It’s a beautiful time to be in content marketing. AI writes your blog posts. It drafts your meta descriptions. It can knock out a month of social captions before your coffee goes cold.

There’s just one problem: it all sounds the same. Yours, theirs, and the competitor you don’t even respect. 

Same tidy sentences, same agreeable rhythm, same faint smell of nobody in particular. You can publish a hundred pages a month and still sound like a brand in witness protection.

I taught an SMX Master Class this spring on scaling content with Claude. The question that kept coming up had nothing to do with keywords or rank tracking: How do we get it to sound like us?

The answer is a Claude brand skill: a structured set of voice, tone, visual, and formatting rules that teach Claude how your brand should sound before it writes a single word.

Here’s how to build one that keeps your AI-assisted content recognizable, consistent, and distinctly yours.

What a Claude brand skill actually does

A Claude brand skill is your brand’s walkout song. When I played professional soccer, mine was “O Fortuna” from Carmina Burana because apparently I wanted to enter the field like a Roman army with shin guards.

Ridiculous? Maybe. Memorable? Absolutely.

That’s the job of a brand skill. It tells Claude what energy to bring before any words get written. Not just “friendly” or “bold” or whatever limp adjective survived three rebrands. The real stuff: cadence, bite, restraint, humor, visual taste, and what your brand would rather die than sound like.

Do it right, and your content stops reading like a group project between a junior writer, a freelancer, and a chatbot wearing business casual. It starts sounding like one company.

To show how this works, I’ll use a fictional cold brew brand named Hot Take throughout the examples below.

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Step 1: Raid your own archive

You already have a brand. It’s just scattered everywhere.

Before you write any instructions, go gather all your marketing materials. Get the style guide that you forgot about after the rebrand. Pull the deck that your founder makes every new hire read through. Even dig into those customer support emails that customers reply to, saying thank you for. 

The goal here is to round up as much information you’ve got about the current brand voice and herd it into one place for Claude to read.

Save all of this in one working folder. Keep it boring and obvious. Something like:

• Claude Brand Skill Source Materials

Then, make subfolders:

• 01 Brand docs
• 02 Voice examples
• 03 Visual examples
• 04 Content formats
• 05 Don’t sound like this

For visual guidelines, save screenshots or image files of the brand in the wild. Name the files like a person who wants to find them again:

• homepage-hero-example.png
• instagram-caption-tone-example.png
• bad-example-too-corporate.pdf

Then create one audit document. In that file, make three notes for every asset:

• What to keep: The parts that sound right.
• What to avoid: The parts that feel off-brand
• Why it matters: This is the rule Claude will learn from it.

Here’s an example:

• Asset: Q2 product launch email
• What to keep: Short sentences, direct CTA, playful first line.
• What to avoid: The phrase “seamless experience.” Retire it immediately.
• Why it matters: Launch copy should feel confident and useful, not like a SaaS brochure trapped in an elevator.

While you’re in there, you want to be ruthless.

Claude can read a lot, but your job isn’t to throw a junk drawer at it and hope for brand clarity to crawl out like Ripley’s baby in Aliens 4 wearing a tiny crown.

Once you’ve finished the audit, sort the keepers into four piles:

• Who the brand is.
• How it sounds.
• How it looks.
• How the voice changes

Those piles become your core skill files:

• brand-foundation.md
• voice-and-tone.md
• visual-guidelines.md
• content-formats.md

Hold that thought. This is where the fun starts.

Step 2: Build your foundation so Claude doesn’t have to guess who you are

• Template and example: brand-foundation.md

This is where we build your brand foundation file that keeps all your copy from running into traffic. Call it something basic like brand-foundation.md.

Claude needs to know what kind of brand it is writing for before it starts doing that thing where it gets confident, cheerful, and completely wrong.

Keep this file small. Painfully small. This isn’t the place for every tagline, campaign line, founder quote, abandoned slogan, or sentence that begins with “we empower.” Those belong somewhere else. Possibly a folder. Possibly a bonfire.

The foundation file should include six sections:

• Brand summary.
• Mission.
• Audience.
• Positioning.
• Personality traits.
• What we aren’t.

For the brand summary, write one paragraph. Say what the company does, who it helps, and why I should care.

For Hot Take, the summary would sound more like this:

• “Hot Take makes cold brew for people who want it strong, smooth, and a little less precious. No fake wellness glow. Just good caffeine, good flavor, and a morning that doesn’t require waiting behind a lavender mushroom latte with emotional support foam.”

