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Welcome to "Future Proofed," the podcast for forward-thinking professionals eager to keep their career and company at the cutting edge.
Traditional go-to-market (GTM) strategies have become clunky, inefficient, and bloated. This show explores the intersection of AI and GTM strategies to ensure you cut the GTM Bloat and build a future-ready approach.
Each episode of "Future Proofed" dives deep into how AI redefines what it means to craft effective go-to-market strategies. From actionable insights on integrating AI into your sales, marketing, and product strategies, to expert interviews that shine a light on the new best practices changing industries, this podcast is an essential resource for anyone looking to upgrade their GTM playbook.
Our host, Kyle Coleman, is a seasoned expert in GTM and AI innovation. He breaks down complex concepts into practical, actionable advice. With "Future Proofed," you'll learn how to:
- Leverage AI and machine learning to supercharge your GTM strategies.
- Navigate the challenges and opportunities presented by new technology trends.
- Adapt and thrive in the fast-paced digital economy.
- Foster a culture of innovation and agility within your team or organization.
Don't let the wave of the future leave you behind. Tune into "Future Proofed" and stay ahead of the curve as you learn to leverage the power of AI for your GTM strategy.
Nathan Thompson (00:00)
Welcome to another edition of Future Proofed. Today we are talking about brand voice and I am going to walk through the problems that brand voice used to have, why I believe people over index on brand voice in the wrong ways and how you can codify brand voice with AI so it can stay consistent across all channels. Now brand voice is something that I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about and the reason is I used to work at an agency and when I worked at the agency
There were a lot of conversations that I had with the editors that I felt like weren't something that were going to move the needle. And to be clear, brand voice is very important. My problem with it is it has always been impossible once teams have scaled to a certain point. And I'm going to break that down for you. When we talk about brand voice, we need to remember how many different channels companies have to market to. So they usually have their blog, their email, social media, which is a larger bucket for a bunch of different channels like X, LinkedIn.
Facebook, Instagram. You have all of those different channels. Then you have customer support. How are your agents talking to customers who are coming in with problems? You have larger assets like ebooks and white papers. have press releases. You have web copy for your landing pages or ⁓ even your product descriptions. You have your video on YouTube and the scripting that you use. And then you have webinars and live events. You have podcasts like this. In the past, each of those would have either
one person running it or teams of people running it. And each of those people might have had a different interpretation of what a brand voice meant or what your brand voice meant. And then to complicate things a little bit further, those people might not stay at the company long-term. So you might have, let's say on a blog post, let's say you have a strategist creating the content calendar, you have an SEO expert who is editing for on-page optimization, and then you have the first draft writer.
The first draft writer might want to take a bolder, spicier take in their tone. ⁓ In the SEO optimizer, they might want ⁓ something a little drier and more algorithm friendly. And then you have the strategist who's really just trying to get through the day and make sure that they are hitting their boxes and not getting fired. So you already have three varying levels of ⁓ commitment to a brand voice already.
What happens now when that writer leaves and a new writer comes in with a different interpretation or a different nuance of what that brand voice is? And that is just with one, like a blog post. What about the email writer or the social media writer or the ebook writer? All of these people need to be aligned in a way that I don't believe was possible before AI, if we're being honest, to the point where I've put out several calls of people asking for any brand that has been consistent across all of these channels. I'll say three brands. If you can find three brands,
that have been consistent across all of these channels over more than three to five years, let's say, then I will gladly shut up and stop talking about BrandVoice. But as far as I can tell, BrandVoice has more been a fun idea that marketing teams have clung to than a reality that anyone's been able to pull off until now with AI. But what's ironic is that a lot of marketers are saying AI is actually taking BrandVoice. It's going to dilute BrandVoice or take away the soul of a company.
