Ever feel like you're playing editorial whack-a-mole with inconsistent messaging across your content? On one day, your brand is sounding like a scholarly professor and the next? More like your cool Gen Z cousin who's "just vibing".
Using AI for content creation is one thing, but making sure it's consistent with everything else you're creating is another.
In this guide, we'll cover how to use AI for consistent messaging, so all your marketing channels are singing in perfect harmony without you even breaking a sweat.
Dos: How to use AI for content consistency
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Spelling and grammar checks
You know those tiny grammatical errors that us human editors can sometimes miss? AI tools can help; in fact, use AI to flag any inconsistencies or errors in your content within seconds.
More advanced AI writing assistants (one of the many jobs on Optimizely Opal's resumé, may we add) can identify more complex content editing opportunities, including:
👉 When you sound a bit too passive (eg. BORING)
👉 Sentences aren't quite working right
👉 Inconsistent terminology that could be quite jarring for readers
...and make better suggestions that fit with your brand. Consistent reading level and tone is one factor in creating engaging content, so why not let AI do its thing and save yourself some time?
Example prompt: "Review this article for grammatical errors, inconsistent terminology, and stylistic issues. Flag any instances where the tone shifts from formal to casual, and suggest edits to maintain our professional brand voice throughout" -
Translation and localization
Instead of hiring translators or content writers per region (or relying heavily on free—slightly dodgy—translation tools), get AI to do it. AI translation tools provide pretty-much-immediate access to global markets by quickly translating content, meaning more reach... faster.
Sounds good, doesn't it? And what if you had an AI translation tool in your CMS that could translate full webpages without requiring any copy-pasting or complex restructuring? Just another humble Opal brag—but we'll move on.
Example prompt: "Translate this product description into Spanish, French, and German while maintaining brand voice. Ensure that industry-specific terminology is accurately localized for each market, and preserve the persuasive elements of the original text" -
Personalization and segmentation
These days, marketing content does need to be a bit more than just 'consistent'—it needs to be personalized. But it also needs to be consistent within that personalization.
With specialized AI agents, you can tick off those more complex consistency needs. For example, if you are marketing via industry segments, you'll want to be in-the-know with industry-specific terminology and trends. And guess what? A specialized AI agent like our Industry Marketer can do just that. Find out all about our Industry Marketing agent in the video below (and more in just a scroll).
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Example prompt: "Review this financial services content to ensure all terminology complies with current regulations. Flag any inconsistent uses of terms like 'investment,' 'returns,' and 'risk,' and suggest standardized alternatives that maintain legal compliance while remaining accessible to non-expert readers" -
With comprehensive AI training
By building an AI training corpus that's complete with brand voice guidelines, terminology glossaries, style guides, and examples of good and poor content consistency, you will see huge improvements in your AI tool's output.
When your AI tool has this sort of training and understanding of your brand requirements under its belt, you're going to get much more targeted and valuable creative feedback.
But remember: this training is ongoing. The more examples and feedback you provide, the better AI becomes at identifying and correcting those brand inconsistencies.
Example prompt: "Using our brand voice guidelines and terminology glossary, analyze this blog post for consistency with our established content standards. Provide specific recommendations for bringing this content into alignment with our brand standards"
Don'ts: How NOT to use AI for content consistency
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Without human oversight
Risk: With no human input or oversight from your content process or workflow can lead to tone-deaf content, reinforced biases, and contextual issues that could damage your brand reputation.
Solution: Establish AI governance structures—this might be using workflow templates for the human-AI approval process, or even designated AI content champions. Some content may be considered more 'high-risk' than others, so you may want to give this more human attention.
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With no iterations as your brand evolves
Risk: Brands naturally evolve over time; new goals, new products, new markets... new messaging. Static AI models will gradually drift out of alignment with your most up-to-date brand identity, meaning your content consistency gets out of whack.
Solution: Make sure you're implementing continuous training and learning protocols by regularly feeding new approved content to continuously enrich your AI's output. Even if you don't think your brand is changing much, schedule in quarterly reviews of AI performance against current brand standards to make sure things are up to scratch.
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Same rules for different content types
Risk: Applying identical consistency standards across all your content types—from social media to white papers to executive communications—is only going to create tone mismatches and will quickly undermine the effectiveness across channels.
Solution: The more specific you are, the better and more authentic your AI-generated content seems. Develop content-specific AI guidelines that acknowledge that each platform and content format is unique. This also requires you to train your AI to recognize different content types and apply those rules where needed.
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Ignoring performance metrics
Risk: If you have no idea about your AI's impact on content consistency, how can you know if it's doing a good job?
Solution: To understand your 'before' and 'after' moment, define clear metrics for content consistency success. This might be reduced editorial cycles, improved audience engagement, less customer support inquiries related to confusion, or faster content production. Get a regular report going that show these metrics, complete with data-driven insights that help to refine your AI consistency strategy over time.
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Lack of team training
Risk: Inconsistent AI usage across marketing teams creates fragmented content experiences and misaligned messaging—whether it's some people using it and some not, or people using it in different ways.
Solution: Make sure everyone is on the same page about how to leverage AI in content creation workflows with comprehensive training. That means clear documentation on approved AI tools, recommended prompts (and prompt sharing when you find a good one!), and review processes.
How Optimizely's industry marketing agent transforms content consistency
TL;DR? Basically, keeping your content relevant and consistent 🤝 Optimizely's Industry Marketer AI agent. Hear all about it:
- Understanding industry context: The agent recognizes industry-specific terminology and compliance requirements, ensuring consistent usage across all content.
- Enforcing brand voice: Beyond general tone matching, the agent understands the subtle differences in how your brand communicates across different channels and audiences while maintaining overall consistency.
- Maintaining messaging hierarchies: The agent ensures key messages remain consistent and properly prioritized across all content assets.
- Adapting to your specific brand: While knowledgeable of industry standards, the agent quickly adapts to your organization's unique terminology and voice.
- Automating consistency checks: The agent can automatically review content for consistency issues before publication, flagging potential problems for human review.
- Learning ALL the time: The more you use the agent, the better it becomes at maintaining your specific brand consistency requirements.
Find out more about our Industry Marketer agent here.
Using AI for content consistency: What's next?
If you're still reading this post, then you've hopefully got the message that AI isn't here to take over your job... it's here to make you work (at least) 10x more efficiently.
Using AI for marketing in the *right* way allows you to skip the grunt work, and get straight to the good stuff—and this counts for every step of the content lifecycle. With Optimizely Opal, you'll see just that.
Check out what else is in store to help with your marketing efficiency, by following our Hype to Hero AI series.
About the author
Leah Messenger
Content Marketing Manager, Optimizely
Leah is the Content Marketing Manager for Optimizely Content Marketing Platform (CMP) solution. A keeno for writing since well… forever, she’s kept a strong focus...
