[AI in Action] ChatGPT vs. Custom GPT: The Secret to Faster, Better Results

Episode #121: [AI in Action] ChatGPT vs. Custom GPT: The Secret to Faster, Better Results

WATCH THIS EPISODE ON YOUTUBE

If you’ve ever felt frustrated tweaking AI-generated content over and over... there’s a better way!!

Typing out new prompts every time you use ChatGPT is fine… until you realize you’re wasting time rewriting instructions, adjusting tones, and re-explaining the same things over and over.

Enter: Custom GPTs.

In this episode of Tech Savvy 101, I’m putting regular ChatGPT prompts head-to-head with a Custom GPT trained specifically for content creation. You’ll see exactly how a Custom GPT delivers faster, more accurate, and more personalized results, without all the extra work.

By the end of this episode, you’ll know when to use a Custom GPT instead of standard ChatGPT prompts, and how it can save you hours each week.

IN THIS EPISODE, I DISCUSS:

➔ The key differences between ChatGPT prompts and Custom GPTs (and why it matters for your business).
➔ Side-by-side comparisons of how Custom GPTs deliver better, more efficient results.
➔ Real-life use cases for Custom GPTs and how they’re helping entrepreneurs automate tasks effortlessly.

RESOURCES MENTIONED:

📌 Want me to build you a Custom GPT? Let me handle the setup so you can start using AI in your business effortlessly ASAP → Sign Up Here

📌 Episode #120: Custom GPTs 101: How AI Assistants Can Save You Hours Every Week 

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS:

01:21 – Understanding Regular ChatGPT Prompts
01:45 – What is a Custom GPT?
02:35 – Real-Time Showdown: Regular Prompt vs. Custom GPT
12:53 – Benefits of Custom GPTs
16:00 – Real-Life Use Cases for Custom GPTs
17:41 – Conclusion and Next Steps

LET'S CONNECT

👉 Facebook
📺 YouTube
📱 Instagram
💡 LinkedIn
🖥️ Website
💻 Facebook Group

SUBSCRIBE & REVIEW
Loved this episode? Please leave a review! If today’s episode got you excited about simplifying your systems and embracing AI, be sure to hit subscribe so you don’t miss future episodes!

