I've had the good luck to work with dozens of brands over the years, both directly and while working full-time within an agency (the logos in the image above are a snapshot).
With some brands I had a longer relationship. The examples below illustrate my approach to such relationships.
Healthy Business
I was the primary strategist behind EAP Healthy Business' content marketing programme and I also wrote all the content.
The strategy was to target the industries Health Business had selected as the most promising for its services with a series of articles that spoke to their needs. This began with a 'State of Wellbeing' report (e.g. this article for the mining industry). These were articles that drew on extensive research to give an up-to-date picture of what wellbeing challenges were most affecting a given industry's employees.
(Indeed, they're so well researched that if you ask Chat GPT or Google's Gemini's 'Deep Research' variants about the state of wellbeing in those industries, they will crib liberally from my work.)
The next part of the strategy was to take that research and drill down into where wellbeing issues were most hurting organisations. For example, this article on professional services offered extensive research-backed advice on two major compliance risks: workplace bullying and sedentary lifestyle issues.
Alongside those industry-specific articles were thought leadership pieces that were more broadly appealing. These were designed to showcase the depth of knowledge Healthy Business contained to help them standout against competitors. Two examples: this article on how a smart wellbeing strategy doesn't de-link physical and mental health and this article on how a return-to-work strategy can drive improvements in employee wellbeing.
CommSec Adviser Services
CommSec had a content platform called Empowered that provided its associcated financial advisers with, funnily enough, good advice. Some of that content was educational, such as this article about how to quickly understand clients.
Another content pillar was 'for clients' and so designed for advisers to pass onto customers, like this article about how exchange traded bonds work.
Written articles made up the majority of the content, but we also had a budget for infographics and animated shorts.
I was editor of Empowered at the time of the Royal Banking Commission, which (among many other things) scrutinised the adviser space. As might've guessed, we did not run articles about this. Behind the scenes it was a complicated time that requrired a nuanced approach.
Salesforce
I was an external content lead for Salesforce ANZ for their Moments Made by Marketing campaign. This began with deep-dive interviews with several Salesforce-selected customers that were then atomised into several different content pieces.
There were ghost-written articles (such as this piece from hospitality group Norths Collective). We also organised or helped with webinars, a video series, and a landing page for the campaign.
nbn
I was an external content lead for nbn for its Made for More campaign. Purpose made to advertise nbn's faster plans, with a focus on their reliablity when compared to 5G, it was targeted at customers concered about 4k streaming, remote work, and gaming.
Check out the landing page and this video explainer of how a fibre connection helps with ultra HD streaming.