A brand voice guide with AI is a Skill: one prompt turns ten pieces of writing you already have into a one-page description of how your business sounds, and the whole job takes one sitting of about an hour. Most of that hour is finding the writing, not waiting on the AI. This page covers one angle: a voice document derived from your own writing that every other job reuses. Why voice matters for social media captions in particular is covered in how to get captions that sound like your business. Here the goal is the document itself, built once and pasted at the top of every writing job after it.
- Shape
- Skill
- Sitting
- one sitting
The shape: Skill
This job is a Skill because it is one prompt and the material under it. There is no chain of steps and no tool to connect. What decides the result is which writing you give the AI and what you ask it to look for.
The AI is genuinely good at this part. Most owners cannot describe their own voice, because they have never had to. Ask someone how they write and they say "friendly but professional", which describes almost every business. Give an AI ten pieces of that same person's writing, and it can point to patterns the owner never noticed: that they open emails with the customer's name and no greeting, that they never use the word "solutions", that they explain price before anyone asks. Those patterns are the voice.
The guide also changes every job that comes after it. Without one, each chat starts from the AI's default voice, and you spend the edit pulling it back toward yours. With one, the AI starts closer to you, and the edit gets shorter. That is why it is worth an hour once, even though nobody outside your business will ever read it.
What you give the AI
Gather these into one document before you open the chat. Put a short label above each piece so the AI knows what it is looking at.
- Five emails you sent to customers: real ones from your sent folder, including at least one that delivers bad news, such as a delay, a price change or a no.
- Two or three replies you wrote to reviews: one to a happy review and one to an unhappy one, if you have both.
- Your About page or the story you tell about why you started: the version in your own words, not one a web designer polished.
- Two or three social media captions you wrote yourself: the ones that got real replies from real customers, if you can tell.
- One piece of writing that is not marketing at all: a text to a regular customer, a note on an invoice, or a transcript of a voice memo explaining a job.
- Words you never want used: anything you have read in a draft and cringed at, such as "game-changer" or "we're passionate about".
- Facts the voice must respect: your industry's rules on claims, whether you write as the business or as yourself, and any name you go by.
Leave out anything someone else wrote for you. If an agency wrote your homepage, the guide will describe the agency. Plain, slightly messy writing is better material than polished copy, because the messy writing is where your habits show.
If your past writing is thin, write two new paragraphs right now, as if you were explaining your service to a neighbor over the fence. That counts.
What comes back
Paste this prompt, then your labeled pieces below it.
You are helping a small business write a one-page brand voice guide.
The guide will be pasted at the top of future writing requests, so it must be
short, specific and usable by another AI.
Work only from the writing samples below. Do not describe a voice the samples
do not show. Do not add values, a mission or adjectives the samples do not earn.
Return the guide in this order:
1. The voice in three sentences. Plain words. No "friendly but professional".
2. Words and phrases this business uses, each with the sample it came from.
3. Words and phrases this business never uses, from my list of words I never want used, plus any
common marketing phrase that is absent from every sample.
4. Rules for sentence length, paragraph length, formality, greetings, sign-offs,
punctuation habits, and whether it writes as the business or as one person.
5. How this business talks about price, delays, mistakes and competitors,
with a short quote from the samples for each, or "not shown" if absent.
6. Three before-and-after pairs: a generic marketing sentence, then the same
idea rewritten in this voice.
7. A checklist of five yes-or-no questions to test any draft against this voice.
Keep the whole guide under 500 words.
After the guide, list anything you inferred that the samples only weakly support.What comes back is a single page in seven parts, followed by a short list of guesses. The quotes next to each pattern are the useful part. They let you check in a second whether a rule came from your writing or from the AI's idea of a small business. The guesses at the end are where to look first, because that is where the AI filled a gap instead of reading one.
Once you have a version you like, save it somewhere you can paste from in one move. Save it as a file in the project where your business brief lives, so it loads without pasting; the brief's own voice section quotes three lines of it. Then every other writing job on the list starts with it: your newsletter, your website copy, your captions, your replies.
How to judge it
Read it once, quickly, and reject it if you see any of these:
- It could describe anyone: swap in a competitor's name and every line still fits, so it says nothing about you.
- It uses adjectives instead of rules: "warm, approachable, expert" is a mood, not a guide; a rule says "sentences under fifteen words, no exclamation points".
- The quotes do not match the rules: a rule claims you are formal, and the quote under it starts with "Hey".
- It invents a personality: values, a mission or a tagline appear that you never wrote and would not say.
- It runs past a page: a long guide will not get pasted, and a guide that is not pasted does nothing.
- The before-and-after pairs do not sound like you: read the "after" sentences aloud; if you would not say them to a customer, the guide is wrong somewhere upstream.
Then run the real test. Open a new chat, paste the guide, and ask for one ordinary piece, such as a short email telling a customer their appointment moved. If you would send it with only small edits, the guide works. If you would rewrite it, notice what you changed and add that as a rule. Two rounds of this usually settle it.
What stays with you
The AI can describe how you write. It cannot decide how you want to sound from here on. If the samples show habits you would rather drop, such as apologizing in every email or hedging every price, that call is yours, and you write it into the guide as a rule.
The facts are yours too. A voice guide is not a fact sheet, and any claim that slips into it, such as "we always answer the same day", needs to be true on your worst week. If you work in health, law, finance or insurance, your industry's rules on what you may claim sit above any voice rule.
The material is yours alone. No AI can go through your sent folder for you, tell which emails you wrote yourself, or remember the reply you were proud of. That gathering is most of the hour, and it is the part that makes the guide yours.
Finally, the ear is yours. The checklist at the bottom of the guide helps, but the moment that matters is reading a draft and thinking "that is not how we talk". Keep the guide open in a document you can edit, and add a line each time that happens.
An editorial example
This is an invented business, used only to show the job. Say you run a two-person dog grooming shop in a small town. You pull five sent emails, two review replies, the "why we started" paragraph from your website and a text you sent to a regular about her dog's matted coat.
The guide comes back. It notices you call every dog by name and never say "pet", that you explain prices in one short sentence before the customer asks, and that bad news always comes with what happens next. It lists "pampering" and "fur baby" as words you never use, because they appear in none of the samples. One guess at the end says you prefer a casual tone with first-time customers, which rests on a single email, so you check it and cross it out.
You test it with a request for a short email about a closing for a holiday week. The draft opens with the dog's name and says when you reopen in the second sentence, so you keep the guide as it is.
That is where the example stops. Nothing in this example is a real business or a real outcome.
Where the guide goes next
Paste it at the top of every writing job on the full list. Before a post goes out, the AI post checker can tell you whether a post sounds machine-written or could have come from any business, which is a quick second check against the guide. Read the guide again whenever a draft makes you wince, and add the rule that would have stopped it.
Of every job on this list, social media is the one that comes back every week, and Boomp is software that does that one for you. See ten posts made from your website, free
