How To Encode Your Brand Voice Into AI Tools

Encoding brand voice into AI tools requires strategic planning. Nataly Kelly, CMO of Zappi, shares her expertise on maintaining authentic brand identity across AI-generated content. She demonstrates how to document brand values, create comprehensive style guides with specific examples, and train AI tools to recognize your unique writing patterns while maintaining quality through human editing. Show NotesConnect With: Nataly Kelly: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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  The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth, and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iHereEverything.com.

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  From advertising to software as a service to data, across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55% to 65% open rate.

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  Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.

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  Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours.

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  If we're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action, then it's just a matter of timing.

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  Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world-class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.

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  According to MediaOcean's recent survey of 1,200 executive-level marketers, there are three common ways marketers use artificial intelligence today. Number one, data analysis, 45% of marketers. Number two, market research, 40% of marketers. And number three, copywriting, 20% of marketers. That was surprising to me. I thought copywriting would be first, but I don't think any of the top three are a surprise. And there's a deeper message here. The real problem is making a connection between the three common use cases. Making a connection from your data to your research so your copywriting authentically reflects your brand voice. Using AI tools without context creates generic sounding content, and your brand voice gets lost in the noise.

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  How can you encode your authentic voice into AI systems? I'm Benjamin Shapiro, and joining me today is Natalie Kelly, the CMO of Zappi and the co-author of Brand Global Adapt Local. And today Natalie is going to explain how marketers can effectively encode their brand voice using AI tools. Natalie, welcome to the Martech Podcast.

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  Thank you, Ben. Wonderful to be here.

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  Very excited to have you. Welcome back, I should say. You've been here once before.

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  Yes, it's lovely to be back. I always enjoy speaking with you.

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  I'm excited to have you here and we've got lots to talk about and lots to celebrate. First off, you wrote your fourth book, Brand Global Adapt Local.

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  Yes, well, I have to say Catherine Melchurey, who was a guest of yours previously, is the lead author on this book, so I didn't write it alone. And it is much more fun to write a book with another person, so I really enjoyed the process this time.

• 2:53Speaker 04

  Well, congratulations on writing the fourth book. And I think of you as one of the best writers in marketing. You've been featured in Forbes, I think Harvard Business Review, you're a published author, and somehow you're also able to be a CMO at a fast-growing company. You clearly have a lot on your plate, so I wanted to ask you a little bit about your writing strategy and your philosophy, because I think it's useful for marketers. Let's talk a little bit about brand voice and what's your philosophy? And what's the purpose of cultivating a great brand voice?

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  Well, first of all, thank you for saying that. I don't view myself as one of the greatest writers in marketing at all. I feel like I'm struggling and just trying to keep up like everybody else and trying to share what I learn. I think that AI has helped us a ton in being able to accelerate certain processes with writing. But this whole topic of brand voice is very near and dear to my heart, because I do think it's important that whatever we put out there is authentic and reflects who we are, whether it's for our personal brand or in the case of Zappi, the brand that I am overseeing, stewarding, et cetera, growing as a CMO. So that is an important topic, and I believe those stats that you shared at the beginning

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  are very intertwined in all of this, because if you're not able to do great research, get that feedback, analyze the data, understand what it means, you can't include that in your writing and you can't message it in a way that is compliant with your brand voice style guidelines and all of that. So it is a challenge to weave all these things together. Now that we have all these new tools at our disposal, it's a constant challenge for marketers to figure out how exactly to do that.

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  It seems like there's an order of operations here, or there's a foundation that needs to be followed. And I think that most marketers or most people in general, most business professionals, think of writing being a creative pursuit. You either have the inherent talent or you don't. And I think that understanding the purpose of a brand voice and then creating your tone and style guide so it can influence what you're actually writing is an important process to follow. So when you think about building a brand voice or defining it, what is your process or what's the exercise that you go through to sort of get that higher level order so it can cascade down into what's actually getting onto the page?

