The marketers I've admired most weren't the most creative. They were the most informed. They knew things — about the product, the industry, the customers, the sales conversations, the support tickets.
It took me a while to put words to this: I'm only as good a marketer as my context.
Context helps you think outside the box
In marketing, thinking outside the box is the job. But you can't do it if you don't know what the box is. You have to build it.
Context is how you build that box.
(That's hard as is — but even harder when you work on remote teams, which I've done for my entire career.)
Questions are the building blocks of your box
Asking questions didn't always come naturally to me. When I was starting out, I held back — I didn't want to sound stupid. So I'd sit in meetings, nod along, and Google things later instead of just asking.
But Google didn't know the internal direction or the company ethos. My context was never enough.
I had to unlearn that and build the habit of asking questions even when it made me uncomfortable. I'm still not the best at it. But I try.
The small, random questions — those are where the gold is.
Beyond questions
Asking is part of it. Context also comes from observing, being present, and reading.
I try to read every message in every Slack channel every day. It sounds like a lot, but it gives me insight nothing else does. I'm grateful to have worked at organizations with open discussions where I can just hop in, take notes, and learn.
Then there's data. Nothing speaks like numbers. Whenever I can, I dig into our data — my favourite is how customers have used the product in the last 30 days. Sometimes it completely overturns how I thought about something. It helps me realign and execute campaigns in the customer's voice rather than my own assumptions.
Data can tell you a lot. The catch is you need to know what to look at and where. Trying to look at everything means you end up looking at nothing.
Reading broadly matters too. Today, the smartest people in every industry openly share what they're experimenting with — in essays, on X, in podcasts. All of that is context about your industry, your domain, the people you're trying to reach.
This matters more now
AI has made marketing execution faster. You can generate drafts, repurpose content, build outlines in seconds. But the quality of that output is only as good as the context behind it — the context you feed the model, and the context you carry yourself.
A marketer without context but with a great AI tool just produces generic work faster.
The tool isn't what makes the difference. It's what you know before you open it.
Engineering context takes time
None of this is glamorous. Asking basic questions. Sitting in on calls that aren't yours. Reading support tickets nobody asked you to read. Being the person who asks "why?" one more time when everyone else has moved on.
But it compounds. Better decisions. Sharper copy. Opportunities others miss — not because you're smarter, but because you knew more about the thing you were marketing.