How to give the AI your business context before asking for anything

You open the AI, ask for some copy for your website, and out it comes. Correct. Well written. And completely flavourless. It could belong to any business in the country.

The easy conclusion is that AI isn't any good at this. Almost always, that isn't the case.

I own a children's entertainment business in shopping centres and I rebuilt my entire marketing this way: website, campaign pages, emails, ads. At the start I was getting brochure copy too. What changed wasn't the tool. It was what I handed over before asking.

This post is about that part. It's the most tedious stage of the whole process, and the only one that pays for itself in absolutely everything that follows.

Generic output is almost always generic input

Think about how you'd bring on a new person to write about your business.

You wouldn't have them writing on day one. You'd show them the shop, tell them who buys, explain why customers choose you over the competitor round the corner. You'd show the photos, the catalogue, the messages customers send.

After that, the copy sounds like you.

With AI the logic is identical, and most people skip that part. They open a blank window, type "write some copy for my X company's website" and receive exactly what they asked for: copy for an X company. Any X company.

The rule is simple. The quality of what comes out is proportional to the context that went in. If the result came out thin, look first at what you gave.

The six pieces of information that change everything

You don't need to write a thirty-page document. You need to nail six points. They're the skeleton of every piece the AI will later create for you.

1. What you do, in one normal human sentence. No market categories, no fancy labels. What the customer takes away. "I make homemade cakes to order for parties" is worth more than "I operate in the premium artisanal confectionery segment".

2. Who for. Who the person paying is. Rough age, stage of life, what they want solved and, above all, what they're afraid of. Fear is the most valuable and the most forgotten. Service customers are afraid of being ripped off, of delays, of not being able to cancel, of overpaying for nothing. A piece that answers the fear sells more than a piece that praises the product.

3. Where you operate. City, neighbourhood, region, or the whole country if you sell online. That changes the copy, the words that show up in search, and even the structure of the page.

4. Your real differentiator. "Quality and service" doesn't count. Everyone says it, so it says nothing. What counts is concrete: you deliver same day, you're the only one in the area doing that thing, you open on Sundays, you give a guarantee nobody else gives.

5. Price, or the price range. Plenty of people hide this from the AI out of embarrassment. That's a mistake. Price sets the tone of the entire piece. A $300 service and an $8,000 service don't sell with the same copy, or the same proof, or the same button.

6. Your brand voice. Warm and playful, or serious and technical? Do you say "you" or "sir"? Is there a word you hate? Say so. That saves ten rounds of corrections.

Pull those six points into a rough draft, however it comes out. It doesn't need to be pretty. It needs to be complete.

The material you already have and never handed over

Here's the shortcut almost nobody uses.

Over the years you've produced a pile of material that describes your business better than you could describe it now, from memory, in one afternoon. And it's sitting there unused.

Hand over all of it:

Your Instagram. Give it the profile and ask the AI to read your captions. That's where it picks up your way of speaking, far better than from your attempt to explain your way of speaking.
Real photos. Of the space, the team, the product, customers using it. They tell the AI the level and the atmosphere of what you sell.
Catalogue, price list, menu. What exists and what it costs, without rounding.
Logo, colours and fonts, if you have them. If you don't, that's fine, it gets sorted later.
Old copy. That leaflet, the old website, the PDF presentation you used to email out. Even out of date, it carries information.
The questions customers ask most. Open the business messaging app and copy the five queries that come up most. That turns into the site's FAQ section on its own, and it also becomes the list of objections the page needs to break.

That bundle transforms the result more than any prompt-writing trick.

Let the AI interview you, instead of guessing what it needs

This is the shift that solved the problem for me.

The mistake is thinking your job is to guess everything the AI needs to know and dump it all at once. You don't know. It knows how to ask.

So invert it. Ask it to interview you before creating anything. One question at a time, until it understands the business, the customer and the goal.

Two things happen when you work that way.

First: it asks about things you'd never have mentioned. Things that are too obvious to you to be worth saying, and which are precisely what makes your business different.

Second: one question at a time forces a considered answer. When a form of fifteen questions lands all at once, you answer everything in two lines to get it over with. When one arrives on its own, you answer properly.

The interview takes half an hour. It's dull. It's the only genuinely tedious moment in building your own marketing, and I won't pretend it's fun. But it happens once and it serves the website, the campaign pages, the emails, the ads and everything you ask for in the months that follow.

A consultant would bill that stage as the brief. It's a half-hour task you do on your own.

Where that context is stored, and why it matters for every piece after

There's a practical detail that makes an enormous difference and is easy to ignore.

Context living in a conversation lost in your history is worth nothing. If every time you open the AI you have to re-explain the business, you didn't build a foundation, you repeated work.

The solution is having a fixed place. A single project folder on your computer, or a context document you always attach, depending on the tool you use. What matters is the principle: your business context is a file, not a memory of a chat.

Once it's stored, the effect compounds. The first piece comes out good. The second comes out better, because the AI already has the first as a reference for tone. By the tenth, it writes more like you than a hired copywriter would after three months.

It's the difference between a team with an organised archive and one that starts from scratch every Monday.

How to check it understood before telling it to build

Never tell it to build straight away. Ask for a summary first.

After the interview, ask the AI to give back, in its own words: what your business does, who the ideal customer is, what that customer's three biggest objections are, what your differentiator is and what the brand voice is.

Read that summary carefully. You'll find one or two errors, and they're always revealing.

If it described your customer wrongly, the entire website would have spoken to the wrong person. If it understood your differentiator as low price when it's actually service, all the copy would have competed on the wrong dimension. Correcting that now takes two minutes. Correcting it after the site is built takes the whole afternoon.

It's the same reason a good agency sends a strategy document before sending a layout. The difference is that here it happens in minutes, not across three meetings.

The most expensive mistake: changing the context halfway through

This is the one that hurts most, because you only notice when you're already deep in.

You build everything on one positioning. Halfway through, you decide the focus is actually a different audience, or a different product, or a different price. So you start correcting the pieces one by one, and the result is a set that doesn't talk to itself: a website addressing one audience, a campaign page addressing another, an ad with a promise the page doesn't keep.

The rule I follow is simple. A change of context isn't corrected in the piece, it's corrected in the context. You update the base, say that it's changed, and ask the AI to review every piece in light of what changed. One clean pass, everything aligned.

If you decide to change direction, change early and change at the root. A patch on top of a patch is the same patchwork quilt you're trying to leave behind.

What to do this week

You don't need a plan. You need half an hour.

Pull the six pieces of information into a draft. Gather the material you already have: the Instagram, the photos, the catalogue, the most frequent questions from your messages. Open the AI and ask it to interview you before creating anything. Ask for the summary. Correct what's wrong. Store it all somewhere fixed.

Done. You've just done the part that separates people who get brochure copy from people who get pieces that sound like their own business.

And with the context in hand, here's a fast way to see it do real work: ask the AI for a number you don't have today. The free Cost Per Customer X-Ray, which I send by email, is a prompt you paste into any free AI. It asks a few questions about your spend and your new customers and works out what each one costs you. About five minutes, and the answer is about your business, not a generic one.