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  So it's interesting. I think it's different if you're talking about a brand that you're creating a marketing program for or building a brand voice as a marketer, or if it's your personal brand. I can talk a little bit about each because I think there's a lot of common ground. And it might be easier to think about your personal brand first because that's where things start, right? That's where ideas come from. And I don't believe there's anyone who can't be a good writer with the right tools, with the right editing, with the right process. Because it's really about having great ideas and expressing those ideas in a way that resonates with a specific audience that might want to hear what you have to say. So when I think about creating that brand voice, part of it is simply who you are

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  and boiling down to the essence of what you stand for and what your mission is and what your values are. So that's as true for your personal brand as it is for an actual business brand. What I mean by that is if you already have encoded or documented a lot of your corporate values, things that you care about, your mission, what you stand for, it makes it so much easier to then develop those brand voice guidelines and develop everything that stems from that. Now, if you're a writer or you want to be a writer and you're trying to develop this for yourself, you might need feedback because you might not know what makes you different and what's coming across in your style. I didn't know this when I began writing until

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  An editor who I worked with very closely when I was at a market research firm told me, Natalie, your style is very punchy. You write with really short sentences, really clear, really almost percussive writing, like attack, attack, attack. And I didn't realize that I was doing that. I don't speak that way necessarily, but when I write, that is how I think and that's how it comes across. And because I was writing for market research and business audiences, it wasn't really appropriate for me to write that way. That was more like copywriting style. So I had to actually change the way I wrote, but that was like my natural tone of voice, my natural brand voice, and that still is my personal brand.

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  Three to five word sentences, you're basically writing long haikus.

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  Yes, I do. I do that all the time. And it's funny because people are like, oh, that's AI generated. And I'm like, that's not AI generated at all. That's my actual style. And maybe nobody likes that but me, but that's me.

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  I like it.

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  I like it too, because it's different. That's how I think. And it's a reflection of who I am. So if people don't like it, maybe they don't like me and the way I think. But that is how you build an identity and how you let that come across in your messaging. And the reason I mention it here is because the more care you take in figuring out what makes you different and what those values are, the easier it is to encode them, the easier it is to train others to do it, including AI tools, agents, et cetera, and other writers. And that's how you scale that brand voice. And so when I looked at my own values, one of the reasons I like that short, punchy, accessible language is because it's easy to understand and people can parse it quickly. It's efficient. It's democratizing in a way.

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  And so I like that because that's the way I like to come across. That's the way I want ideas to be shared. So it really does tie to my own values and my personal brand. So when I'm working with a company like Zappi, very different brand, it's punchy and bold and in your face, a little cowboy, and it's like very, very bold. And I didn't create that. I came here and that was a brand that already existed, that had been built up over many years. And that relates back to the essence of the values of the founders. And that all comes across in how a company expresses itself in every way, including tone of voice. So I think the clearer you are about getting that and documenting it. And putting it into specifics of why do we write this way? Why do we use this word versus that word?

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  Why did the founder dislike that certain word? The more you can pull that out, the more you can scale it and understand the meaning behind it. And that's really important when you're dealing with AI tools, because you're not going to be able to scale it, leverage it, train a tool to do that consistently unless you've taken the time to really think through that.

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  All right, so you're starting either whether it's a personal brand or whether it is your company brand by identifying your mission, your values, and you're using that to basically have a top-down influence on everything you're doing. After you get past this, all right, here's our identity, here's our philosophy, here's our brand voice and the rationale behind it. Zappi's brand being a little bit corporate punk rock. I don't want to say counterculture, but bright and vibrant, but a little different and a little challenging.

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  We call it Rebel Magician. There's like a hybrid Rebel Magician persona that we include.

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  Rebel Magician, there we go. Perfectly describes it. I want punk rock. We're in the same ballpark. Then you have to be able to document that in some sort of a tone or a style guide, right? Just giving an AI prompt saying, hey, my brand is about Rebel Magician. Doesn't feel like it's specific enough to get this word versus that word. So how do you think about going down from this ethos of who we are into something that defines what the tone and style should be?

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  Yes, so that is the next layer down. And that's where you have to start to provide examples of how that shows up. And what's interesting is you can train AI tools and humans, just like when you're writing a style guide, you show examples of good and bad. Like do this, not that. And showing this is on-brand, this is not, and here's why. The reason that this is not part of our brand voice is because we don't use these types of terms because we think that's a little too squishy and soft. We like to use bold language, in the case of Zappi's brand. My version of that for my own personal writing style might be, I try not to use words that have too many syllables because I want it to be super accessible for people. I try not to use.

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  Things that are too flamboyant because I just don't want it to be alienating or not as accessible. But I think for Zappi, we would use words that are a little more like bang, boom, bombastic. Because that is our brand. So, understanding and identifying that is really important, but providing those specifics, especially if there are key terms, key ways that you express things. I have certain turns of phrase that I use a lot in my own language and my own writing that I train AI tools to remember. These are some little turns of phrases that I like, that I use all the time in my daily, the way I speak and that I use in my writing. And for Zappi, we do this as well because there are lots of little plays on words.

