On-Brand Content

You're staring at an empty content calendar, knowing you should be publishing regularly to stay relevant with your audience. But between running operations, managing clients, and handling financials, finding time to create thoughtful content can feel impossible. When you do make the time, you spend hours staring at a blank page trying to sound "on brand."

Content creation is a notorious time-sinks for SMBs. It's essential for staying top-of-mind with customers, but the traditional approaches require significant investments of time and creative energy.

AI can transform content creation  into a strategic advantage. And you can do this without losing your authentic voice or turning your brand into bland, generic "AI slop."

Here's how.

Step 1:

Define Your Brand Voice

The first challenge most businesses face is defining their brand voice. If you don't have a formal style guide, don't worry—your existing content already contains patterns that define your unique voice. Generative AI can help extract these patterns.

Start by gathering examples of your existing content:

1. Website Content: Your homepage, about page, and product/service descriptions
2. Email Communications: Newsletters, customer emails, and sales follow-ups
3. Social Media Posts: Especially those with high engagement
4. Customer-Facing Documents: Proposals, case studies, or presentations
5. Recorded Conversations: Transcripts from sales calls or customer meetings (if available)

Open a conversation with Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini, we're not going to build a jig (yet). Use the most capable model you have access to. Try a prompt like this:

You are my brand voice analyst. I'll share examples of my existing content, and you will analyze them to identify patterns in my communication style. Help me understand what makes my brand voice unique so I can create a comprehensive brand voice guide.

For each content example I share, please analyze:
1. Tone and personality traits (e.g., conversational, formal, technical, passionate)
2. Recurring phrases, metaphors, or terminology
3. Sentence structure patterns (short and punchy vs. complex and detailed)
4. How formal or casual the language is
5. Use of industry jargon vs. accessible language
6. Emotional appeals or values emphasized

After analyzing all examples, I'll ask you to create a complete Brand Voice Guide.

Next, copy and paste 7-8 examples of your content into the conversation, one at a time. After sharing each piece, ask it to analyze that specific example. Provide relevant context about the example as a preamble:

Here's the first example of our content from our website homepage. Please analyze this piece:

[Paste content here]

Continue this process with each content example. After you've shared all examples, ask for the complete Brand Voice Guide using this exact prompt:

Based on all these examples, please create a Brand Voice Guide in exactly the following format:

"""
BRAND VOICE GUIDE

ABOUT OUR BRAND:
[Write 1-2 paragraphs summarizing our overall brand personality, values, and positioning]

OUR VOICE IS:
- [Adjective 1]: [Brief explanation with example]
- [Adjective 2]: [Brief explanation with example]
- [Adjective 3]: [Brief explanation with example]
- [Adjective 4]: [Brief explanation with example]
- [Adjective 5]: [Brief explanation with example]

OUR VOICE IS NOT:
- [Adjective 1]: [Brief explanation]
- [Adjective 2]: [Brief explanation]
- [Adjective 3]: [Brief explanation]

KEY MESSAGING THEMES:
1. [Theme 1]: [Brief explanation]
2. [Theme 2]: [Brief explanation]
3. [Theme 3]: [Brief explanation]

CONTENT GUIDELINES:
- Sentence length: [Preference for short vs. long sentences]
- Vocabulary: [Simple vs. technical, any specific word preferences]
- Formatting: [Use of bullets, headers, paragraph length, etc.]
- Contractions: [Yes/No and when to use them]
- First person: [Do we use I/We/Our? When?]
- Humor: [Do we use humor? What kind?]
- Phrases we like: [Any signature phrases or terminology]
- Phrases we avoid: [Terms or expressions to never use]
"""

The Brand Voice Guide should capture the essence of our unique voice based on the examples I've shared. Make it specific enough that it could guide someone to write in our voice, with concrete examples rather than generic descriptions.

The resulting Brand Voice Guide will be in the exact format needed for your Brand Voice Architect jig in Step 2. You'll be able to copy the entire output and paste it directly into your jig instructions, saving time and eliminating the risk of misalignment between steps.

This analysis often reveals surprising insights about your brand—such as being more formal in written content than verbal communications, or using different tones across different channels. These insights help you make intentional decisions about which elements of your current communication style you want to maintain and amplify.

Step 2:

Build a "Brand Voice Architect" Jig

With your Brand Voice Guide in hand from Step 1, you're now ready to create a specialized AI jig that will consistently produce content in your unique voice. This jig will serve as the foundation for all your content creation efforts.

Start by creating a new GPT (ChatGPT), Project (Claude), or Gem (Gemini) with these custom instructions:

You are my Brand Voice Architect, designed to help me create content that authentically captures our unique brand voice and messaging. Your purpose is to help me draft various types of content while maintaining consistent tone, style, and messaging.

[PASTE YOUR ENTIRE BRAND VOICE GUIDE HERE]

Audience Information:
- Primary: [Add details about your target audience]
- Their pain points: [List 3-5 key challenges they face]
- Their aspirations: [List 3-5 key goals/desires]

When helping me create content:
1. Always ask clarifying questions about the specific content piece I need
2. Suggest 3 different approaches when appropriate
3. Highlight any areas where you're unsure if the content matches our voice
4. Flag any potential messaging that might contradict our brand values

Now, upload these additional materials to give your jig even more context:

• Top-Performing Content: Upload the same content examples you used in Step 1, focusing particularly on the pieces that resonated most with your audience. Quality matters more than quantity.
• Customer Testimonials and Reviews: These provide valuable insights into how customers perceive your brand and the language they use to describe your value.
• Competitor Analysis (optional): Include brief notes on how competitors position themselves and how your voice deliberately differs. Don't have one? This will be the topic of an upcoming newsletter 😊. 

