Find your greatness with AI, 3 easy steps for authenticity and brand voice

It’s absolutely shocking how few organizations truly embrace AI from the top down. Why do most organizations fail to embrace AI? While LinkedIn and our socials are exploding with savvy content creators, their how-to prompt guides, and everyone raving about AI's endless options, generally, the senior management shines with its lack of operational action. 

As a Marketing Manager, you know you’re leaving money on the table by not using AI. That said, you yourself or your team still don’t use AI in any professional or business way.

What’s up? Why aren't you using AI yet?

And more importantly, how to fix it.

Error: AI is still experimental and not essential

First and foremost, it’s good to know that you’re not alone. The lack of Marketing professionally using AI for their daily content production is absolutely real.

Despite all the media attention and AI specialists popping up like crazy, it’s common that AI is still in the experimental corner and not an essential part of the daily processes and ways of working to speed up, enrich, and improve content. 

The creative agencies are an exception to this. However, if you brief them to create content for you, what do you think they'll do?? 

Second, I get that AI and its crazy exponential growth can be overwhelming. 

Unknown makes unloved, and it's a bit scary with all the big data and privacy concerns, let alone the deep fake sh*t.

The root cause of the lack of embracing AI

One reason could be that brands struggle to start, and another is that they are afraid to lose their brand identity and voice while using AI to speed up the processes.

I can’t think of any other reasons, as everyone knows the urgency. It's only apparently not urgent enough to get funding and resources approved by the C-suite to really get things moving. 

I hope we can change that. 

Let’s get started

Let’s dive into the details of what you need to know, and how to find your greatness and stay authentically you while you use AI for your content. 

1. Let AI define your brand voice
2. Use Custom Instructions
3. Have fun; you can’t break AI

In the first paragraph, you'll find the business case of ~€ 500 per person per year for an AI license and training results in 10% time savings. The best investment you can make.

First, what a Marketing Manager or CMO needs to know about AI

For clarity, let’s assume you know nothing about how AI originates and works. AI still looks like abracadabra magic to you.

Without getting into all the details, this is what you need to know for your Marketing job:

• AI is based on probability and predictability; it echoes what’s already there
• It’s trained on big, I mean really big, sets of data, updated every second
• The growth is exponential, even faster than you think. The knowledge and experience gap widens every day
• You and your team need time to adapt your ways of thinking and processes and learn how to prompt properly. It’s not a tool; it’s a different way of working
• The business case is mind-blowing; AI can save you at least 1 hour daily. That’s about 10% of your time. Against a € 250 ChatGPT-4o team license or a € 360 CoPilot license per person per year. Double that amount for training, and you’re there. 

Don’t be fooled or bamboozled by all the how-to guides, manuals, and raving reviews by hipster Millennials of Gen Z. If you, as a (retarded) X or Boomer with pretty cold feed, use your common sense, think clearly, stick to your craft, use your industry expertise, and don’t panic, you’ll be fine.

All you need to do is to dive in. Head first.

Let’s start with the authenticity scare before we dive into the getting started anxiety.

Find your greatness with AI

Finding your greatness. Dare to stand out and be authentically you. You can use AI while doing that. There’s no need to be afraid that you’ll blend in and have more of the same mediocre so-so content when you turn to AI to produce your content.

This is what you need to do

First, you need to realize that shit in equals shit out. You need to learn how to prompt properly and use the right paid tools.

Second, you need to define your greatness, brand identity, voice, and point of view to bake this into your AI setup to get on-brand output.  

Then, follow my 3 easy steps to find and keep your greatness

1. Let AI define your brand voice

In short, collect examples of your writing, apply the ‘tone of voice’ prompt, add more examples to fine-tune, and make it even more authentically you. Lastly, you create a prompt that you can use by copy-pasting it as an add-on to every prompt you write. 

For example, this is my brand voice 
'‘The tone of voice in this copy is direct, authoritative, and slightly informal. It uses strong language and metaphors. The author is not afraid to be blunt and even a bit confrontational in their language to make their point clear. However, they balance this with a friendly and approachable tone, offering practical advice based on their own experiences. Overall, the tone is confident, knowledgeable, and passionate, with a sense of urgency to get the message across.’

The extended step-by-step guide → How to use ChatGPT to create content: defining your brand voice

2. Use Custom Instructions

This is the game changer I mentioned above. Custom Instructions equal baking in your brand voice and add another characteristic to personalize ChatGPT.

The 2 elements of Custom Instructions

• Enter ‘What would you like ChatGPT to know about you to provide better responses?’
• Tell ‘‘How would you like ChatGPT to respond?’

It’s a bit too long and much to give an example of my configuration in this blog. Please check the link below for all the details and specs.

→ Improve your ChatGPT output: a 2 step guide for 'Custom Instructions

3. Have fun; you can’t break AI

This is my last and maybe even most important tip. ‘Have fun’. Play and fool around with ChatGPT. Push the limits, ask the weird things, challenge the status quo.

Whatever you do, you can’t break AI. If you get stuck or don’t like what you get, close the chat and open a new one.

The worst that can happen is that ChatGPT remembers your quirky prompts; at best, that results in a better output for the next session.

Get over your start-up anxiety

I get that AI and its crazy exponential growth can be overwhelming. Unknown makes unloved, and it's a bit scary with all the big data and privacy concerns, let alone the deep fake options.

That all said, you know you cannot not do this. I know that you’re aware of the urgency. However, you might feel a bit paralyzed in getting started and getting the funding from the C-suite. They know it’s important but apparently don’t feel the urgency you do.

Time to make the AI change! This is what you need to do; I know it’s easier said than done…

• Start to use AI in your daily job. Don’t stick to the obvious, playing around in the free ChatGPT version. Use it in your daily work to experience its power, benefits, and disadvantages yourself.
• Realize the growth is exponential; you already know there’s no way back
• The best time to start was yesterday; the second best time to start is now. You need time to strategize and implement; it’s not a tool; it’s a different way of working
• If you don’t, you’ll miss out. On cost savings, talent, speed, and time to market. You’ll be overtaken by brands who do embrace and use AI.
• The business case is very clear: ~€ 500 per person per year for a license and training results in 10% time savings.

Not starting is just not an option. Now, it’s up to you as a Marketing manager to get the funding and resources to make it happen.

Wrapping it up, finding your greatness

Honestly, sorry not sorry for my bold statement, you’re a fool if you don’t use AI in any professional or business way. AI can save you so much time and money and improve your content in ways you can’t imagine.

Besides, the business case is so clear that you’re a double fool if you leave so many savings on the table.

That all said, the biggest hurdle, next to getting started, is to keep your authenticity while using AI. Don’t be afraid, you can find your greatness and prompt and bake that into your AI to create authentic and real content.  

With my newsroom, 30K+ unique visitors a year if created with the help of AI. And I still sound pretty authentic, don’t I?

Image credits: Nike, Find Your Greatness, 2012

Need help?

If you need any help with all of the above—and I’m not biased at all—I’m thoroughly experienced, have ruffled many feathers, and have learned from my mistakes, drop me an email. If I’m not the right person to help you, maybe I can recommend someone or an agency from my network.

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