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  Like I usually, everywhere I go, when I'm speaking on behalf of Zappi, I say, "Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here today." And it always makes people smile and people think it's a little, little cute and a little fun and a little playful. So we use those types of little plays on words. And so we want to get that little, you know, I'm a little bit rebellious. I'm gonna play with my brand a little. Like I'm, I'm cool with that. You know, that's kind of how the Zappi brand shows up. So it's important to be intentional and actually specify when you're training AI agents or tools, or you have a Claude project, or whatever you're doing, to really feed that. And to be specific, to say, "I'm adding this to my project instructions. Like, remember to do this. Here's this list of do's and don'ts. Here's..."

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  And what I also like to do with tools like Claude is when I see things that are great examples, that are resonating really well and that I feel really are like great examples of brand identity, I'll feed that in and say, "Analyze this. Identify any patterns that you think that are different or unique about the writing style." And it will produce things that I didn't even realize were part of the brand voice. It does that for me. I always, whenever I write anything, feed it into one of these tools. I like to get the patterns. And so I might say, "Analyze these four pieces of writing. What are the common trends? What's that mean for the style?" And that way I can use that for the next prompting to leverage it and make it consistent.

• 13:05Speaker 05

  So you can do that no matter if you're doing it for your corporate brand or your personal brand. It works very well. But you have to want to do that grunt work upfront to get that output later. And it's not, it's not fun for people because people want instant results. But I think it's so important to have that patience to retrain, retrain, constantly iterate. That's how you get to an elevated brand voice, is by doing that consistently.

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  Yeah, I went through this process. I had a ghostwriter for years, writing LinkedIn posts about all the episodes we were doing for the Martech Podcast. And eventually, we just didn't feel like it was really making that big of an impact on business. So I just stopped posting on LinkedIn for six months until I figured out the strategy. And the realization was, I need to actually write first. And I started writing authentic posts that were from me, from the heart. I actually had them handwritten, and then I would take a picture of them and have GPT transcribe it, and hopefully fix some grammar, and then publish them. And those posts perform way better than anything that I had been doing with a ghostwriter, because they were more relevant and specific to me. Then, from those

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  posts, I was able to take it, feed it back to GPT, and be like, okay, tell me who I am as a writer. Give me my style guide. And sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. And there's this constant refinement process. But as you're going through, having that tone and style guide, and sort of having the general structure for what your tone is, is absolutely mission critical for creating AI-generated content. Which begs the question, should we be making AI-generated content? What role does artificial intelligence have in your writing? Are you giving a topic and have AI writing it, and you're the editor? Are you writing and then having AI the editor? Tell me about your process.

• 14:51Speaker 05

  So I've experimented with everything. And it's interesting, because, well, I say everything, but I always come up with more ideas and things I can experiment with. So not everything yet, but I've done a ton of experimentation. And I've learned so much about what does and doesn't work. What doesn't work for me is to have something written completely from scratch, in my voice, without any training. In fact, I'll give you a quick anecdote. So I write for many outlets, and they have human editors who check things and make sure that it's never been published anywhere else, and all of this. So I spent a lot of time writing an article, all original ideas, concepts I created, things that don't exist anywhere else, that were unique to me, including a framework that I came up

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  with. I was proud of this. But there was one section of the article that I was like, eh, this isn't as robust as I want it to be. So I took it from my Google Doc where I was drafting and I put it in ChatGPT and I said, "Help me rewrite this section, just this section here, but make sure that the flow is in line with everything else that I've written." So it rewrote just those couple of paragraphs and I was really happy with the output. And I said, "Oh, this sounds like in my voice. It sounds good." So we sent it over to the editor and they flagged it. They said they had run it through an AI detection tool and a plagiarism tool and it had come back with some sentences that were

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  almost directly lifted from a blog somewhere that ChatGPT had leveraged and never specified that it was citing it. So as a result, that editor was like, "This is plagiarism and you've used..." I literally only used it for a couple paragraphs to rewrite and I thought, "Well, this is just editing. It's not even writing." Like 80, 90, 95% of the content was written by me, my ideas and everything, but I got in trouble for that little tiny bit. So it just goes to show you have to be super careful whenever you're asking it to do these things without proper training because in that instance, I hadn't provided any training materials. I hadn't done anything other than just drop it in there, ask it to do something simplistic. I learned my

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  lesson. I was horrified because this also was visible to my team members and like the editors emailing them saying, "I plagiarized." I'm like, "I swear I didn't."

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  I didn't mean to.