Transcript

Sarah Baker 0:00

Hey there, and welcome back to Tech Savvy 101: AI Automation Made Simple. I'm your host, Sarah Baker, your tech savvy bestie, who's here to help you simplify your business, embrace automation, and save hours every week. Today, we're diving into another AI in Action episode, and we're focusing on something that's been a complete game changer in my own business, the difference between regular ChatGPT prompts and custom GPTs, also known as AI assistants. If you've been using ChatGPT, but feeling like you're spending too much time tweaking and massaging the results, this episode is going to be an eye opener for you. We're going to do a side by side showdown in real time during this episode, showing you exactly how a custom GPT stacks up against a regular prompt. You'll see the dramatic difference in quality, specificity, and time saving. And trust me, when you see the difference, you're gonna have one of those, Why haven't I been using this sooner? moments. By the end of this episode, you'll understand exactly when and why you should be using a custom GPT instead of regular prompting inside ChatGPT. This approach is a serious time saver, cutting your content creation time in half or more while actually improving your results. Let's get started. Before we dive in, let's do a quick 30 second refresher. A regular ChatGPT prompt is when you go to ChatGPT and type your request from scratch. Maybe you're creating the prompt out of your own brain, or maybe you're cutting and pasting it from somewhere else. But either way, you're starting in a completely blank ChatGPT chat. You have to explain what you want every single time. A custom GPT, on the other hand, is like your own personal AI assistant that has been pre trained with your specific instructions, your brand voice and your preferences. Think of it like this: a regular prompt is like giving directions to a complete stranger, while a custom GPT is like giving directions to your best friend who has been to your house a hundred times. One needs all the details. The other just needs to know when to show up. It just gets you. You know that thing when you can look at your best friend and you can talk with a look across the room and you know what the other one is thinking, that's a custom GPT. One brain. So if you want more background on all things custom GPTs, check out Episode#120 Custom GPTs 101: How AI Assistants Can Save You Hours Every Week. I'm going to include a link in the show notes, but in today's episode, I'm going to be sharing my screen to show you the exact difference between these approaches. And in our test case, we're going to be using something many of you have asked about, which is optimizing Pinterest content. So now let's talk about why this matters for your business. Custom GPTs debuted on November 6th, 2023. As of November 2023, there were 19,100 public GPTs in the GPT store. As of December 2024, there were over 159,000 public GPTs, which is an increase of 732% in just over a year. That is a lot of businesses recognizing the value of personalized AI. Sam Altman, who is the CEO of OpenAI, put it perfectly when he said"the future of AI isn't just in general models, it is in personalizing AI assistants to work the way businesses need." And honestly, that is also exactly what I have found in my own business. The number one frustration I hear from my own clients and students inside my courses about using ChatGPT and all AI models is it takes too much editing and back and forth to get the results that they need. And listen, I get it. That's because general AI doesn't know you, your style, your workflow, or your preferences. It's like hiring an assistant who doesn't know anything about your business and expecting them to nail it on day one. And I talk about this all the time. If you've listened to my previous episodes, you know that I love to say, AI is your intern, Chad. If you don't bother to train Chad, you're always going to get Basic, bleh, results from your unpaid, untrained intern. According to McKinsey and Company, automating content creation with AI saves businesses an average of 40% on time spent per task. But, here's the thing. That number goes way up when you're using a custom GPT instead of starting from scratch every time. So if you take the time to train Chad and teach him everything about you and your business and your brand, well, congratulations, you've just created SuperChad, and you're going to save way more than 40% on time spent per task. All right, let's get to the fun part, our head to head test. If you're listening to this episode, you can grab the link to watch this episode on YouTube at your convenience in the show notes. As you can see on my screen, I have ChatGPT pulled up. Let's start with round one, the regular prompt. I'm going to use a typical prompt that any of us might use with ChatGPT. Here is what I'm doing. First off, I want to note that I do have the paid version of ChatGPT. The only difference here is that I am able to attach documents. So what I have done is I have attached a transcript of one of my past podcast episodes, and then I'm going to add in this prompt."Please act as a Pinterest expert. Create 10 Pinterest pin titles. Suggest highly searched Pinterest keywords and write three Pinterest optimized descriptions for my podcast episode. I'm attaching the transcript of that episode. Please make sure the titles are attention grabbing and include keywords that help with SEO for Pinterest. Please also include a CTA for each description." I think that's a pretty solid prompt. Now let's see what regular ChatGPT, with a prompt, comes up with. We're going to hit enter. We've given it a pretty solid amount of detail with the prompt, and also by providing it with the entire transcript of that episode. So it's giving us 10 attention grabbing Pinterest titles, 7 AI myths that are holding your content back, number 3 will shock you. Think AI is too expensive? Here's the truth about AI for content creation. The biggest lies about AI and content creation. Don't fall for these. So it's given us 10 titles. It's giving us highly searched Pinterest keywords for SEO, such as AI content creation, AI for bloggers, AI tools for content creators. And it's come up with three Pinterest optimized descriptions with a call to action. Think AI is too complicated, too expensive, or makes robotic content. Think again. In this episode, we're busting the seven biggest AI myths, stopping creators from using AI effectively. Learn how to use AI to streamline your content creation process and grow your brand without the overwhelm. Tap to listen now. It's not bad. It's not exactly my voice, but for Pinterest pin descriptions. You can give or take. So I've got 10 titles, some keywords and three Pinterest descriptions. Not too shabby. Now what we're going to do is I have my PiperBot, which is a custom GPT that I have built. Now, you can use it two ways, because I have built this to be forward facing. This is actually one of the resources inside of my AI Evergreen Content Machine course that students inside the course get access to. So if you Click on let's pin. It'll prompt you through how to use it. It'll say, hey there, let's get started with your Pinterest pin. Tell me what you're promoting. It'll ask you some questions to start, get started. But again, because I want to do this as an apples to apples comparison, what I'm going to do is just upload the transcript again. So I'm going to upload the transcript and say, please give me keywords, pin titles, and pin descriptions for this podcast episode, one of the things you'll notice right away is that you don't have to be as Lengthy with what you're asking because with custom GPT's you've front loaded What you're asking and you've already given the custom GPT a lot of information. It already knows what to do So we're gonna hit enter. Here's a fully optimized Pinterest strategy for your podcast episode High ranking Pinterest keywords. These are optimized for search visibility AI content creation, AI tools for business, content creation tips, small business automation, and it's giving me 20 Pinterest pin titles, because inside of the bot, I have told it I want 20 Pinterest titles, and it's giving me a mix of curiosity driven, SEO friendly, and list style formats, because again, this is the type of pins that I want. So it's writing me all of these pin titles. Because that's the strategy that I like, is to have a lot of pin titles to mix and match both