I don't believe that's the case, especially if you're adding a lot of ⁓ detail to your prompts, to the tool or platform that you are using to generate all of your content. And now I'm going to explain how I actually think that AI is unlocking BrandVoice ⁓ in a different way than ever before. And here's why. What you can do now is rather than, say, like, I'm not talking about co-pilots like ChatGBT, where you go in and say, hey, write me an email about X, Y, and Z. I'm talking about building a workflow inside of a platform where you can upload documents about your
brand. with Copy.ai, for example, we have tables and Infobase, and we can take our value propositions, we can take our product lists, we can take all of the information about the problems that we solve, the value that we offer to the market, and we can store it so that it's trained and ready to go. Now, all of our channels can have different workflows tied to them. So if we ever need an email, we have a workflow where we give certain inputs about whatever we're emailing about. And in that workflow, it looks at the audience segment that it would be
best for. It looks at how our value propositions can best serve that audience. And then it writes personalized emails in a way that our best performing examples had been written in the past. So here we have a human's best practices, our top performer. We codify how they approach email marketing with AI. And now for all of our emails, we have a consistent and replicable system to get to a first draft that is
trained in the brand tone that we want and to use the vocabulary that we want and to avoid the grammar and vocabulary constructions that we don't want. Once we have that, we can do the same with our blog posts. And now if we want our blog posts to have a slightly different ⁓ tone or use slightly different language, but stay in the same voice, we can codify our top performers, best performing post and writing style. What does their process look like? How do they put something together? And then we can create review steps.
in all of the copy that's coming out long form or short so that it stays on that brand's voice in the same way as the emails. We can do that for each of the social channels. We can do that for each of the customer support or documents that we are making to help people solve their problems. We can do that with ebooks and white papers. We can do it with press releases, web copy, videos and events. We can codify a brand voice across all channels, taking in the nuance to account for each channel. And then once it's built, we can
replicate the quality on the back end. So now we have AI and a human editor for each of those channels and they can go through and make sure that it's sticking to brand voice. The reason that this is important is you don't have to worry about turnover as much anymore. So now if you're managing, let's say four writers on a blog post and one of them leaves, you can quickly get a new writer to use the same workflow as the past writer to get to the same quality and in the same brand voice.
this is really important because brand voice is important. It's just been impossible to actually pull off at a concrete level. At least that's been what I've seen. What I've seen is a lot of marketers talking about brand voice and what they really mean is I personally like this style of writing or I personally don't like this style of writing and that level of subjectivity across the entire team can start to bottleneck everything and really create some expensive problems. So for example,
When I was at an agency and I was writing for one of our clients, I would work with an editor. Now these were very expensive blog posts, whether or not they move the needle. So I remember this particular article was the top of the funnel blog post, something like Content Marketing 101. It was $2,500 to get over the line for the clients. And the conversations that I was having with the editor were along the lines of what word was allowed or not allowed in the H2 heading. And this wasn't coming from the customer's perspective. This was one editor saying they...
do and don't like certain words in the heading. The problem with that was this conversation and those notes and that back and forth, even just in a little dock that has to, you know, sits there, that edit would push back the deadline by a day and a half. So I would get that back into my email and now the deadline is pushed back. So I don't have to technically get that back till tomorrow. And then there's another edit from that tomorrow on that word. It got so granular that we were charging clients.
for things that would not move the needle. And that became a real problem. So I love this idea because what we can do is just sit down as a team, say, what do we want to sound like on this channel? What is our brand voice on this channel? What are our editorial guidelines and what vocabulary do we want to use while we're talking about our category, about the problems that we're solving? How do we want to present ourselves to our customers and in which channels? Then we can use AI to codify that by uploading a bunch of documents about our brands.
about the problems we solve, about our editorial guidelines for that specific channel. And then we can reuse it and replicate the quality all the way through the first draft, regardless of who is coming in and out of that role over the next decade. So brand voice, super important, also very unrealistic without AI to expect to cover all of these channels, emails, blogs, social media, customer support, eBooks, white papers, press releases, web copy, videos, all of that in the same brand voice.
with only human writers who are full of churn, it's just not realistic. But with AI, you can now get the best of both worlds. You can actually have a brand voice. You can define that brand voice with your current team and the vision that you have as the decision maker. And then you can put all of that in a Notion doc, Google Docs, have you, load it into a platform like CopyAI so that it's trained on what your brand is, how your brand presents itself, and then you can move forward from there.
As always, if you have any questions, comments, or concern, can find me on LinkedIn. Nathan likes writing. Ironically, is my username on that. Or you can find Copy AI on LinkedIn. We're happy to help at any time. But if you are interested in learning how BrandVoice can be used across your brand, feel free to reach out. This is absolutely the year to strike on this.