Then write the mission. One sentence. Maybe two if you must. This is the hill the brand would die on.

Not something like this:

• “To revolutionize the beverage experience through innovative cold brew solutions.”

For Hot Take, I would keep the mission stupidly clear:

“Make cold brew that tastes good, works fast, and doesn’t make the morning more annoying than it already is.”

Next, define the audience. Claude doesn’t need “women 25-44 with disposable income” as much as it needs the emotional context.

More like this:

“Hot Take is for people who want coffee to do its job. They may be heading into work, to school drop-off, for a client call, for a creative sprint, or just to the emotional obstacle course known as opening Slack.

They like good coffee, but they aren’t trying to make it their whole personality. They don’t want weak coffee, wellness cosplay, or fake premium vibes.”

Then add positioning. This is where you tell Claude how the brand should sit in the market.

“Hot Take lives between gas station coffee and the $9 Starbucks.

It’s better than the sad office fridge situation. Less sensitive than the coffee shop, where ordering requires courage. Strong, smooth, unfussy, and just opinionated enough to feel like someone awake wrote the label.”

Now get to the part everyone loves to skip: personality traits. Pick four or five traits with teeth. Not “innovative,” “customer-obsessed,” or “authentic,” unless you enjoy words that have been left in the sun too long.

For each personality trait, write enough that Claude can make an actual judgment call.

Not just “sharp.” That means nothing. A knife is sharp. So is a bad email from finance.

Write the trait like this instead:

Sharp

Hot Take gets to the point. The copy should have a little bite, but it shouldn’t draw blood. Use shorter sentences. Make the claim clearly. Let headlines carry some edge.

• Good: “Strong cold brew. No personality transplant required.”
• Too far: “Your current coffee is embarrassing.”
• Too flat: “Our cold brew offers a smooth and enjoyable taste experience.”

Do the same for every trait.

Playful

The brand can wink at the reader. It can’t put on a foam finger and start yelling internet slang. A joke is welcome when it makes the line more memorable. A joke isn’t welcome when someone is trying to understand pricing, shipping, refunds, or anything involving their money.

• Good: “The 12-pack landed. Your fridge is about to get interesting.”
• Too far: “This cold brew slaps harder than your Monday trauma.”
• Too flat: “Our 12-pack is now available for purchase.”

Honest

Say what the product does and what it doesn’t do. Tell the truth about the product, that’s enough. This isn’t a spiritual awakening.

• Good: “Strong, smooth cold brew for mornings that need backup.”
• Too far: “This will change your life.”
• Too flat: “Our beverage supports your daily routine.”

Warm

The brand should sound like a person you wouldn’t mind hearing from before 9 a.m. Helpful. Relaxed. Easy to understand. This should feel like waking up to Bill Withers singing Lovely Day. No baby talk. No “Hey bestie.”

• Good: “Need help picking a pack? Start with the classic. It plays well with most refrigerators.”
• Too far: “Bestie, your caffeine era is calling.”
• Too flat: “Multiple pack options are available for customers.”

Steady

Confidence without feeling like a fan girl at a T-Swift concert. This is the trait that keeps copy from spiraling. The brand can be excited.

• Good: “New flavor. Same strong cold brew. Available now.”
• Too far: “RUN. DO NOT WALK. YOUR MORNING DEPENDS ON THIS.”
• Too flat: “We are pleased to announce a new product offering.”

The trick is to give Claude contrast. A good line. A line that goes too far. A line that dies of beige. That’s how the model learns the edges of the voice instead of just memorizing adjectives.

Then write what the brand isn’t.

For Hot Take, I’d write it like this:

Hot Take should never sound smug.

• No coffee snob routine. No meme-account-with-a-product energy.
• No fake urgency. No fake scarcity. No fake intimacy.
• And please, for the love of every tired person in aisle seven, don’t say ‘fuel your journey.’

The “not” list is usually more useful than the “is” list. It catches the moment a brand starts drifting from playful into try-hard, from confident into cocky, from polished into beige.

End the file with a little pre-flight check. Just a few lines Claude can run through before it starts flinging adjectives around.

For Hot Take, that might look like:

Before writing, make sure this sounds like Hot Take on a good day.

• Is it useful? Does it feel confident?
• Did it get to the point before the reader aged visibly?
• Is the joke helping, or is it standing there waving?
• Would this sound weird coming from a cold brew brand?

