scheduled tasks.

So up until now, everything we've talked about has involved you having to ask the AI to go and do something, but scheduled tasks are different. You set them up once and then they just happen daily, weekly, monthly, whatever cadence you choose. So that Instagram report that I mentioned just now,

I don't have to remember to ask Claude for it every Monday. It just appears in my inbox and my team's inboxes before I've had my first Americano or brushed my hair. This is a super duper useful feature to start leveraging in your business because we all have those jobs that we know we should be doing regularly, like the weekly check-in on what content's actually working, like the monthly review of where your inquiries and clients are coming from, like the regular competitor research that you keep meaning to do. But when you get busy and life gets in the way, they're usually the first things to get pushed until next week and then next month and then really properly never happen. And these are usually the things that are really important to look at because they help you make better decisions and help you grow your business. Turn those, 'I'll do it when I get time' jobs into things that automatically happen when they need to. One of my favourite scheduled tasks that happens inside Claude is my daily briefing. Every morning at 6am, Claude creates a personalised summary of what I need to know for that day.

It checks my calendar and my email inbox and then pinpoints anything important that I need to be aware of that I can prioritise and what can wait until the next day or the next week.

It also gives me a quick summary of the news and summarises things in a really simple way so that I can understand the key points quickly without falling down a rabbit hole of articles. It also gives me updates on things that I care about like marketing trends, AI developments, of course, pediatric nutrition and neurodiversity.

I've even given it my full natal birth chart. So yes, my daily briefing includes my horoscope too.

And then it compiles everything together in one short update that's sent straight to my phone, ready for me to read with my coffee first thing in the morning. It takes me about two minutes to go through instead of opening five different apps and somehow losing 40 minutes before I've even started my day. And of course, this involves things like my inbox and my calendar. So I'm using an upgraded business level plan that allows me to process personal data safely, compliantly.

Earlier I mentioned that Claude isn't able to create photo-style images in the same way that ChatGPT can. And that is still true for photo-style images. But Anthropic, the creators of Claude, have recently created something really interesting called Claude Design. So it's a separate design tool that you access from Claude and it allows you to describe what it is that you want it to design in words and then Claude will go away and create the design for you. Instead of starting with a blank Canva page, you can just say something like, 'Here's a blog post that I've written on explaining how to introduce allergens safely, create a simple professional one-page guide for parents. And then Claude will create the layout, the structure and visuals for you. It's particularly useful for things like presentation slides, simple graphics and infographics. It knows your brand, your colors, your typography, your logo. And then when you're happy with it, you can export it into Canva or PDF or PowerPoint, whatever you like.

So think about the practical uses for your business, like a really well designed lead magnet or turning your workshop content into a professional handout or a one-page overview of your services to share with GP surgeries or referral partners or an Instagram carousel template so your grid always matches.

Now, it's worth saying that this is still a very, very new feature and not everyone actually has access to it yet. It's still currently in what they call 'Research preview', which basically means it's still being developed and improved. But if you're someone who thinks, 'I know what I want to create, but making it look good takes me forever!', then this is definitely something worth experimenting with.

And actually, I recently delivered a workshop for the freelance dietitians group of the BDA where I got Claude to design and create all the slides for me and I was really impressed.

Those are Claude's biggest strengths and features, but there's actually something else that most people don't realise about Claude. There's actually three different ways that you can work with Claude, but most people only ever use the first one. So the first way is chat. This is the version you're probably most familiar with, the normal conversation window that you can use on your phone or your computer.

And this is where you brainstorm ideas, you ask questions, you write content, you think through problems, et cetera, et cetera.

The second way is co-work. And this is where Claude starts moving from being something that you chat with to something that actually helps you get your work done. With co-work, Claude works directly with files and folders on your computer. So instead of saying, 'Here's my idea, now help me write it!', Claude can actually create and work with the files themselves. For example, if you're creating a lead magnet, it can help produce the actual finished resource rather than just giving you the words and leaving you to format everything yourself, and then it can store it for you on your hard drive. I actually used Cowork recently when I was redesigning my program Accelerate. I wanted to make it more beginner-friendly, and I also wanted to update the whole experience for 2026. And Claude helped me work through the existing materials, identify what needed changing, and restructure the whole program.

The third way is the browser extension. And this is where Claude sits alongside you while you're browsing online. It appears in a side panel in Google Chrome, and it can work with the page that you're currently looking at. For example, you could be looking at a competitor's website and ask Claude to analyse their messaging. Or you could be reading an article or a research paper and ask it to summarise the key points.

It's like having an assistant sitting beside you while you work. So if we simplify it, Claude Chat thinks with you, Claude Cowork creates with you, and Claude Browser Extension works alongside you.

A little bit of behind the scenes here. I am currently in the process of having Claude build me a business brain where it has access to all of my business data, like leads and sales and transactions.

It has access to my ads account. It reads my inbox and my calendar. It works in my programs as an extra set of eyes and ears to keep on top of what my clients are doing. And it knows all of my business tasks. The plan is that it will help me first of all, keep on top of my work, but also make me the best version of me for my clients. It'll help me spot patterns in leads and sales data that I couldn't spot myself and ultimately improve the business so it's the best version of itself and it makes a bit more money.

Watch this space, I will share how that one goes. So there we have it. Claude is a great choice for helping you write better content. But also if you want to use AI more as a strategic business assistant, so you can really start understanding what's working in your business and what isn't, where your time's going, and where you could make smarter decisions to grow. Before you go, if you're using ChatGPT or Claude and you're thinking, "Well, why am I not getting the amazing results that everyone else seems to be talking about?" It's usually because it doesn't have enough context to give you the kind of responses that you actually need. And that's why I've created a free PDF showing you exactly how to prompt AI so that it properly understands your clinical expertise, your ideal clients, your brand voice, and exactly what it is that you're trying to create. So instead of spending ages correcting generic AI responses, you can get responses that are more accurate, more relevant to your audience, and much closer to something you'd actually use in your business. You can customise it and add your own details, and then just plug it straight into ChatGPT or Claude. It's completely free, and you can download it from the show notes in this episode.

But of course, if you want to go all in and use AI the way that I'm using it, come and talk to me because one of my business coaching options might be exactly what you're looking for. Bye for now.