We were ready to launch a new feature at Dispense: Drive Through for cannabis dispensaries. This means we need to update our marketing website with some feature content. As all creators know, copy and content takes FOREVER! With the new OpenAI tech being all the hotness right now, I wanted to see if I could use it to alleviate the time it takes to write SEO-optimized copy and generate images for the marketing website.

Below is the first version of the new drive through marketing page. We'll certainly add to this and iterate on our copy for SEO purposes, but we like shipping > perfection.

I asked ChatGPT to "generate seo optimized keywords for a cannabis drive through"

Okay, this isn't a bad starting place. But we're not the ones actually offering the drive-through, we just provide the tech. So maybe a better question is:

"generate seo optimized keywords for cannabis drive through software"

The output here was much more diverse and the terms were longer. I'll have to comb through these.

Let's see what Google Trends thinks about 'through' vs 'thru' - ChatGPT is giving us a mix.

You can see in the graph below is that these searches definitely peaked during the pandemic, and 'thru' is the winner, so that will be used in our slug and then we'll use a mix of both terms in our page copy. 

Now that we've got a start on keywords, we need to write some copy. Let's see what ChatGPT can do with the prompt "write copy for cannabis drive thru software":

Meh. It's gimmicky, which is against our brand guidelines. Over-using terms like "ultimate solution", "state-of-the-art", "streamline", "user-friendly", etc. typically make me think your tech is probably not these things.

I gave it a few more prompts to get some more copy ideas. There's some copy pieces I grabbed from ChatGPT, but it was still me mostly manual writing copy, not dissimilar to getting copy ideas from existing businesses.

Generating images using DALL-E was kind of fun, but weird. The images of people and hands come out really funky.

Overall, I think screenshots and images still need to be done manually - especially if you already have a strong branded visual identity established. 

The output is kinda random. It's possible if I gave DALL-E extremely specific instructions I could've gotten it closer to our brand. I'll have to play around with it more.

Here are some results from many searches. I tried things like: "cannabis drive thru 3d" and "cannabis drive thru pixel art". And refined these by adding things like "with car at window", "purple background", etc. I went down one path to try and get some shots of someone taking an order (upper right) and the people all ended up looking very uncanny valley - mostly human-like, but off.

Overall, it was fun and directionally helpful, but not a silver bullet. I think like all new tools you have to figure out how to use it to the best of its abilities, but all tools have gaps that only an adaptable, thinking human can fill.