Inbound Marketing and Design Blog | Stream Creative

AI and Brand Voice: The 3-Step Guide to Better AI Outputs

Written by Janice Dombrowski | Jun 20, 2024 6:58:34 PM

Stream Creative’s recent event, “Maximizing AI Outputs with Your Brand’s Voice,” highlighted the role of brand voice and how it can be integrated to guide AI content creation.

Here are the presentation highlights.

Why Brand Voice Matters 

Brand identity is pivotal, and using AI to craft a strong voice is about distilling a company's unique values into a coherent narrative. Consistent messaging builds reliability and reinforces social proof, fostering an emotional tie that transforms passive listeners into active advocates. This strategic communication goes beyond talk; it's an experience that pulls consumers closer, distinguishing your brand from competitors.

Ultimately, the equation for fueling AI outputs comes down to a mixture of brand voice, a solid knowledge base, and clear AI prompts. This multifaceted approach defines a brand’s essence and amplifies overall message consistency, ensuring that every piece of AI-supported content meets brand voice standards. 

1. Define Your Brand Voice

Developing a distinctive brand voice is a multi-step process that results in clear, consistent brand communication. Following these structured steps will define and express your brand's unique identity:

Step 1: The Foundation of Brand Identity

Mission: Define your brand's purpose and reason for existence.

Values:
Articulate the principles and beliefs that guide your brand's actions.

Personality:
Create or define a brand persona that is unique, relatable and memorable.

Step 2: Tone of Voice

Tone: Identify the emotional tone your brand communicates.

Voice Examples:
Provide examples of how your brand would communicate in different scenarios.

Not Our Tone:
Identify communication styles that are not aligned with your brand.

Step 3: Understand Your Audience

Audience Profile: Understand who your audience is and what they care about.

Communication Style:
Identify the best way to communicate with your audience.

Step 4: Messaging Framework

Core Messages: Articulate the key messages that your brand wants to communicate.
Brand Vocabulary: Create a list of words and phrases that uniquely describe your brand.
Inclusivity: Ensure that your brand messaging is inclusive and reflects the diversity of your audience.

Step 5: Style Guide Essentials

Writing Conventions: Establish guidelines for grammar, punctuation, and style.
Writing Style: Define the writing style that aligns with your brand, including any registered trademark or naming conventions. 
Sentence Preferences: Establish preferences for sentence structure, length, and complexity.
 
Once you have these elements defined, the next step is to use AI to drive your brand. Stream Creative has developed a Brand Discovery Guide. This tool creates a brand voice prompt that can be used with any AI content generation tool.

2. Build Your Knowledge Base

Building an extensive Knowledge Base helps AI platforms create brand-aligned content and informs your AI tools' continued development and education.

What types of information should be in a brand’s Knowledge base? This is what we suggest:

Company Knowledge: Tap into the vast amounts of unstructured data—like training sessions, calls, webinars, and whitepapers. Utilize Language Learning Models (LLMs) to access this data, ensuring the AI produces accurate and current information. Regularly audit and update your content, categorizing each asset for maximum effectiveness.

Buyer Personas: Assemble detailed PDFs on your target customer, including demographic and psychographic information, purchasing behaviors and their challenges and goals. This creates a customer profile for more targeted content creation.

Marketing Content: Transform your past marketing materials into PDFs, including content briefs, product information and educational content like webinars and case studies, as well as details from events.

Sales and Service Content: Compile PDFs from sales conversations and demos, service knowledge bases and training video transcripts to better inform your AI tools about effective sales and service language.

Competitor Information: Research and document competitor insights, understanding their keywords, customer profiles and market strategies.

3. Master Prompt Building

Effective and efficient communication with AI requires a nuanced approach of utilizing prompts. The quality of your prompts will directly influence the quality of the AI content generation.

We recommend the following guidelines:

Conversational Prompting: Engage with AI as though it were a colleague, providing context to refine the nuances and specificity of the responses. The more context given, the more personalized the AI's responses will become, mirroring a natural learning process.

Structured Prompting: Hone the AI to perform specialized tasks by setting clear, role-specific parameters. Detailed, step-by-step instructions, personalized questions and examples elevate the AI's relevance and adaptability.

Build an Internal Prompt Library: Assemble a digital prompt library that is easily accessible for recurring use to maintain brand consistency. Each entry should include:

  • Title: A precise, informative header for easy retrieval.
  • Description: A concise summary of the prompt's intended effect.
  • Use Case: Clarification on when to apply the prompt for optimal results.
  • Examples: Illustrations showcasing the prompt in action, guiding content generation in line with your brand’s tone and objectives.

The alignment of AI with a well-defined brand voice hinges on a thorough knowledge base and precision in prompt crafting. It's a deliberate process that blends understanding of a brand, its audience and the technology now at our disposal.

Stream Creative’s Brand Voice Discovery Guide provides a critical first step in articulating and maintaining your brand’s identity in the age of AI. Request your guide and take the next step in optimizing your brand's digital communication.