With this comprehensive foundation, your Brand Voice Architect jig will be equipped to generate content that sounds authentically like your brand. The key is that your jig now contains both explicit instructions (from your Brand Voice Guide) and implicit patterns (from your content examples).

Step 3:

Strategic Content Planning 

Once your Brand Voice Architect is set up, it's time to build a content calendar. The goal is to develop content that resonates with your audience and aligns with your business objectives.

Start a new conversation with your jig and try prompts like:

Based on my customer pain points and our business goals, help me develop a 3-month content calendar with weekly topics that would be valuable to our audience. For each topic, suggest:
1. A working headline
2. 3 key points to cover
3. The primary customer pain point it addresses
4. A relevant call-to-action

To make your content even more relevant, use AI to analyze customer interactions and industry trends:

I've been hearing these questions/concerns from customers recently:
[List 5-7 recent customer questions or comments]

How might we develop content that proactively addresses these topics while showcasing our unique solutions? Please suggest 5 potential content pieces.

For timely content that ties into current events or seasonal trends:

What are 3-5 upcoming industry events, holidays, or trends in the next quarter that we could create content around? For each one, suggest a unique angle that aligns with our brand positioning.

This approach transforms AI from a mere writing tool into a strategic planning partner. Instead of simply asking AI to "write a blog post about X," you're leveraging its pattern recognition abilities to identify valuable content opportunities you might otherwise miss.

The key difference here is collaboration—you're not blindly accepting whatever the AI suggests, but using it to expand your thinking and identify connections between customer needs, business goals, and potential content topics.

Step 4:

Avoiding Slop

The difference between generic "AI slop" and standout content isn't in the tools you use, it's in how you use them. A thoughtful human-in-the-loop process ensures that everything you publish truly represents your brand.

Create a Simple QA Checklist

Before publishing any AI-generated content, quickly review it against these key criteria:

• Voice Verification: Does this sound authentically like us? Are there phrases that feel "off"?
• Accuracy Check: Are all facts, statistics, and claims accurate and properly sourced?
• Value Assessment: Does this content provide genuine value to our audience?
• Originality Scan: Does this offer a unique perspective, or is it generic advice anyone could give?
• Brand Alignment: Does this content reinforce our core messaging and values?

The human review process doesn't need to be time-consuming. With well-trained AI, most of your review time will be spent on minor tweaks rather than major rewrites. .

Inject Original Insights

Your business has unique perspectives and experiences that no AI possesses. Always add elements that only you can provide:

• Customer stories or case studies from your direct experience
• Proprietary data or research findings
• Industry observations that aren't widely published
• Personal anecdotes that illustrate key points
• Novel frameworks or approaches you've developed

These original elements transform generic content into something distinctively yours.

Engage as a Collaborator

The most powerful AI collaboration happens through back-and-forth interaction. Rather than accepting the first draft, treat the AI as a thought partner:

I like the overall structure, but section 2 feels too generic. Let's revise that section by incorporating these examples from our client work: [examples]. Also, could we emphasize our unique approach to [topic] more strongly in the conclusion?

This collaborative process combines AI's ability to generate coherent content with your unique business expertise—producing results neither could achieve alone.

Think of it as a creative partnership: the AI handles the heavy lifting of drafting and structuring, while you focus on making strategic choices, adding unique insights, and ensuring the final piece truly represents your brand.

Step 5:

AI-Generated Images

For businesses where visual content is important, recent improvements in a few, specific generative AI models make it possible to create compelling visuals that complement your written content without graphic design skills or being a prompt engineer.

The latest image generation capabilities from ChatGPT 4o and Gemini 2.0 have dramatically improved:

• Consistent brand aesthetics: Both models now allow you to generate images that maintain consistent visual styles across multiple images
• Text integration: They can generate images with properly integrated text elements that don't have the distorted text issues of earlier models
• Multi-frame generation: Create sequences of related images for carousel posts, step-by-step guides, or before/after comparisons
• Detail control: Specify exact elements you want included or excluded from generated images

To get the best results for business content, try these prompts:

Create a professional image showing [brief description] with these specifications:
- Style: [clean/minimalist/illustrated/photorealistic]
- Color scheme: [describe your brand colors]
- Should include: [specific elements that must appear]
- Text to include: [any text to appear in the image]
- Aspect ratio: [16:9 for blog headers, 1:1 for social media, etc.]

While these tools are impressive, remember that they're best used for:

• Conceptual illustrations and diagrams
• Abstract brand imagery
• Simple data visualizations
• Supporting graphics

For photography of real people or products, you'll still want to use actual photos, or invest in professional photography or stock images that reflect your audience's diversity.

Scaling Without Sacrificing

The approach outlined above transforms content creation from a sporadic, time-intensive process into a strategic, scalable system. The goal isn't to replace human creativity but to amplify it, giving you the capacity to maintain an active content presence while focusing your human time and energy on the strategic elements only you can provide.

By creating a system that combines AI's production capabilities with human strategic guidance, you can build a content engine that consistently delivers value to your audience while authentically representing your brand - and avoiding the slop.

✨ ✌🏻 ✨

As always, if you have ideas for future newsletters, I'd love to hear them.