5 Ways AI Can Boost Your Branding

Sorry, Hot Topic, but AI has been the hot topic this year. It turns out topical graphic tees and nerdy Funko pops are no match for Midjourney, ChatGPT, and Sydney (er, I mean Bing). AI has been promised to transform everything from art to search engines. But what about branding? Are there any ways to use AI to boost branding? Can you use AI to enhance your brand’s mission, identity, and content strategy?

Nope. Sorry, there’s not a single way these incredibly powerful visual and verbal tools can be used to help your branding efforts.

Actually, as you can tell from the title of this blog post, there are tons of ways to use AI tools for branding. At Elevation, we are extremely excited about AI. We’re constantly trying out new tools and techniques to improve our workflow, try new things, and challenge ourselves. We made a thematic video as an anthem for this year using AI tools, and we’ve even digitally cloned our Director of Strategy.

Today, I’m sharing five techniques and strategies that you can use today to help your brand. Come escape the chat box with me as we dive into the world of using AI for branding.

Header image generated by Midjourney with prompt "a bright 2D illustration of an AI and a marketer working together in an office space putting sticky notes on a whiteboard"

1) Maximize your mission statement.

A great mission statement is core to the success of your brand. In fact, it’s one of the key elements of the Brand Core that we cover in Elevation’s Guide to Brand Building.

But mission statements can be hard to write.

Even as someone who writes for a living, I can really struggle when I try to write about myself. When your company is crafting a mission statement, you’re essentially writing about yourself. Whether you are starting from scratch or revisiting your existing mission statement, finding the right words to capture the essence of your brand can be extremely challenging.

So simulate an outsider’s perspective with AI.

To get a better understanding of what makes for a successful mission statement, check out my post on how to write a powerful mission statement. 

Use an AI Chat Bot like ChatGPT in conjunction with our Mission Statement exercise. Take some of the ways you describe your brand, and train the AI model with them.

A common mistake brands make is to make their mission statement too long. Without an outsider’s perspective, it can seem vital to include every big idea, which can make a mission statement that feels meandering and aimless. Ask AI to summarize your mission statement in two sentences or in less than 20 words. You can very quickly start to see what’s worth keeping and what can be removed.

2) Get ideas for color palettes, logos, and visual language

One of the best ways to build your brand is having consistent visual language. This not only makes sure that your brand is recognizable, but elements like color, logo, and typography can communicate so many different things about your company. With their ability to create images within seconds, visual AI tools like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion are fantastic for brainstorming elements for your brand’s visual identity. Here are a few examples I generated using Midjourney.

Color palettes

Midjourney prompt: a brand color palette for a travel company with #49B7B2 as the main color. Bright, exciting, modern, and fun

Midjourney prompt: a brand color palette for a car company, technology, advanced, modern, futuristic, cool

Logos

Midjourney prompt: logo for a travel company. Bright, exciting, modern, fun, 2D, flat.

Even ChatGPT can get in on the fun:

I wouldn’t recommend using the AI generated art as a final product — AI has a lot of artifacts and imperfections, especially when you look at it in larger resolution. But it could be a great addition to a mood board or a jumping off point for a designer.

Using Midjourney isn’t a replacement for working with a design expert, who knows how to balance type faces, colors, and iconography to be able to create a complete branding package. But even if you aren’t an expert with design, this can give you something to bring to the table when collaborating with someone like one of our designers to point them in the right direction.

3) Rewrite copy with the right tone

It may sound ironic, but a robot can definitely help you find your own voice. In part 2 of Elevation’s Guide to Brand Building, we have an exercise that helps you define the voice that your brand speaks in. You can use AI to make sure you are sticking to that voice.

You can use prompts such as:

• Rewrite this with a warmer tone.
• Make this sound more professional.
• Make this friendlier.
• Make the wording more powerful and dramatic.

By using AI like this, you can get some examples of what to do and what to avoid. Eventually, you’ll be able to read through the responses and figure out what sounds like your brand’s voice and what doesn’t. Take what’s working in the responses - even if it’s just a word or a phrase. It can help you strike the right tone for whatever content you’re crafting.

4) Generate ideas for content and audience touch points

As I mentioned in my post about AI writing, I find tools like Chat GPT to be excellent brainstorming tools. When it feels like your content strategy is getting predictable, think outside the box by starting inside the chatbox. AI can give you ideas for novel ways to promote your brand, or ways to engage with your audience.

