AI can help you write emails, create social media content, brainstorm ideas, respond to reviews, write job descriptions and save your team a ridiculous amount of time. But if you’re using AI the exact same way as everyone else, there’s a good chance you’re starting to sound like everyone else, too.
You know the content I’m talking about. It’s technically correct, the grammar is perfect and everything is organized nicely, but you could replace the company name with any other contractor in the country and no one would know the difference.
That’s not necessarily an AI problem. It’s a training problem. AI can only work with what you give it. If your prompt is “Write me a Facebook post about why homeowners should change their air filters,” it’s going to fill in a lot of the blanks for you. The more context you give it about your company, your opinions and the way you actually communicate, the more useful the output becomes.
Start With Your Brand Guidelines
If your company already has brand guidelines, that’s one of the easiest places to start. And I’m not just talking about your logo, fonts and colors. Your AI needs to understand your brand voice.
Are you casual or professional? Funny or straightforward? Do you use industry terminology or keep everything simple for homeowners? Are there words or phrases your company uses all the time? Are there words you would never use?
If you’ve already done a deep dive into your brand voice, give that information to your AI and tell it to use those guidelines when helping you create content. The more context you provide, the less AI has to guess about what your company should sound like.
Let AI Learn How You Already Communicate
Don’t have a formal brand voice guide? That’s okay. You probably already have plenty of examples of your voice—you just haven’t put them into a document labeled “brand voice.”
Give AI emails you’ve written yourself, social media captions that actually sound like your company, website copy, newsletters or even transcripts from videos where you’re talking naturally. Then ask it to analyze how you communicate. What patterns does it notice? How would it describe your tone? What words and phrases do you use frequently? How do you typically structure your thoughts?
You can even ask AI to interview you. Tell it what you’re trying to create and have it ask you questions about your personality, opinions, audience, communication style and company. Instead of expecting AI to magically know what “sounds like me” means, give it the information it needs to learn.
Brain Dump First. Clean It Up Second.
This might be my favorite way to use AI because it keeps the most important part—the actual ideas—coming from you.
Open ChatGPT and type exactly what you’re thinking. Don’t worry about grammar, punctuation or whether it turns into one giant run-on sentence. Tell it the story, explain what annoyed you, share the point you’re trying to make, type out the example you want to use and write it exactly how you’d say it if you were explaining it to someone sitting across from you.
Then ask AI to clean it up without changing your voice or adding ideas you didn’t give it.
Now AI isn’t creating your thoughts for you. It’s helping you communicate your own thoughts more clearly. The ideas, opinions and stories are still yours; AI is just helping you package them.
Stop Accepting the First Draft
One of the easiest ways to end up with generic AI content is to copy and paste the first thing it gives you.
If something sounds weird, change it. If you’d never say a certain phrase in real life, delete it. If it sounds too polished, tell AI to loosen it up. If it’s too wordy, ask it to simplify. You can even tell it, “I would never say that. Here’s how I’d actually say it…” and give it an example.
That feedback is part of training your AI. Over time, you’re giving it more information about what sounds like you and, just as importantly, what doesn’t.
AI Should Make Your Voice Easier to Use, Not Replace It
Your customers don’t need more generic content. They need your stories, opinions, experience and personality—the things you’ve learned after years of running a home service business.
AI can help you turn those things into content faster, but it shouldn’t be the reason the content exists in the first place. The goal isn’t simply to get AI to create more content for you. The goal is to use AI to create more of your content.
We’re actually diving deeper into this exact topic with Zac Garside during our September 22 webinar at 2 PM CST. We’ll be talking about how contractors can use AI without losing the voice and personality that make their brands different in the first place.
[REGISTER FOR THE WEBINAR]
The contractors who get the most out of AI won’t be the ones who let it sound like everyone else. They’ll be the ones who teach it to sound like them.