That’s your foundation. Everything else in the skill should connect back to this file. Voice comes from it. Visuals should match it. Content formats should bend around it.

Step 3: Build the voice guide people will want to use

• Template and example: voice-tone.md

This is the file I would obsess over. Voice is the part people remember when the rest of the page gets chopped up in the sad little gap between meetings.

Voice is the brand on a normal day. Tone is the outfit it wears for the room.

Hot Take can be louder in a product launch email. It should be calmer in a refund email. It can be funny in a social caption. It should probably not be doing stand-up in a shipping delay message.

That’s the point of this file. Claude needs to know the difference between the brand’s personality and the mood of the moment. Then give it examples. Lots of them.

A trait like “honest” doesn’t help much on its own. Honest compared to what? A priest? A mechanic? A brutally direct aunt at Thanksgiving?

Give Claude the before, the after, and why the after works.

• Before: Our nitro-infused cold brew delivers a smooth, premium caffeine experience.
• After: It’s cold brew. It’s strong. It won’t taste like a compromise.

Now do the same for playful, where the line gets a little more wink and a little less brochure.

• Before: Hot Take is now available in a 12-pack.
• After: The 12-pack landed. Your fridge is about to get a lot more interesting.

Write five or six of these per trait.

Claude learns a voice the way a new hire does. Your before-and-after pairs are that training ground. The more useful contrast you give Claude, the less it has to guess.

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Step 4: Teach Claude what the brand looks like

• Template and example: visual-standards.md

Sadly, my visuals always get treated like they were assembled during a minor hostage situation.

Claude doesn’t need every component state, hover color, and button radius that your product designer has carefully hidden inside Figma. It needs the basics. Things like logos, color palette, fonts, and what not to do.

“Deep blue” means one thing to your designer, another thing to your freelancer, and apparently something very alarming to AI.

Give it the actual codes and the job each color is allowed to do. For instance:

• Black: #111111. Use for headlines, body copy, and anything that needs to be easy to read.
• Orange: #F45D22. Use for CTAs and callouts. We aren’t painting a traffic cone.
• Cream: #FFF8EF. Use for warmer sections or background blocks.

Then add usage rules.

• “Use black and cream as the base. Orange is an accent. Aim for 80% neutral, 15% warm background, 5% accent.”

Do the same with type. Don’t just list the font family and call it a day. Tell Claude how the type should feel and how it should behave.

• Headlines should feel bold, clean, and editorial.
• Body copy should be easy to read.
• Use sentence case for headers.
• Avoid all caps.
• Arial or Helvetica if the primary font is unavailable.

Then get painfully specific about layout. “Generous spacing” sounds nice. It also means nothing. One person’s generous spacing is another person’s abandoned parking lot.

Give Claude something to work with:

• Keep the layout rules plain enough that nobody has to interpret them like cave drawings.
• Paragraphs should stay short. Two to four lines is plenty. After that, the reader starts looking for an exit.
• Each section gets one main CTA. Not three buttons fighting for custody of the click.

For imagery, don’t stop at “natural” or “bright.” That’s mood-board language. Give Claude the taste level.

For Hot Take, the image notes are less “brand guideline” and more “please don’t make this look dead inside.”

• “Use real morning stuff. A can on a kitchen counter. A fridge that looks opened by an actual person. Bad lighting? No. Perfect fake lighting? Also no. Somewhere in the middle, where humans live.”

That’s why this file is useful. Claude can help, but only after you show it the taste level. Otherwise, it defaults to safe, and safe is usually just beige wearing better shoes.

And safe is where brands go to become lobby furniture.

Step 5: Teach Claude how the voice changes by channel

• Template and example: content-format.md

A line that works beautifully in an Instagram caption can eat pavement in an investor update. I have seen it happen (no, I didn’t do it, and yes, it was cringe.)

That’s why the content-formats doc (content-formats.md) is created.

This file tells Claude how the brand behaves when the assignment changes. Blog post. Sales email. Support reply. Board deck. Landing page. Social caption. Each one needs its own little rulebook.

For each format, write down:

• What the piece needs to do.
• How it should be structured.
• Which voice traits should be louder.
• Which traits should stay in the back seat.
• One good example.
• One “absolutely not” example.

For Hot Take, here’s an example of social captions:

Turn up: Playful, Sharp, Warm

Turn down: Steady

Keep it short. Let the first line do the work. One joke is plenty. Don’t stack three jokes like a person trying to prove they are fun at a company offsite.

