If you’re like me, you’ve experienced a rollercoaster of emotions about generative AI. One moment, we're in awe of its capabilities; the next, we're anxious about its implications. This tug-of-war of feelings is part of the journey. But here's the thing: whether we like it or not, AI is here to stay.
Maybe you’ve used AI to generate blog posts or optimize your SEO. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Have you considered how AI will change the way our audience consumes and interacts with our content?
Simply put, we need to make our entire content ecosystem AI-ready. This involves aligning our brand values with AI capabilities, developing AI-friendly style guides, and reimagining our content workflows. But how do we do that? Here are a few things to get you started:
Become an AI Champion at Your Company
Let's face it: getting your entire company on board with AI can feel like an uphill battle. But trust me, it's worth the effort.
Start by gauging your company's appetite for AI—understanding where your organization falls on the AI adoption spectrum is crucial for your approach. At LoSasso, we've formed an internal AI council with members from different departments, meeting regularly to stay up-to-date on AI tools and strategies for implementation.
While overhauling your entire workflow with AI can seem daunting, remember that you don't have to do it all at once. Begin by examining your foundational processes and identifying where AI could lend a helping hand. By pinpointing specific pain points or opportunities, your AI tool research becomes much more focused and effective.
Now, let's dive into making your brand AI-ready.
From Monologue to Dialogue: Why Conversation-Ready Matters
As marketers, we've always known that our brand is more than just a logo or a catchy tagline—it’s an essential consumer reference point. But in the age of AI, we need to take our brand personas a step further to be positioned for more engaging and authentic interactions.
Traditional brand guidelines have served us well. They've given us a consistent color palette, memorable taglines, and some general voice and tone guidelines. However, these were created for a world where brands mostly talked about consumers, not with them. AI-powered tools like agents and assistants will be speaking on behalf of your brand. Therefore, we need our brands to sound, type, talk and write like real personalities to get them conversation-ready. If your brand persona isn't ready for this level of interaction, you risk coming across as inauthentic or worse, completely missing the mark in these AI-driven conversations.
Train Your AI: Make Your Digital Twin
Now that we've stressed the importance of getting your brand conversation-ready, it's time for the next step: using those new personas to train your AI. Remember, AI's true superpower is mimicry and imitation. So, let's treat it like the cognitive collaborator it is—or more appropriately, let's make it your digital twin. Here's how we can infuse that brand personality we just crafted into your AI.
Create Your Own GPT
Ever found yourself deep in a chat with ChatGPT, only to notice it starts to go a little off the rails? To keep ChatGPT on track and true to your brand throughout your entire conversation, you can create your own custom GPT. This allows you to build an AI model that truly embodies your brand persona.
Write an Effective Prompt
If creating your own GPT feels like overkill, fear not. You can achieve a lot with an effective prompt. Here are the key ingredients for the perfect prompt:
- Role: Define who the AI is supposed to be
- Directive: Clearly state what you want it to do
- Structure/Template/Format: Outline how you want the information presented
- Example: Provide a sample of what you're looking for
- Style instructions: Describe the tone and voice to use
- Context: Give any necessary background information
By training your AI with your brand persona, you're ensuring that whether a customer is chatting with a human or an AI, they're getting the same authentic brand experience.
Plot Twist: AI Helped Me Write This
I'll tell you a little secret: I'm not a strong writer. My brain thinks in bullets, not flowing paragraphs. So, how did I turn my scattered thoughts into this (hopefully) coherent blog post? You guessed it—I followed my own advice and enlisted the help of AI. Here's a peek behind the curtain:
It all started with a notebook full of scribbles from MAICON, put on by Marketing AI Institute (highly recommend following them, by the way). Normally, I'd type up my notes and ask ChatGPT for a summary, but this time I had a clear direction in mind, so I skipped that step.
Next, I outlined my blog in bullet points, writing exactly how I talk to guide the AI on style, tone etc.
For this project, I decided to take Claude for a test drive having heard it's better at writing tasks, and fed Claude my outline one section at a time—I've found this approach more effective for refining content.
From there, it was a back-and-forth dance with Claude. I'd revise and tinker with the language to make it sound more like me, then share the revisions with Claude, explaining my changes. This iterative process helped me maintain my voice while leveraging AI's writing capabilities.
The final step was having a professional copywriter review the post to ensure it still sounded human and like me.
And voila, this post was born. You can see from this example that while AI is a powerful tool, you still need human experts to drive the collaboration and direction.
Don't Fear AI, Embrace It
AI isn't just a passing trend; it's reshaping our industry in profound ways. Our AI tools are powerful collaborators for creating more engaging content, optimizing our workflows and connecting with our audience in new ways.
By diving in, experimenting and learning how to use AI effectively, you're not just keeping up with the trend—you're positioning yourself and your brand to thrive in this new landscape. Moreover, as you engage with AI, you'll gain invaluable insights into how to optimize your content for AI-driven platforms and search engines. This knowledge will be crucial as AI continues to shape how our audience discovers and interacts with content.
The AI revolution in marketing is just beginning, and the opportunities are boundless. Are you ready to seize them?
