Anyone who started their career in a newsroom and then switched to marketing knows that the methods and values in most newsrooms are challenging to fit into a corporate environment. In a newsroom, when you write something that gets powerful people mad, you know you’re doing your job well. In marketing, not so much. So why are more and more companies interested in brand journalism?

You're familiar with creative briefs—those documents with market, product, and persona information that advertising types use to craft memorable campaigns. As B2B marketers begin creating multiasset campaigns with a variety of content developers, it's helpful for all involved to use a creative brief to help formulate ideas for everything from social media updates to website content and sales collateral. We've helped clients create and use these documents. We call them content briefs.

Recently, a few of us were on a call with a marketing prospect. The prospect mentioned that they intended to conduct a competitive review to find out how their content stacked up against their competition. We were excited to hear this. Yet, as we delved deeper into what that review would include, we realized that the prospect was only going to have about half of the information they would need to execute against the broader business goals of repositioning the brand and driving leads into the sales organization.