AI Tips That Are Practical, Not Hype
Here’s how to use AI to standardize your firm’s marketing and communication.
I know. You’re tired of hearing about AI. I am too. But I found a really useful tool that I think can help streamline your marketing and communications.
In mid-January, my team switched to Claude after testing it for a single day. The output was just that much better than what we were getting from ChatGPT. But one of the things I am liking the most is not the original reason we switched: Skills. (I’ve heard ChatGPT now has something similar, but I haven’t tested it.)
A skill is a set of instructions that you write once and that the AI follows every time. Think of it like a standard operating procedures manual that your AI actually reads. You define the rules, the structure, the tone, and the guardrails, and the AI applies them automatically to every piece of content it produces. You don’t have to re-explain your preferences every time you start a new conversation. And because skills can be deployed across your entire organization, everyone on your team is working from the same playbook instead of each person producing things their own way.
Here’s how we use them, and how you could do the same.
SEC Compliance. Everything written for marketing purposes needs to comply with SEC marketing guidelines. We built a skill that ensures the AI won’t produce content with testimonial language, performance claims, superlatives, or other common violations. If you upload a first draft, it will rewrite the language to be compliant. It doesn’t replace a compliance review, but it means the draft that reaches your compliance team is already clean.
Writing Style. We follow Associated Press style with a few modifications, so we created a skill that enforces those rules in everything the AI produces. If your firm has a style guide or even just a set of preferences, you can teach the AI to follow them. Maybe you don’t want your firm to use Oxford commas or em dashes. Or you spell out numbers at different thresholds. Instead of remembering every rule, the skill handles it.
Writing Voice. If you’ve built up a library of original writing, podcast transcripts, or video transcripts, you can create a skill that teaches the AI how you sound. Sentence structure, word choice, tone, how you open an article, how you close one. The output isn’t perfect, but it’s a much better starting point than generic AI copy.
Content Structures. Over time, most firms develop specific ways of doing things. A newsletter follows a certain format. Blog posts have a preferred structure. Social media posts hit certain beats. Client welcome emails, meeting follow-ups, and annual review summaries all have a way they should read. You can build a skill for each type so the AI produces first drafts in your structure rather than inventing its own.
The best part: If you’re on a team plan, skills deploy at the organization level. Your team doesn’t need to know these skills exist for them to work. If a new advisor sits down to write an article with the assistance of AI, the AI will automatically write it in your firm’s style, in the voice you’ve defined, in your standard article structure, and it will flag anything that might raise a compliance issue. The advisor didn’t have to know any of those rules existed.
Don’t know how to create a skill? Just ask Claude to help you build one.
The takeaway: AI gets more useful when you teach it how your firm actually works. If you’re using AI for marketing and communication, take the time to define your style, voice, compliance rules, and content structures.
Kristen Luke
Founder of Kaleido Creative Studio and OnNiche®