Whilst speaking with customers, I often hear the same concern: AI has become the crucial solution to producing content at greater scale and speed, but AI-generated content tends to sound generic. If you cover the logo, the content could belong to any company.
How do you keep your content written in the personality and tone that your customers recognise and trust, while still benefiting from the productivity of AI?
This is where Brand Voice comes in.
What is Brand Voice?
HubSpot’s Brand Voice is an AI-powered tool that tailors generated or written content to your brand’s specific voice. To generate your brand voice, HubSpot’s AI tools will analyze a sample of your writing to capture your brand’s unique writing style, nuances and personality.
Once it’s set up, your brand voice can be applied when generating content with AI in HubSpot, and efficiently create on-brand and consistent content that reflects how your brand actually sounds.
Best Practices For Setting Up and Using Brand Voice
Here are four ways to make the most out of this feature.
(1) Start With a Genuine Writing Sample
Brand voice is generated from a writing sample of at least 500 words. You can upload a file, paste text directly, or use existing content such as a blog post or website page. This writing sample should contain a proper beginning, middle, and end. It should not be a collection of disconnected snippets.
It’s worth being selective about which samples you use. A generic ‘About Us’ page tends to produce a generic voice, whereas a piece of content that already sounds like your best writer gives Brand Voice much more to work with. Where possible, pull your sample from content that’s already performing well (such as an email with a high open rate, a top-converting landing page, or a popular blog post) rather than whatever’s easiest to find.
(2) Further Customize Your Brand Voice’s Attributes
Once your sample is uploaded and analyzed, it is worth reviewing the personality and tone generated. Treat these as a starting point rather than a final version, and you can still adjust them as and when it’s needed.
You should also further refine your Brand Voice by adding your company’s mission, terms to avoid and inclusivity settings. Don’t rush through these, as these will shape how the AI writes for you.
(3) Where It Matters, Customize Tone By Channel
Not every channel needs to sound identical. Under Channel Optimizations, you can set a different tone for a channel than your default, or turn Brand Voice off for that channel entirely. This is useful if for example, your blog content needs to stay more formal but your social posts are more casual. This allows you to be flexible and cater your AI-generated writing to different platforms, without limiting yourself to a one-size-fits-all voice.
(4) Keep Your Brand Voice Updated
If you go through a rebrand, shift your messaging, or simply refine how you talk about your product and services over time, the voice previously generated will fall behind unless you regenerate it from a newer writing sample or update its attributes. Treat this feature as something to revisit periodically, not a one-time setup.
Where Brand Voice Can Be Used
Once it’s set up, you can use and apply your Brand Voice across different tools in HubSpot:
- Content creation: used when creating content for your blogs, case studies, marketing email, pages, podcasts and social posts
- Prospecting Agent: you can choose to use your Brand Voice (instead of a preset tone) for the outreach emails’ content
- Customer Agent: you can choose your Brand Voice for your Customer Agent to use
Brand Voice isn’t just about making one email or blog post sound on-brand. By setting it up and letting it carry through your content, your prospecting emails, and your customer conversations, you turn separate customer interactions into a consistent experience that sounds like you.
Ready to get started? Follow the steps from our Knowledge Base article!
If you need any guidance in setting this up, do reach out to our Support Team!