In our article on how to build Brand Orbit through Content Strategy, we mention the importance of creating lots of touch points to connect with your audience. Some of these are standard parts of a modern marketing strategy: emails, blog posts, social media. But it’s always good to think of new and creative ways to create more touch points, both through your existing channels and ways you may not have even considered before.

You can ask ChatGPT for ideas for new content, YouTube videos, Instagram Reels, or even in-person events or activations. This could help you find a cool way to connect with your audience, like Uber and McDonald's ice cream giveaway.

5) Adapt your existing content into other mediums

In order to build as big of an audience as possible, your brand needs to be multi-platform. That’s one of our key brand building tenets. Being on as many platforms as possible gives you the biggest opportunity to attract new fans and turn them into brand ambassadors.

But the trade off is that being multi-platform is a lot of work. Every medium has a different sensibility. What works best on Instagram won’t necessarily fly on LinkedIn. If you just post the same content to every platform, you could be missing out on maximizing your engagement and connecting with your audience.

So use AI to help translate your content into different mediums. For example, I fed the contents of this blog post to ChatGPT and told it this prompt:

“You are a social media expert. Write a tweet thread summarizing this blog post. Use a powerful hook in the first tweet, and make the language intelligent, fun, and nerdy.”

🔥 "Sorry, Hot Topic, but AI is the real hot topic in 2023!💥 Discover 5 ways AI can boost your branding & transform your content strategy!🚀🤖 A thread👇

1/ Maximize your mission statement: Struggling to craft the perfect mission statement? Use AI like ChatGPT to gain an outsider's perspective & create a concise, powerful statement!💬✨

2/ Color palettes, logos, and visual language: Visual AI tools like Midjourney & Stable Diffusion are ideal for brainstorming brand elements. Think mood boards & design inspiration!🎨🖌️

3/ Rewrite copy with the right tone: Find your brand's voice with AI! Use prompts for warmer, professional, friendly, or dramatic tones. Extract the best from AI-generated responses!🗣️📝

4/ Generate content & audience touchpoint ideas: Stuck in a content rut? ChatGPT is your go-to brainstorming buddy for blog posts, videos, Instagram Reels, & events!💡🌐

5/ Adapt existing content into other mediums: Go multi-platform with AI! Tailor your content to each platform for maximum engagement & turn fans into brand ambassadors!🌟📲

AI is changing the branding game! Are you ready to join the revolution?🤯🤓 #AI #branding #contentstrategy #marketingtips

Okay, it’s a little aggressive with the emoji. But within seconds, I was able to adapt my post into social content. This puts me way ahead of the game when it comes to translating content across platforms.

One reason I love using ChatGPT this way is that the content ends up sounding like me. By feeding it a long piece of text that I’ve written, I’ve essentially trained the AI to copy me. Large Language Models have a high sycophancy - which means that they will tend to mimic the language and prompts of the user. This is part of what has caused AI to have some hilarious (and disturbing) conversations that have gone viral. They are mirrors programmed to give us content it thinks we are most likely to want to see.

This also makes it an ideal tool for quickly adapting my existing content in my style and my voice. Plus, if I want to change the tone - i.e. having a more professional tone on LinkedIn or a more personal tone on Instagram - it’s easy to do that with the right prompts.

Quick Tips for Using AI for Your Branding

1. The quality of your prompt will affect the quality of the output.

2. You have to put some work in to get the results you want. Even with a great prompt, you may not get the exact response you want. Take some time and give feedback to the AI: "That's too long." "Can you make it sound friendlier?" "Add a bit of wordplay to the beginning."

3. One thing to absolutely not do is to just ask the AI to write everything for you. Brands are already getting into trouble for putting out statements clearly just written by AI. Authenticity is one of the key ways to build a brand that resonates with an audience. If you take the quick and easy route, it's also a quick and easy way to burn your audience's trust.

Could you sense a theme throughout all of these techniques and tips? AI is a tool. It is not a replacement for human creativity or for branding experts.

These are all ways to generate ideas or jumpstart your creativity.

If you rely on AI to create your branding for you, it won’t feel authentic or feel like you.

If you use it as a tool to speed up certain processes, AI can amplify your branding, help you express your unique voice in more ways, and accelerate you towards your goals.