The diagnostic before the brief
How I start every new content engagement. Before a single post, a hard look at how the product is actually being talked about.
Before I write a single word for a new product, I do an audit. Not the standard content inventory most teams mean by the word, where you list URLs and word counts and call it a day. A story audit. I read every blog post, every press release, every customer case study, and every sales deck the company has ever produced, and I pull out the words it uses to describe itself. Then I read the press the company has earned, and I write down the words the press chose instead. Then I sit with the BD team and the product team and listen to the words they use when they think no one in marketing is around.
Almost every time I do this, three different companies show up in the three sets of pages: the polished one on the homepage that's trying too hard, the half-imagined one the press has decided to write about, and the one the team actually believes in (which is, invariably, the most interesting of the three and the least visible to the public). The brief that follows is supposed to be a decision about which of those three companies we want to be from here on. The brief is the easy part. The diagnostic is the work, and it's where most of the real strategy actually happens.