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  I didn't even know that ChatGPT could lift things like a whole sentence. So you do have to be super careful. Now, that was a while back. It might not be as bad today, but I also had not trained it to write things in my style and not do those things. And so now my prompt instructions and my project instructions are much more explicit, but I do use these tools very differently than I did a year ago because I've learned a ton. That's like one of many, many things I've learned. But what I love using it for is my writing process is labor intensive because I write really long. Nobody wants to read all my thoughts. So in many cases, like you mentioned that haiku style, I could do that for days. Like I could just keep going and going.

• 17:46Speaker 04

  Short sentence after short sentence.

• 17:48Speaker 05

  Right. But what I have to- To do is make it digestible for the average reader because they don't want to hear me talk forever. So I have used different tools to synthesize and cut or dissect or carve up or reduce and things like that. Whereas a lot of people out here are like, oh, write 20 blog posts on whatever topic and I'll publish them on my blog. They use it to kind of increase the amount of content. I'm using it to kind of synthesize and decrease and improve and condense down to less quantity, but more quality that's aligned with my brand voice.

• 18:22Speaker 04

  You know what I've found really useful is using AI to evaluate your content based on your specific purpose. So I'll go into a writing session saying, I am writing this as a LinkedIn post that is specifically targeted towards mid-market CMOs. So they understand that I hear everything is a media production company. And here are the problems I'm trying to address. Then I'm using a tool called Whisper. I think it's Super Whisper or Whisper Flow. There's two different ones. I forgot which one I downloaded. But basically you press the function button and then you just talk. So I'm not actually writing, but I'm sitting here being like, hey, 95% of marketers are marketing towards the wrong profiles.

• 19:04Speaker 04

  And here's why, and here's how you do it. Go through the whole thing and then getting a draft and then saying, okay, now evaluate this on a scale of one to 100, based on how effective it would be for my intended goal. And what the process is after I've sort of spoken out what I want to say and have it reformatted is then I can go back and have a feedback loop. And it's essentially synthetic data, right? It's saying, hey, this is an 85 out of 100. And now I have a conversation with my AI that is what's missing? How can I shorten this? What's going to be more effective? Which passages are confusing? And I'm getting real time feedback, albeit not from a human, but it's still a data source where I can think through whether this is right or wrong.

• 19:48Speaker 04

  And using my best judgment for what I do want to change and what I don't.

• 19:52Speaker 05

  Yes, I love that. And in fact, that's a best practice. And I will say, this comes from my background as a translator and interpreter. And my first job out of college was I was a Spanish translator and interpreter. And one of the things I learned is that it's much, much faster to speak than it is to write. So a hack, back in the days when translators used to have transcription machines in their homes, is that they would speak the translations while they were reading out loud, because it was much faster than typing, because you can just generate content much faster that way. So if they had like, translate a book really quickly over a weekend, and the publisher is like on deadline, they would use this as a hack. So ever since I

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  knew that, since 1996, I have always used transcription. I used to pay humans to transcribe interviews and things like that as a way to capture content, and then reformat it, and then publish it as blog posts in the early days of SEO to grow organic traffic. And I still do that. Now, sometimes I leave myself a voice memo when I'm driving, or whatever. And I get that transcript, pop it into your favorite AI tool, and then turn that into something. And I can turn it into a listicle, or I can turn it into a LinkedIn post, or I could turn it into a blog post, or I can turn it into a newsletter idea. There's so many ways that you can capture your thoughts now, and capture them at scale, but then repurpose them. So I have a whole huge

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  Trello board of content ideas I've just captured, that I want to hold on to for the future. But I love that process, because speech is very natural. And they always say, write how you speak.

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  I would have really long blog posts. I tend to be very long-winded.

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  I'm obviously rambling, so you don't want that. But you do want it to be colloquial, accessible, friendly language. And so I do love taking that transcript, turning it into something that's highly readable, and natural, and in your brand voice. There's no better way than like, your thoughts as they're emerging and coming out of your mouth. Like, that is authentic.

• 21:47Speaker 04

  The only thing I worry about when it comes to the transcription to text, or the speech to text, is you can speak so quickly, sometimes the process of sitting down and physically writing, or typing slows you down and makes you think about what you actually want to say, as opposed to what you just said.

• 22:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, you want to have that writing process where you take a look, reflect, refine. That's also what you can prompt an AI tool to do is to take that and reformat it to make it highly readable. So I do like that as a raw input, but I wouldn't just publish it on its own.

• 22:22Speaker 04

  Sometimes you can speak faster than you can think, and that might be a little bit of a problem as well. So talk to me about your toolkit. Obviously, I'm sure it's evolved over the last year. I'm sure it's regularly evolving. You mentioned before that you've got a specific prompt for hooks. What does your writing kit look like?