Good: “New 12-pack just dropped. Your fridge has been emotionally preparing for this.”

Too much: “BESTIES. THE 12-PACK ERA IS HERE AND YOUR FRIDGE IS SCREAMING.”

And here’s an example of customer support messages:

Turn up: Warm, Honest, Steady

Turn down: Playful

Be human. Fix the thing. A tiny bit of personality is fine, but nobody wants a stand-up set when their order went missing.

Here’s an example of good: “Sorry about that. Your order should have arrived by now, so we’re checking on it and will make this right.”

And here’s an example of too much: “Uh-oh, looks like your cold brew took a little vacation.”

The goal here is to keep the brand recognizable without forcing it to use the exact same voice everywhere.

Step 6: Write the SKILL.md and stress-test it

• Template and example: SKILL.md

Four files down. One to go, and it runs the show. This is called SKILL.md.

This is the one Claude checks first. 

Think of it as the little bouncer for the whole skill. It tells Claude what the skill is for, when to use it, which files to read, and what to do before handing you copy that sounds like it was microwaved in a corporate kitchen.

Inside SKILL.md, keep it boring in the places that need to be boring:

• Skill name.
• Description.
• When to use it.
• Files to reference.
• Workflow.
• Checklist.

The description matters more than people think.

Claude uses it to decide when the skill should wake up. So don’t write some vague little fortune cookie like:

• “Use this skill to support brand-aligned communication.”

Nobody is typing that. Nobody has ever said that out loud unless there was a webinar involved.

Write the description with the words you use when prompting:

• “Use this skill when writing or editing Hot Take blog posts, landing page copy, email campaigns, social captions, product copy, presentation copy, creative briefs, image prompts, or marketing content that needs to match the Hot Take brand voice and visual style.”

That’s the SEO part playing hide and seek. Use the words people search for. Or in this case, the words you prompt with.

Then add the workflow:

• First, read brand-foundation.md.
• Then check voice-and-tone.md.
• If the request involves layout, slides, images, or creative direction, read visual-guidelines.md.
• If the request is for a specific format, read content-formats.md.
• Before sending anything back, run the checklist.

After that, test it as if you’re trying to break it.

Give Claude a stiff paragraph and ask for a rewrite. Give it a support reply. A homepage section. A social caption. A slide title. A product description. Something boring. Something delicate. Something where the joke absolutely shouldn’t survive.

If the first few drafts are off, don’t keep adding one more to the prompt. That’s how you end up with a final piece that reads like you tried to duct tape your bumper back on.

Open the skill file and find the problem hiding there.Check the stuff you banned. There’s probably a word in there that your team hates but forgot to write down.

Or, maybe you said the brand can be playful, but forgot to mention that refunds aren’t open mic night. Add the line you liked and hated. Then test again.

You aren’t trying to make the prompt longer. You’re trying to make the skill smarter. That’s the whole game.

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Teach Claude your voice before it makes more beige

The real magic of a Claude brand skill isn’t that it makes AI faster.

Speed is everywhere. Taste isn’t. Your competitors have speed. The intern with a Canva password and a dangerous amount of confidence has speed.

The win is that your content stops multiplying like generic office wallpaper.

A good brand skill turns Claude from a polite autocomplete machine into a trained creative partner. It knows when to be sharp. When to shut up. When to use the joke. When to keep the joke in its little cage. It understands the words you use, the words you avoid, the rhythm of your sentences, the way your visuals should feel, and the kind of copy that should be escorted off the premises immediately.

For SEOs like me, the job is getting weirder. Now I’m thinking about what happens after the page gets scraped, summarized, cited, and wedged into an answer box with six other brands wearing the same khakis.

The goal is for Joe in San Diego to read one sentence and think, “Yep, that sounds like Anna.” Maybe he laughs. Maybe he hates it. Either way, I made it through the blender.

This doesn’t happen by asking Claude to “make it more on brand,” which is the content equivalent of yelling “be hotter” at a toaster.

So don’t treat the skill like a cute AI side quest. Build the thing as if it were part of your content infrastructure.

Give Claude the good examples. Give it the bad ones, too. Show it the phrases your brand owns, the phrases you never want to see again, and the little judgment calls your best editor makes without thinking.

That’s where the value is. Make sure your brand survives the blender: search results, AI answers, comparison pages, Reddit threads, and the human being skimming all of it while half-watching Netflix.