The AI style guide: your key to chatbot-assisted content that captivates and converts

As a content marketer, you're always searching for ways to produce high-quality, brand-consistent content more efficiently. You're leveraging generative AI to streamline your process, but you may feel like you're not getting the best possible results or maximizing the potential of these powerful tools. 

Here’s a hot tip: If you aren’t providing a style guide as part of your AI prompts, you should start now. It’s the key to creating efficient AI-assisted content that aligns with your brand identity and sounds, well, human. It’s not a silver bullet—there’s no replacement for good old-fashioned human ingenuity—but it’s pretty close!

What is an AI style guide?

An AI style guide is a set of guidelines and instructions that help generative AI (GenAI) tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Copilot understand and emulate your brand's unique voice, tone, and style. It's essentially a playbook for your AI collaborators, outlining what to do, what to avoid, and how to sound like an authentic extension of your brand.

A typical guide includes several key components:

• Brand voice & tone

• Writing style & formatting

• Content themes & topics

• Channel-specific guidelines

• Lexicon & terminology

• Audience insights (pain points, goals, personas)

For example, an AI style guide for Comarketer.ai might look like this. Codifying these elements in a way that AI can understand and follow can have a transformative impact on the quality of the AI’s content output.

Why use an AI style guide?

Why bother creating an AI style guide? Isn't it just one more thing added to your never-ending to-do list? Well, yes—in the short term. But in the long-term, it will save you ample time and energy, we promise. An AI style guide can offer serious benefits for your content creation process and outputs.

1. Streamline your workflow

You may have experienced the frustration of inputting a prompt into an AI tool, only to receive a response that just doesn't hit the mark. The process of tweaking and refining prompts can quickly eat up the time you hoped to save by using AI in the first place.

A comprehensive AI style guide nips this problem in the bud by helping your preferred AI chatbot nail your brand voice from the get-go. With precise guidelines to follow, it can generate high-quality, on-brand content on the first or second attempt. An AI style guide also helps keep your prompts concise while still giving AI the info it needs. This is crucial for avoiding dreaded token and prompt limits that can hamper your AI-powered content efforts.

With a style guide, you’ll do less iterating and see a bigger return from your investment in AI.

2. Tailor content for different channels

You need to adapt your content to suit various channels—blogs, social media, email, and beyond. Each channel has its own best practices, audience expectations, and constraints. AI tools may struggle to account for these nuances without clear guidance.

An AI style guide eliminates confusion by providing channel-specific guidelines for your AI tools. You can specify details like:

• Optimal blog post structure and length

• Suitable hashtags and emojis for social posts

• Best practices for email subject lines and preview text

• Character limits for meta descriptions

Here's an example of how a style guide might instruct an AI tool to write a blog post:

"Use an inverted pyramid structure with an engaging hook, clear thesis statement, and descriptive subheadings every 300-400 words. Aim for a length of 1500-2000 words."

With these detailed specifications, your AI tools can produce content that is optimized for each channel right from the start, ensuring your content is effective and resonates with your target audience. (Curious about which chatbot is the best tool for content marketers? Check out our blog post, where we evaluate each one.)

3. Avoid overused language

AI-generated content often comes across as generic, repetitive, or cliché. (Chatbots are obsessed with “revolutionizing,” “supercharging,” and “secret sauce.”) This is because many AI language models are trained on huge swaths of web content, so they gravitate toward common phrases and conventions. But the last thing content should be is boring. 

An AI style guide helps you sidestep tired, lackluster phrases by giving your chatbot guidance on using language to relate to, not repel, your audience. Pinpoint specific words and phrases to avoid, like:

• Acronyms without explanation (e.g., "CMS," "MQL," "SQL")

• Trendy buzzwords or clichés (e.g., "synergy," "disrupt," "10x")

• Insensitive or exclusionary language (e.g., "guys," "crazy," "insane")

• Overly technical or academic terms without context or explanation

• Overly technical jargon (e.g., "neural networks," "deep learning algorithms")

• Bland, generic, or overused marketing jargon (e.g., "synergy," "paradigm shift", “secret sauce,” “revolutionize”, “transform”)

• Unnecessary acronyms or abbreviations that may confuse readers

• Insensitive, offensive, or exclusionary language or humor

Using a style guide to actively steer your AI tools away from stale or confusing language helps you preserve your distinctive brand voice.

4. Enhance human creativity & authenticity

One of the primary concerns marketers have about AI is that it will diminish human creativity and authenticity.  After all, content marketing hinges on forging genuine connections with your audience, not just churning out words to satisfy search engines.

At Comarketer.ai, we see AI as a tool that augments our capabilities, enabling us to focus on higher-level marketing strategy and generating truly novel ideas.

An AI style guide embodies this human-machine collaboration. By investing the time to capture your brand's unique identity, values, and audience insights, you ensure AI tools amplify your vision, not muddy it. 

Moreover, an AI style guide empowers you to create personalized content at scale. By outlining consumer personas and their preferences, pain points, and goals, you equip AI to craft content that resonates with different audience segments. This level of personalization would be incredibly challenging without the efficiency of AI assistance.

How to create your own AI style guide

Sold on the perks of an AI style guide but not sure where to start? Here's a step-by-step blueprint:

1. Round up key info: Compile the core elements of your brand identity and content strategy, like your brand voice, writing style, content themes, and channel-specific guidelines. If you have an existing style guide or brand book, start there.

2. Know your audience inside out: To craft content that hits home, you need an intimate understanding of your target audience. Flesh out detailed personas covering their pain points, goals, and communication preferences. The more specific, the better.

3. Nail down your lexicon: Jot down a list of terms and phrases to embrace (and avoid!) in your AI-generated content. Think industry jargon, brand terminology, and those AI-favored clichés we mentioned. 

4. Distill into a user-friendly template: With all the key components gathered, it's time to pull them into a clear, scannable template. Lean on headings, bullets, and examples to make the info easy to reference and apply. Consider organizing your style guide into sections like:

   • Brand voice & tone

   • Writing style & formatting

   • Content themes & topics

   • Channel-specific guidelines

     • Blog

     • Social media

     • Email

   • Lexicon & terminology

   • Audience insights (pain points, goals, personas)

   • Examples & resources

5. Refine as you go: Like any tool, your AI style guide will need fine-tuning as you put it through its paces. Note what's working and what could be better as you use the guide to shape your AI-generated content. Don't hesitate to make tweaks and additions along the way!

If you want a head start on crafting your bespoke AI style guide, check out Comarketer.ai’s nifty AI style guide generator. Just answer a few Qs about your brand and content goals, and we'll whip up a custom template you can polish and implement pronto.

Closing thoughts

An AI style guide is an invaluable tool that empowers you to create maximally-effective, engaging content at scale in less time and with less grind. By defining and asserting your brand's personality, values, and audience insights up front, you ensure your content stays true to your north star no matter what. A little legwork now (even less with our AI style guide generator) will reward you in spades with time saved, better results, and more creative energy to spend on strategy and innovation.

Comarketer.ai, is a leader at the intersection of marketing and AI. Follow our LinkedIn page for more AI marketing content, tips, and insights.