• 22:41Speaker 05

  For writing, I'm really only using Claude and ChatGPT, and primarily Claude is my favorite for writing. But I do a lot with projects. So if I'm writing a LinkedIn post, I might ask, if I can't think of a really good hook that I like myself, I might, for inspiration, go to my Hook Architect project, which I have trained based on hooks that perform well. I've gone back and done analysis on impressions and engagement on my past posts, and also looked at what other people are doing, what their hooks are like. I don't always copy or leverage exactly the formula, because some of them are just not me. Like, some of them are very clickbaity, and just, I don't really love the format of them. But

• 23:22Speaker 05

  things that are me, I will definitely borrow. There's formulas and hooks you can leverage. So I feed those into my Hook Architect project in Claude, so that I have kind of a baseline to constantly make sure that if I'm stuck, I can go there and say, oh, here's the hook I've written, make it better, use the formulas that you've learned to make this one better. And it will usually give me like three or four examples, and that I can choose the best one, or I can tailor it. I will say, there's times when it comes up with a really good one, that I'm like, oh, that's great, and that sounds like me. Other times, I'm like, eh, none of these are really good. So I have to keep going and reiterate, regenerate, until I get to where I like one. And what's funny is, when you think about all of the things I just said, it's like,

• 24:05Speaker 05

  You could write a hook in like less than a minute. Like, why go to all that trouble?

• 24:10Speaker 04

  You can write a hook in less than a minute. It takes me forever.

• 24:14Speaker 05

  You could, but it has to be good. And like, you want it to lead in and be deserving of the post, right? So there's an art and science to that, but that's just one little thing. So I do have separate Claude projects for each type of content where I want refinement, where I want help, where I want to curate and distill down. And I have lots of different projects that I'm experimenting with and I take pieces out of them. And I'm like, come up with a really great data point for this. Take this data point and do some analysis or, you know, I have all kinds of different projects based on what my goal is.

• 24:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's interesting that you have content, that you have projects that are based on the format of writing, a hooks project, essentially a editing project as opposed to, I think, at least I, maybe I assume most other people, I have a LinkedIn project. And I have a YouTube copywriting project. I have blog post projects and I'm thinking more of the output as opposed to the process of writing. It seems like you've structured it to go from project to project for different stages in the writing process as opposed to different outputs.

• 25:21Speaker 05

  Well, I have a little bit of a mix. So I have in my content calendar for LinkedIn, specific things that I want to post about regularly on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays. Like I have lined up different types of posts for different segments of my audience because some are generalists and some are more for marketers and some are more for global business people. And I also have two LinkedIn newsletters. So I have separate projects for each LinkedIn newsletter as well. And what I've done for my LinkedIn newsletters is I've trained Claude with a project. This is the format. This is what I use every time. And so I have basically a formula that I use where I can drop in the topic. I can drop in the inputs. It will spit out the newsletter, but I still have to go in and do quite a bit of editing.

• 26:03Speaker 05

  So it will help me with kind of like what an intern would do if I said, okay, get it like 60% of the way there. And that Claude project for each LinkedIn newsletter has a different format. And different audience. So I've trained within that project, within the project knowledge. I've uploaded the top performing newsletters and I've analyzed the pattern, basically developed a template, then added the template to the project knowledge, then leveraged that template the next time I have one. Now I've got it down to where I can write a newsletter. It'll generate a full newsletter in 10 minutes and it'll be in my voice, but would I be happy enough to publish it without a lot of editing? If I'm in a real hurry, maybe, but I don't feel happy if I don't edit it to make it in my voice.

• 26:44Speaker 05

  So I do have different things for different audiences, different purposes. It's a mix. I won't say it's really clear cut.

• 26:53Speaker 04

  I think the distinction is it's in your voice, but it's not by you.

• 26:56Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 26:57Speaker 04

  And that really is where, again, it's human in the loop, right? AI is not a replacement. It's a tool. And I think the more that us marketers understand how to use it, the more we'll understand where to interject ourselves to make sure that we are keeping that human connection that makes our content actually resonate with other people. All right. That wraps up this episode of the Martech Podcast. Thanks to Nataly Kelly, the CMO of Zappi and the author of Brand Global Adapt Local. If you'd like to contact Natalie, you can find a link to her LinkedIn profile in our show notes or on martechpod.com, or you can visit her company's website, which is zappi.io. If you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, hit the subscribe button in your podcast app or find us on YouTube and we'll be back in your feed next week.

• 27:43Speaker 04

  All right. That's it for today, but until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.

• 28:14Speaker 00

  Thanks for listening to the Martech Podcast and I Hear Everything production. Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit ihereverything.com.