Content Without Context Confuses Your Audience
A case for business content context when writing with Quora thoughts from one teacher, SEMrush marketer and TEDx speaker Sanjay Shenoy
It’s in writing that we add depth to concepts, ideas, thoughts and opinions and we leverage our content to fit with our business and its goals, our audience, the people we serve and those we want to reach but it’s in our words that the power of context plays a key part in adding weight and meaning along with understanding and purpose of your message.
Content and context in communication & language use plays a vital role in how we portray our words and piece together our copy for consumption. Utilising content and context together is what gives your written work its story and detail – it’s the driving force of the bigger picture and the light and shade of the messaging that connects to the people you’re talking to and engages their attention.
Having clarified context by Cambridge Dictionary describing it with examples as:
‘The situation within which something exists or happens, and that can help explain it:
  It is important to see all the fighting and bloodshed in his plays in historical context.
 This small battle is very important in the context of Scottish history.
I decided to venture further into search engines and aptly noting that asking it about content needs careful wording as in itself that means satisfied and happy which may be the result of our content on our audiences but in this case is a direct description of one word but not in the right context or meaning for this article.
I instead decided that the explanation needed more than a dictionary based response and went in search of my research source Google again and found some Quora answers/views – here are my top chosen 3:
‘Jimmy's mom woke him up early in the morning. Jimmy protested but mum insisted he goes to school. He dragged himself out of bed and went to school.
You will be forgiven for thinking that Jimmy is a bad boy and a bad student, but if you know the context, you might want to know that Jimmy is a man and the headmaster of the school. Still a mummy's boy though, at his age, and likely not married, from the context.’
This response was from an English teacher and he describes the section in bold as the content which leaves the final section as the explanation and the context of the paragraph which changes the narrative from one where you may believe that Jimmy is a student -- when actually — he’s the headmaster.
The second example response is slightly more philosophical in nature but equally shows the need for context which offers us insight and detail over what we initially see and think:
‘An analogy would be a container. The container is the context. What's in it, the content. Any narrative contains the 6 W's. Who, what, when, where, why and hoW. The who, when and where constitute the setting, the context. The what, why and how are actions in the scenes, the content. History changes context constantly. It is part of the evolving "when" and impacts the current setting. The problem with the container metaphor is that very thing. Time is constantly changing the container. Context is a mental construction, concrete, conceptual and symbolic in nature. Content is the concrete description before interpretation turns it into, meanings, desires, intents and judgements. There is no meaning without context. Content depends on context to give it life.’
And, finally, my third find was from a product marketing manager at the time working for SEMrush who gave a crisp, clear and highly focused answer that stated for business content, context is the perfect antidote and driving factor:
‘In order to have a great piece of content, you need to make sure everything you write and say is in the correct context. If you are using words and themes out of context it can confuse your audience and dilute the point of your message. In terms of marketing, the content is what you are sending out to your audience (PDF’s, E-books, Videos, Etc.), however, context goes much deeper.
Context is going to be geared to a specific audience or people of interest. If you have a software in the field of SEO, the content is going to be whatever you are putting out, let’s say a blog post. However, all of that information will fall under the context of it being within the field of SEO.
That blog post will perform much better on an SEO related website as opposed to a sports website because there it would have no context to the audience.
A huge part of understanding how to manage both the content and context of anything you write is knowing your audience, and the time and place in which you're going to publish the content.
Each platform you publish on is going to have its own audience and expectations. Facebook audience is different than your Twitter audience so it's important to know these distinctions.
Once you are able to identify what your audience wants on each platform, this will allow you to create quality pieces of content that are also written with the best context in mind.’
You see, it’s the context that encompasses a high regard in consideration for our audience and where we place/publish our work for them to understand and comprehend what it means to them, how it relates to them and why it’s important to them -- always looking to provide quality of work over quantity which conveys your brand and business as a valued voice that looks to create value for the people that consume it – guiding and supporting them in a helpful way that sees them as a person over simply being a commodity to sell to.
Is Content Without Context Useless?
YouTube TEDx Covelong with Sanjay Shenoy talks around this topic and starts his speech discussing when as early humans we were holding ideas in our brains as much as we could remember mainly being critical and vital detail but today we absorb so much information that content is vast and processing it requires context over and above attention grabbing.
He goes on to state that our attention is a highly prized commodity that is consistently being approached for market share by advertisers where making money over quality is peddled and where sensationalised data is seen as a tactic to draw in the numbers but what he suggests is a change to view attention as an equal to transaction -- changing the relationship between the consumer and creator which places empathy towards the consumer and where the transaction becomes the content that is created for consumption therefore building value not just in economic terms but in terms of what you provide as context weaving in: what, where, when, how and why.
When we create useful content with the context of adding value over content for numbers and pushing emotions, the response we build is far more impactful and promotes positive interactions which provides better outcomes for our output as businesses but also for the people we are creating it for.
Content without context is where connection with your audience and readers can be lost and where if not clearly cemented in plain sight leads to confusion rather than clarity.
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