How to Customize AI Agents for Your Brand Voice

Why Agentic AI is a Greater Advantage for Marketers 

AI agents promise marketing assistance to make work more efficient, more effective, and (fingers crossed) smarter. However, as any marketer who has started using these tools knows, adoption and effective use are not necessarily the same.  

Marketers rarely have time to learn to use these systems, let alone create the quality workflows promised. It seems every technology platform introduces a new AI model or feature every month. Generic, bland, off-target, or hallucinated responses are frustrating beyond their poor value. Teams have inadvertently wasted time, must take on additional workload to correct the content, and are dispirited by feeling their expertise ignored. Even worse, when an AI assistant delivers an unhelpful response, the human is blamed for writing a poor prompt. Errors belong to the technology, but responsibility belongs to the person. 

Kentico’s AIRA Agentic Marketing Suite has a few key advantages over general AI assistants. Each agent has a particular focus that keeps response on target. You may not have one job, but these agents do. They are built to be part of your work; AI works best with a human in the loop, and these agents are built to require marketer approval and customizations.  

Another advantage is that the AIRA Agentic Marketing Suite gives you the opportunity to customize instructions, tone of voice, and content style to fit your brand. These customizations are inside Xperience by Kentico’s interface and they’re absolute gems. Taking time to prepare customizations according to exactly what your brand needs will save you time in the future and help you get better results. The agents aren’t hopping around the system, so you learn how to customize once and get targeted and brand-specific responses. 

How to Configure Brand Voice: Three Customization Layers with AIRA 

It’s no easy feat to condense the essence of your organization into values, words, and media. Your defining attributes should not be stripped away as you rework or brainstorm your website content. Build your brand into the Kentico system in three different places, all with slightly different if overlapping roles.  

Layer 1: Custom Instructions guide how an agent behaves and responds in AIRA; basically, how it talks to you. This is a great place to specify brand fundamentals, what and how to assess content (or not), preferred communication style (to you), or domain-specific rules. For example, banks, credit unions, and other financial service providers should include instructions to never alter legal disclosures. 

Keep it short and smart; the Content Strategy artifact will do the heavy lifting.  

Find it under AIRA > Agents > Content Strategist > Edit > Custom instructions.

Layer 2: Tone of Voice guides the tone for your website copy and its translation. Think of it as creating the emotional environment in which you interact with your users. Are you calm and reassuring? Are you energetic and confident? 

Find it under AIRA > Content generation > Tone of voice guidelines.

Tip: Add specificity for how you speak where. For example, use imperatives in headlines or start first paragraph copy with a question that a user may be asking themselves.  

Layer 3: the Content Strategy artifact is your comprehensive brand guide for the AI Content Strategist. Include your brand identity, audience segments, voice, tone guidelines, style guide, terminology, content-specific guidelines, and sector-specific requirements. This file can contain everything from your brand mission, to whether to use contractions, to how product pages have a different tone to emails. 

Build it with a prompt in the AIRA chat in your administrator interface. Once completed, find the current file in AIRA > Artifacts, as content-strategy.md.

Tip: If you have a brand guide, ask a generalist AI assistant like Claude or ChatGPT to turn it into a plain text document following this structure that can easily be added to the AIRA chat.  

Govern how AIRA speaks to you with Custom Instructions, how AIRA speaks to users with Tone of Voice, and how AIRA should tie your brand and content together with the Content Strategy Markdown Artifact. 

Before and After: the Impact of Customization 

Let’s explore the impact of customization for one of our clients: a credit union that offers mortgages in the Bay Area and beyond.  

The generic Content Strategist agent defaults to a “friendly and professional” voice and tone that works for any audience, not necessarily one for financial services: 

“We offer a range of mortgage options for properties across the United States, designed to fit your unique needs. Whether you prefer applying online or want to chat with a mortgage expert, we make the process clear and straightforward.” 

This paragraph is perfectly serviceable but fails the brand in several ways. It lacks distinction. The primary focus is the brand itself, not the customer. It doesn’t describe any of the specific products or their benefits. Finally, it fails to give a clear action to the reader.  

After customization, the same paragraph becomes much richer and brand-appropriate: 

“Explore our selection of fixed rate mortgages to enjoy consistent monthly payments and long-term stability. If you prefer flexibility, adjustable-rate mortgages offer lower initial rates that adjust over time based on market conditions. Both options are crafted to fit the diverse financial goals of Bay Area homebuyers like you.” 

