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.

When it comes to social media, research shows that 44 percent of users are more likely to engage with brands that post photos as opposed to brands that don't. As a result, B2B marketers are increasingly using images to deliver their messages. And with Twitter's recent additions of GIFs and photo collages, the need to think visually and tell compelling stories with images is all the more important if your social media marketing efforts are going to stay relevant.

According to the Content Marketing Institute and Marketing Profs, events are the most effective content marketing tactic. They’re also a goldmine for content that can be leveraged and repurposed to drive engagement and demand. But to ensure your event content continues to add value, you need a plan.

Use these 10 tips to maximize the value of your live event. 

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.  

Recently, one of our editors bought a new piece of guitar equipment. Since he bought it used, he wanted to make sure he got a good price so he did some online research. Though the Amazon.com reviews were positive, it was the manual that reviewers couldn’t stop gushing about. Yes, the manual—the documents that are usually explained with basic, yet confusing, pictures or are written in something only vaguely resembling English.

Broadly speaking, there are two types of marketers—those who have a lot of content and those who don’t. They both share the same problem: Whatever content they do have, they’re not sure what to do with it.

There's a common saying about referees in sports: You don't notice the good ones. The only time you usually pay attention to them is when they're screwing up. Referees, like doctors or yes, content marketers, should all follow the same basic principle: Do no harm.