in the actual pins themselves. And when I'm pinning on Pinterest, I like to have a lot of pin titles. Now it's giving me six engaging Pinterest pin descriptions in three different styles of pin descriptions. SEO and engaging focused descriptions, curiosity driven and value packed descriptions, and problem solution pain point focused descriptions. So as you can see, these are already much more custom tailored to the exact type of content that I am looking for, meaning I have more descriptions, I have more titles. They are exactly the type of content that I'm wanting when I'm using Pinterest and the descriptions alone are already more nuanced. Now I didn't answer the questions. Again, this is a forward facing pin, meaning it's not customized to me, but if I had gone through the questions at the beginning of the bot, where it says, first, tell me about what you're promoting. What is your business and content about? Who is your ideal audience? Busy moms, entrepreneurs, health conscious professionals, and do you have specific keywords you'd like to target or would you like me to suggest high ranking Pinterest keywords for your niche? So if I had gone through and answered those questions before I just launched into asking it to provide me with the content that I was asking for, the keywords, the pin titles and the pin descriptions, then The descriptions would even be more tailored to me and my niche. Meaning that they would be even more geared toward who I want finding my pins. So, even taking that extra minute or two to answer those questions at the beginning would mean that my content would be even more tailored. And the difference here is because again, I've created this specific bot to be a resource for students inside my course, so I've created it for many people to use, but I also have another bot that is just for me to use, so I have trained that bot on my brand voice, and in that case I get even more custom results because it is a unique to me bot. When we compare the results from the custom GPT versus the prompt, we can already see that we've gotten over double the content from the custom GPT, because that was what the custom GPT was trained to do. Additionally, looking at the pin descriptions, we've gotten much more tailored descriptions in three different styles, the SEO and engagement focus, the curiosity driven, because that is what the custom GPT was trained to do. This is just a snippet of what the custom GPTs are able to do. You just need to tell it on the front end once what you want. Now if you had a more complex task, more complex than writing Pinterest descriptions, you can see how long those prompts could get. And then if you don't get the ideal output, you have to go back and say, okay, change this, change that, add this, include that. And that eats up your time. So let's break down the exact benefits we're seeing with the custom GPT. First, there's the obvious time savings. Creating optimized Pinterest content can take up to 30 to 45 minutes of research and writing per blog post or podcast episode. With this custom GPT, it is literally done in two to three minutes. For someone who posts regularly on Pinterest, this could save hours every week. Second, there's the platform expertise built right in. The custom GPT knows exactly what works on Pinterest from character count to keyword formats to the types of titles that get clicked the most. You don't need to be a Pinterest expert yourself. However, if you do have pinterest knowledge or knowledge in whatever the GPT is about, you can build that in and add that value to the GPT. Third, there's consistency across your pins. In this example that we're talking about, the custom GPT ensures all your Pinterest content follows the same high performing format, which helps build your brand presence on the platform. But if we were talking about something else, say, Email marketing headlines for your emails and you had a formula, an additional knowledge in really juicy click worthy email headlines. You could take all that knowledge out of your head and build it in on the backend of the GPT so that you were creating essentially a really juicy email headline GPT, and then just put in what your email was about and it could become a juicy headline generator GPT. And fourth, and this is huge, you get better results because you're using optimized content from the start. According to a recent HubSpot AI trends report, 82% of businesses using AI automation, report increased efficiency in content creation and marketing, but what's even more impressive for this specific bot that I've created for our test case in this episode is that properly optimized Pinterest pins can see up to 30% higher engagement rates than generic ones. So this type of stat where you're seeing higher engagement and better results can translate across the board for most custom GPTs because you're giving that custom GPT all the knowledge base that you have and you're inputting it into the GPT on the back end when you first create it versus when you're doing a standard prompt you're much less likely to take the time and add that knowledge every single time when you're prompting ChatGPT. It's simply too time consuming. You're not going to be consistent with giving ChatGPT all of that information every time, meaning you're going to have inconsistent results each time that you go into ChatGPT. Now, let's talk about some other real life use cases where custom GPTs absolutely shine in business. Content creation is the obvious one, right? Blog posts, social captions, newsletters, YouTube scripts, podcast outlines, really anything that you regularly create that follows a similar format is absolutely perfect for a custom GPT. Marketing materials are another big one. Generating ad copy, calls to action, email sequences, landing page content, because It all becomes so much easier when your AI already knows your offers and your style. Client communications also become a huge time saver. You can create custom GPTs for responding to DMs, answering frequently asked questions, and even creating personalized onboarding materials for new clients. And don't forget about your dreaded administrative tasks. We're talking standard operating procedure or SOP generators, meeting notes summaries, project planning, these are all perfect for custom GPTs. You can even make fun ones. Remember my Buddy the Elf GPT that I made over the holidays? It planned an entire Elf on the Shelf calendar so I didn't have to rack my brain for creative ideas every night. My kids thought I was a holiday genius, but honestly, it was just my buddy the elf GPT doing the heavy lifting. The key question to ask yourself is: Where are you spending the most time on repeatable tasks? That is where you need a custom GPT. So let's wrap this up. Today we've seen the massive difference between using a regular ChatGPT prompt versus a custom GPT tailored specifically, in our test case, for Pinterest marketing and how much time you can save and how much better the results are when your AI assistant already knows platform-specific best practices. We also saw the clear quality improvement when your AI is trained on exactly what works for a specific task. The bottom line is, AI assistants aren't just for big business, they're for any entrepreneur who wants to work smarter, not harder.. So if you're spending too much time rewriting, reformatting, or prompting AI the same way over and over again, it's time for a custom GPT! Now I know you might be thinking, but Sarah, building a custom GPT sounds extremely complicated. And that's exactly why I would love to do it for you! So if you want your own custom GPT, that's perfectly tailored to your business, head to the link in the show notes to get started. I'll build it for you, so you don't have to figure out all the technical details yourself. Or if you're still on the fence and you want to chat about how this could work for your specific business, just email me to chat about the details. And there you have it, a complete comparison of regular ChatGPT prompts versus custom GPTs for your Pinterest marketing needs. This approach is a game changer for saving time, optimizing your content quality, and creating platform optimized content without needing to be an expert yourself. Thanks so much for tuning in. Don't forget to subscribe and check out the YouTube version of this episode for the full screen share demonstration, where you can see exactly how both options perform. I'll see you really soon.