The Custom Instructions directed the agent to tailor feedback to the content type, in this case, a product page. The Tone of Voice document specified speaking directly to members, using “you,” employing a warm and clear tone on products as well as the focusing on the product benefits. The Content Strategy Markdown Artifact reinforced those tone guidelines and indicated an action orientation, e.g. “Explore.” The Content Strategist even integrated some local SEO because we defined their service area in the artifact.  

How to Set Content Guardrails for an SEO and GEO Agent 

With one quick click from a dropdown, Kentico’s SEO & GEO Specialist can run a full analysis of a webpage on your site with suggested optimizations. It’ll ask for a primary keyword and 3–5 secondary keywords, which is quick work if you’ve saved them to your page content inside Xperience by Kentico. 

Metadata keywords may no longer help improve your ranking in Google but they still guide the Kentico SEO & GEO Specialist. Give the SEO & GEO Specialist enough to work with, or its recommendations default to generic best practice. Add a brief brand summary, key audiences, key product areas, competitors, keyword focus, GEO focus, and restrictions such as geographic market area or regulated content.  

Custom Instructions is your agent’s pilot on how to navigate SEO and GEO best practices while keeping your brand in mind. (Find it under AIRA > Agents > SEO & GEO Specialist > Edit > Custom instructions.) 

Here's additional guardrail considerations that help your content stay on track:

• For key audiences, it’s helpful to focus on transactional relationship stage rather than the full market segment as you’d find in the content strategy. A new customer doing research and evaluating options drives one action, while a current customer seeking how-to guides drives another.  
• For keyword focus, it’s helpful to point the agent in the right direction. Are you optimizing content for high volume keywords? Your goal is to pump the traffic, and you have a strong brand that can compete with not only your industry peers, but also media and comparison sites. Are you optimizing for long-tail keywords? You’re seeking focused qualified traffic. High conversion intent keywords? You want bottom-of-the-funnel users only.  
• For your GEO focus, consider what niches your content can fill and how it may match your audience. Do you publish original, authoritative research? This is great for citations. Do you provide clear definitions and FAQ? This is great for matching consumer queries. Do you show comparisons? Generative engines love differentiation and entity clarity. 

Tip: Include content restrictions to avoid conflicts with your brand voice or interference with user experience (UX). For example, specify that headlines (h1) can be no longer than 100 characters or buttons can be no more than three words. “How to Open a Bank Account in Chicago” may be great button text for SEO, but it’s a headache for any user interface, and the users themselves.  

Before and After Customizing the SEO & GEO Agent

Let’s revisit the mortgage page for our credit union client. Before our enrichment work, the only keyword was “mortgages,” and the agent feedback was adequate. But, with only one keyword, the agent was trying to get everything to read exactly as that, recommending turning every subheading into “mortgages.” This advice ultimately works against our client, and we knew one keyword (especially one as competitive as “mortgage”) wasn’t enough.  

We expanded the list with long-tail keywords to bring in more highly qualified traffic and give the agent more guidance. Secondary keywords included “home loans” (common variation), “fixed rate mortgages” and “adjustable-rate mortgages” (specific products), “mortgage application” (high conversion intent), and “Bay Area home loans” and “Bay area mortgage” (local market). The subheadings that the agent was initially trying to change (“Fixed Rate Mortgages” and “Adjustable-Rate Mortgages”) suddenly looked much better to it.  

With the addition of custom instructions that gave a clearly defined market area, the agent also gave feedback on local SEO, an area it completely missed before customization.  

The SEO & GEO Specialist’s recommendation following this enrichment and expansion: address enhancement opportunities in semantic variation usage and internal linking to boost topical authority and navigational ease. This response is highly specific and more helpful than the first.

Employing Decision Gates for Agentic AI 

AI assistants are useful tools for marketers, but they cannot replace their judgment, knowledge, and responsibility. While Kentico’s AI agents make suggestions for copy and optimizations, they do not have permission to rewrite automatically. Each response must be considered and, if accepted, copied and pasted over. This smart friction, instead of a quick auto-apply option, ensures marketers employ their expertise. For example, the SEO & GEO agent often recommends alt text for decorative images, which is not best practice; that’s a recommendation we almost always reject. Marketers may have skipped the blank page at the start, but their depth of experience and organizational knowledge is integrated into the process.  

Co-work or co-intelligence is the smartest way to use AI for results. These customizations can evolve as your brand does, so don’t forget to revisit them every six months or whatever feels right for your organization. These agents are tools, not magic wands. When you learn to use the tool well and wield it properly, it can make you more efficient, more effective, and smarter—as promised.