How Marketers Should Set Up Context for Their AI Tools
Marketers were among the first to adopt AI seriously — for copy, content, campaigns, research
Marketers were among the first to adopt AI seriously — for copy, content, campaigns, research. And most have hit the same wall: the output sounds like everyone else's, because the AI doesn't know your brand, your audience, or your positioning. You spend more time fixing generic drafts than you saved generating them.
Setting up context is how AI stops producing average marketing. Here's what that looks like for a marketer.
Why does AI produce generic marketing copy?
Because brand is exactly the thing the AI doesn't have, and brand is what makes marketing not generic.
Ask for a landing page headline with no context and you get a competent, forgettable line that could front any product in your category. That's not the model failing — it's the model averaging, because you've given it nothing specific to be. Your voice, your positioning, your audience's actual language, the angle that makes you different — none of it is in the request, so none of it is in the output.
Marketers feel this acutely because their whole job is the specific over the generic, and generic is the AI's default state without context.
What context should a marketer give their AI?
The things that make your marketing yours:
- Brand voice — how you sound, words you use, words you avoid, tone
- Positioning — what you do, who you're against, why you're different
- Audience — who you're talking to, their language, their pain points, their objections
- Proof and specifics — your differentiators, your customers, the claims you can actually make
With those in context, "write a landing page headline" gets answered in your voice, for your audience, around your positioning — a draft you refine, not a generic line you rewrite from scratch.
Why positioning context can't be static
Here's the part most "set up your brand in AI" advice misses: positioning is a living thing. It moves as you learn what resonates, as competitors shift, as your audience's language evolves, as a new customer segment opens up. The brand brief you wrote six months ago is already drifting from how you actually position today.
That's why a one-time setup — pasting your brand guidelines into a settings panel once — decays fast. What actually helps is a place that gathers the signals shaping your positioning from wherever they show up: customer calls, sales objections, what's converting, competitor moves, the language your best-fit customers use. Pull those into one place, keep them current, and you can do something genuinely useful — talk to your positioning. Ask "what objections are coming up most lately?" or "how has the way we describe ourselves shifted this quarter?" and get an answer grounded in real signal, not memory.
That's an extra layer of value beyond on-brand drafts: a living view of your positioning, instead of a frozen snapshot.
Isn't that what an AI marketing tool is for?
There are plenty of marketing-specific AI tools, and some are genuinely useful. But notice what most of them are: a separate app with its own brand-settings panel you fill in and maintain, that helps inside that one app. They're built to do marketing tasks — generate copy, schedule posts, run campaigns.
A context layer does something different and complementary. It doesn't generate your marketing; it makes the tools you already draft, research, and think in understand your brand. The marketing app is where work gets done in its lane. The context layer is what lets you do that work in any tool — Claude, ChatGPT, your editor — and have it sound like you. Different jobs: one produces marketing, the other gives every tool your brand.
How should a marketer actually set this up?
Maintain your brand and audience context once, and serve it to every tool you use.
A context layer pulls your context from where it already lives — your site, your brand guidelines, your existing content, your customer research, your calls — keeps it current, and delivers it to any AI tool via MCP. Configure it once, and every tool drafts on-brand from the first line, while the positioning signals keep flowing into one place you can actually query.
For a marketer producing across tools all day, that's the difference between AI as a generic copy generator and AI as something that sounds like your brand — and a positioning view that stays alive instead of going stale.
→ What to put in it: What Information Should You Add to Your AI Context?
→ How delivery works: How to Deliver Personal Context to AI Tools
→ Set up your context layer with Unabyss →
