Here’s what I know after months of co-writing my YouTube scripts, newsletter, blog posts, and social media with Claude: the fix isn’t a better prompt. It’s one document with four specific sections. Get those four sections right and Claude stops sounding like a LinkedIn robot and starts sounding like you. Get them wrong or leave them vague , and you’ll keep rewriting every draft from the ground up.

Why Most Brand Voice Files Don’t Work

The standard advice is to tell Claude your tone. “Friendly but professional.” “Casual but authoritative.” That’s not a brand voice file. That’s a horoscope  – vague enough to apply to anyone.

The problem is that Claude needs more than a few adjectives if you really want it to sound like you. It needs to know who you’re talking to, what you sound like at a sentence level, what your content is trying to accomplish, and which AI-isms make you cringe. Four dimensions, not one. When you hand it three adjectives and call it a brand voice file, you’re giving it roughly 2% of the information it needs.

And here’s the other thing worth unpacking: every time Claude releases a new model, the default behavior shifts slightly. Your content starts drifting. A solid instructions document acts as an anchor. The models change, but you consistently sound like you.

The Four-Section Instructions Framework

I call this the Four-Section Instructions Framework because every section does a different job, and skipping one leaves a gap the AI fills with its own defaults. Here’s the breakdown.

Section 1: Audience

You have to tell Claude who you’re talking to, because content — especially marketing content — isn’t about you. It’s about the people you want as clients. 

“My audience is small business owners” gives Claude nothing to work with. That’s millions of people with completely different problems. Compare that to “senior executives who just stepped into a new role and are managing a team they didn’t build” or “SaaS founders in the product management space trying to raise their first round.” Now Claude knows the reading level, the vocabulary, the pain points, and the sophistication of who it’s writing for.

Section 2: Brand Voice

This is where you tell Claude which Friend you are.  Are you Phoebe — warm, offbeat, floopy? Or are you more like Ross — precise, academic, a little literal? Brand voice is the section that shapes word choice, pacing, and energy level.

This is where you want to get specific. Do you use short punchy sentences or long flowing ones? Do you swear? Do you use analogies or stick to data? 

Each of these four sections works together to push Claude away from the middle – away from that default, sounds-like-everyone tone. Brand voice is the section that does the heaviest lifting on that front.

Section 3: Business Context and Bio

Not everyone includes this. I think that’s a mistake.

When you’re writing marketing content, Claude needs to understand the end game – what your content is actually trying to get your audience to do or buy. Without business context, it produces educational content with no strategic direction. You end up sounding like an influencer instead of a business owner.

I lump bio into this section because for most of us, our background and experience are directly connected to the businesses we run. Your 15 years in corporate finance before launching your consulting firm? That’s not just a fun fact, it’s the credibility that makes your content land differently than someone who read a book about the topic last month. 

Section 4: Do’s and Don’ts

This is the section that changes how you feel about the output. Every person has a list of AI tells that make them twitch — the em dashes everywhere, the “it’s not X, it’s Y” pattern on repeat, the word “synergy” showing up in content written for humans.

Your do’s and don’ts section is where you get specific about formatting preferences, banned words and phrases, structural patterns you want (or want to avoid), and the small stylistic details that make content feel like yours. 

The Fastest Way to Build Each Section

This document doesn’t need to take days to create. Here’s the fastest approach for each section:

1. Audience: Start with your “I help” statement, then add 3-5 bullet points about your audience’s frustrations and 3-5 about what they actually want. If you have client call transcripts or intake forms, feed those into Claude and ask it to build an audience profile. Real language from real clients beats anything you’ll brainstorm alone.
2. Brand Voice: Pull together 7-10 writing samples that sound the most like you –  emails, social posts, scripts, whatever you have. Alternatively, open your phone’s voice recorder and talk about your business for 5-7 minutes, and upload the transcript. That raw, unfiltered version of how you communicate is exactly what you want here.
3. Business Context and Bio: Give Claude links to your website and LinkedIn profile. Let it reverse-engineer the relevant details. You’ll edit for accuracy, but it handles the heavy lifting of structuring the information.
4. Do’s and Don’ts: Start with the AI-generated phrases that annoy you most. You know the ones. Then keep a running list. Every time you edit a Claude draft and catch yourself fixing the same thing, add it to the don’ts. This section gets better over time.

How to Attach It to a Claude Project

Once your document is built, save it as a markdown file and attach it to a Claude Project. This means Claude reads your instructions automatically every time you start a new conversation inside that project.

This is the beginning of your content system that you can use to showcasing your expertise.  If you’re stuck on what to write about, here are some ideas.