AI tools can only go so far if you don't know your brand voice. Without training the models on your unique brand tone, you'll end up with generic copy and lots of 🚀🚀🚀 — not exactly what you had in mind!

Think of AI like an intern — you probably wouldn't trust an intern to develop your brand voice from scratch, right? So why do we think AI might be capable of doing it?

And what do we do if we don't know where to start with any of *waves hands wildly* …this?

For our September Goldcast Insider event, Lindsay McGuire, Associate Director of Content and Campaigns at Goldcast, spoke with a few folks who have been around since the beginning of AI as we know it:

• Bryan Grover, Copywriter and Content Strategist at Grover Consulting
• Ruth Favela, AI Marketing Manager at Tomorrow.io
• Lauren Creedon, VP of Product at Goldcast

The panel discussed how to use Goldcast Brand Voice's AI capabilities to uncover your brand tone. We also learned how to train AI with strong prompts and got some recs for favorite AI tools to try!

Read on for:

• Why is brand tone so difficult to nail?
• How to prompt AI properly (hint: it's R.A.R.E.!)
• Use Goldcast Brand Voice to discover your brand tone
• 4 more AI tools to try
• Expert tips for getting better AI outputs
• Brand voice and tone should work together seamlessly

If you didn't catch the event live, you can watch below to see us take audience members' LinkedIn posts and use those to develop their brand voice in real time, using the Goldcast platform!

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Let's get something out of the way first. If you're struggling with how to make AI sound like your brand, you aren't the only one. And, if you're not happy with the generic AI content you've been producing, you're not alone there, either.

Many marketers are uncertain about how to interface with AI. Maybe you're unsure about prompting, or perhaps your expectations haven't been met in the past and now you're a bit jaded.

Once you demystify the different parameters you can use with AI and learn how to improve the directions you feed it, you'll feel more confident about how to use AI and get the most out of your AI stack.

Bryan pointed out that the "A" in "AI" stands for "artificial," but it's more like "automated" right now — an "autocomplete on steroids," if you will. Essentially, generative AI tools are good at taking a ton of data and then predicting what will come next, and that's about it (for now, anyway).

With that in mind, it makes sense that you would need to provide a lot of information up front in your prompt. Let's cover how to do that next!

As tempting as it is to pull up ChatGPT and type, "Write me a social post," that is not going to get you the results you want.

When you use barebones prompts, the GPT model has no idea what topic your post should be about, how long you want to be, if you're okay using emojis — or anything else about what you're looking for.

When it comes to AI prompting, use the R.A.R.E. framework to cover all of your bases:

Role: Tell the AI model who you want it to be. Is it a marketing manager helping to create a campaign strategy? A junior writer outlining a blog post? Or something else? Be specific!

Action: What do you want the tool to do? Get down into the nitty-gritty of what you want to achieve. Maybe you're looking for a 500-word blog post on a certain topic, or maybe you'd like a detailed calendar for your next event promo push.

Break down your instructions into simple steps instead of one long block of text. Even though the AI isn't human, it's still easier to digest that way.

Result: This is where your brand voice will go. (If you're feeling stumped as to your own voice, soon we'll show you how to use our handy tool to find it!)

You should also get into other specifics here. You can tell GPTs to "limit prose" if you want to reduce the length of output, or even give it a strict word count to abide by. You can also go over language to avoid and any other style guidelines AI should know.

Example: Any tangible examples you can provide to reinforce the information you gave above are helpful. This doesn't have to be a post you've written, either; you can pull from other existing material you find if you want GPT to emulate that.

There are AI tools out there that can help you improve your prompts, too. Ruth has used Prompt Perfect in the past to iterate on her prompts, or you can try asking ChatGPT to evaluate your prompts and tell you what you could improve on. A little reverse engineering never hurts!

If you haven't used Content Lab, allow us to introduce you to Brand Voice, one of the newest capabilities within the platform.

Watch as Lauren demos the Brand Voice feature within Content Lab — complete with a Snoop Dogg cameo or two:

As you can see, Content Lab's Brand Voice feature makes it simple to create content in your own unique voice. You can feed the platform posts from your LinkedIn, brand guidelines, or copy from elsewhere; it will analyze it and develop your specific voice profile, which you can then tweak to perfection.

If you create content for multiple people in your company, Brand Voice will save you tons of time because you can just create individual profiles for each person that are true to their POV, and then apply them to your content as needed!

By the way, the time to get in on Content Lab is now. Start building your video library as soon as you can, so that when the ability to quickly search across video for specific keywords is unlocked, you're ready to go!

One note — and this is true of any AI tool — Brand Voice on its own won't get you 100% of the way there. However, it will certainly save you time and contribute to consistency across your team and as you keep editing your prompts and inputs, you'll get closer and closer to your desired results!

If you want to evaluate your current tech tools, here are some recommendations from our panelists. Check these out, and remember that it's always good practice to find tools that can do more than one thing for you in order to simplify your stack!

Use Perplexity to save time on basic research tasks. Ruth was looking for a very specific tool the other day and, instead of digging around on Google, she asked Perplexity a question and it delivered the right answer in seconds!

Bryan used Perplexity to finish a piece he was working on about cancer guidelines; it was written for physicians, and Perplexity helped him hone in on the most relevant points for that audience.

As you may have guessed by now, Content Lab is our video repurposing tool! Simply upload a video or event recording and wait a few seconds as Content Lab churns out video snippets, social media posts, blog posts, takeaways, transcripts, and more.

Use Fathom to summarize your discovery or check-in calls and then provide those summaries to your sales team for more powerful follow-up and lead nurturing. Bryan also uses it for interviews that will end up feeding into finished client pieces; Fathom is great at convo summaries!

Rather do a quick face-to-face check-in than an email? Record a Loom video and let your recipient view it on their own time. Recording videos can make it easier to explain things or do brief demos without the hassle of setting up a call and coordinating calendars.

A few parting tips from our panel on how to further refine your outputs:

• Expand your technical writing vocabulary. You're going to be the person responsible for cueing the AI on what it's doing right and wrong, so you need to develop the language skills to do that. We've all been in a situation where we know something's off with a content asset, but we can't necessarily articulate what it is. Try to ask yourself questions to drill down into what exactly you want the GPT to change.
• Remember that AI is akin to having an intern. It will do exactly what you ask it to do. It will not take risks, pass "Go," or collect $200 unless you explicitly tell it to do so! Be sure to break down your instructions and get as elementary as you can with specifics so that you have the highest chance of getting the right output.
• Building on that last point, include elements in your prompt that are uniquely you. (Hint: Use Goldcast Brand Voice to get those if you don't already have some in mind!) At the end of the day, you want to be sure that your content feels like "you."

While AI will absolutely save you time and energy, you will still have to put in the time and effort to create strong prompts and fine-tune the model over time. Only then will you start to really see the value.

The beauty of all of this AI advice is that it works together. You can use AI tools to help identify your brand voice, and then you can use that crystal clear brand voice to improve the prompts you're feeding into GPT models.

When you're ready to give Brand Voice a whirl, you'll be excited to know that you can use Content Lab for free — forever! No strings attached! Seriously. Try it below, and be sure to tag us in your creations so we can see what you're up to!

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