'Find out who you are and do it on purpose' for engaging content

Authenticity matters. The more AI-generated content we have, the more we’ll value personal contact and authenticity — knowing there’s a real human who cares and gives us some love and attention.

As with all things in nature, we seek balance. The more AI and automation on one side, the more personality on the other.

The big question and challenge: How do you let your brand's personality shine while still using AI to speed up your content production and improve your quality? How to keep your brand’s voice when you use ChatGPT to create the content for you?

Fair questions, easy answer by Dolly Parton: ‘Find out who you are and do it on purpose’.

This means two things

• Self-awareness: understanding who you are, your motivations, values, and strengths. And live by them deliberately rather than conforming to industry standards and external expectations. Or generic AI-generated content.
• Intentionally: embrace the above and express this in your actions, your content, and how you interact. Guided by a clear sense of self. You dare to be different.

This all sounds very philosophical and wise. How the h*ll do you implement this in your content strategy and production?

Easy.

1. Find your brand persona and brand voice and create a prompt for that
2. Use Custom Instruction to automate that in ChatGPT-4
3. You do the strategic and creative thinking; AI takes care of the rest.
4. You add the last and final human touch

This results in content that lets your personality shine and reflects your values, vision, and point of view. And above all, it creates more authentic and engaging content.

Let's go. 

1. Creating your brand's persona and voice

The quickest way to produce content at scale that reflects your identity is to have a brand persona and a brand voice.

If you imagine your brand is a person, that personification of your brand is your brand persona.

It’s the counterpart of the buyer persona. Best explained by example, the brand persona of Ironclad Pan is ‘a funky, young grandma who loves to cook and is environmentally aware.'. Having this persona gives them a clear, simple, applicable guideline to produce outstanding, engaging, and recognizable content.  

Once you have your persona, you also need your brand voice. I have found the best prompt to define your brand voice and how to use that for proofreading as well. All with help from ChatGPT. There are 3 easy steps: collect examples, prompt, and refine.

Now, it’s time for the next step: automate this.

2. Optimize AI output with Custom Instructions 

First, step up your game by getting a paid subscription to ChatGPT-4. Yes, there’s a big difference compared to the free version. More accurate, better details, real-time-search, build your own GPTs.

Second, use the hidden and best feature of ChatGPT-4 to transform your experience: ‘Custom Instructions’. 

Here's what you need to do.

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

It personalizes your output and gets rid of those same old bland, non-personal vanilla AI results. My results went from good to great.

3. You do the strategic thinking; AI handles the details

One of the best ways to be authentic is to have your point of view in your content. How you see the world, your vision and insights on the topic.

That said, the best perk of AI is that it frees up your time by doing the grinding hands-on work for you – so you have time for this strategic and creative thinking. Ballpark is about 10% to 30% time savings. You can have AI help with coming up with ideas, writing concepts, proofreading your content, or summarizing chunky PDFs.

That saves you so much time; now you have more time to think and define a prompt. As for everything goes, sh*t in is sh*t out. The better your prompts that are based on insights and have a creative, different angle, the better the output.

So, once you have your brand identity in your customer instructions and your prompts rock with an insight and are aimed to add value, you’ll get great output. You’re almost there.

4. Add some human touch

The last step is adding your human, authentic touch and ‘do it on purpose.’ Play with the copy, break some rules, add some fun, and make quirky changes to make it more you.

Next to highlighting your personality, something AI can’t do for you is the appearance, the visual design of your content. How does it look on a mobile phone? Does it look light, airy, playful, easy, and fun to read? This is the visual design of your copy.

In general, the lines on a mobile phone screen are 30% shorter than on a desktop: 9 words instead of 12, or 12 instead of 15. This depends on your template and font. The result is a 30% longer paragraph on an already small screen.

And nobody gets excited by seeing big, chunky paragraphs on their mobile. So you need to design it, break it down into smaller paragraphs, add more break lines, add more subheaders to group the paragraphs, and use more bullets or lists. 

Again, best explained by example, if you open this page on a desktop, it looks kind of funny with the single lines. If you open it on a mobile, it looks clean, airy, light, and easy to read.

Wrapping it up

Find out who you are and do it on purpose. Let your personality shine and be authentically you.  

Understand who you are, your motivations, values, and strengths. And live by them deliberately rather than conforming to industry standards and external expectations. Or generic AI-generated content. Embrace it and express it in your content. You dare to be different.

These are the 4 steps to nail it and create more authentic and engaging content.

1. Find your brand persona and brand voice and create a prompt for that
2. Use Custom Instruction to automate that in ChatGPT-4
3. You do the strategic and creative thinking; AI takes care of the rest.
4. You add the last and final human touch

Now it’s your turn.

Inspiration: Alex M H Smith, Image credits: Vogue

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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