The StoreConnect message house
While my primary role is to manage and improve the product docs, my role actually sits in Marketing and I complete a lot of marketing projects alongside docs work. One of them was the StoreConnect Message House, which I proposed after learning about a huge pain point for the business: that nobody was really certain of what they could and couldn't say about the product and our brand.
Technical content writer - StoreConnect
I collected the messages brick by brick
To put together the true product and brand messages of the business, I talked to anyone who had time. I gathered nuggets of insight, feature benefits, use cases, value props, sales material, and more. I fed the chaos into AI and it helped me construct a spreadsheet encompassing core messages, key audiences, market verticals, and sector-specific information. This is the core message source for the AI gem.
The audience was the key
While I don't really love personas, because they can be reductive and stop a business from considering anything outside predefined norms. Personas were very helpful to guide AI to create more targeted and role-appropriate product messages. I developed a persona slide deck (so it can be used for onboarding) and loaded this into the Gem.
The tricks behind the gem
A gem is made up of a number of parts: including a mission-type overview and description, predefined directives (meta prompts), plus source material for training the AI on. The idea is the AI only uses the pre-approved source material for creating content. This means anyone can prompt for a sales email, a social post, an event promo, a pitch deck, and they can feel confident walking away with a first draft that is on-message.
After putting all the source material together, I constructed and trained the gem. We are still refining it, like you would any message house. Gavin Terpstra is Head of Marketing.
Saves time and tears at review
People within the business can create collateral with a confidence they have never had before. First drafts are on message, so editing processes are light and nimble. It's saving people hundreds of hours.
AI has not replaced proper review and oversight. Everything is still quality audited and copyedited before release.
Me and AI ghost write quite regularly together. Example to the left.