Content marketing refers to writing educational articles, e-books, or holding seminars to answer the questions that people may have. Of course, it helps if the content is exclusive. However, content marketing is not an easy job as it is difficult to come up with new content every time. According to Zazzle Media, while 60% of companies find it difficult to produce content consistently, 65% struggle to create engaging content. With the increase in your marketing campaigns, the challenges grow manifold. Therefore, here are some content marketing ideas with great examples to motivate you to do better.
Blogs have developed to be one of the greatest tools of content marketing tools. Not only do they provide information in great detail, but also fuel your SEO efforts.
Buffer is one of the best examples of content marketing done right. They used guest blogging to boost their initial growth. One of the biggest advantages of guest blogging is that it increases brand awareness. That is exactly what happened with Buffer. Guest blogging helped them in gaining their first 100,000 users. Today, Buffer has four blogs. One of them talks about people who influenced their customers while the other two are Transparency and Open Blogs when they share their business ups and downs. The results: Buffer is highly recognised and has more than 400,000 users.
Hubspot, the multi-million-dollar company used content marketing in its earliest days. They wrote in-depth blog posts about various issues, and added content upgrades (example: e-books) to their blog posts. They even created an educational content sharing hub called Inbound.org that provides a great opportunity to promote its certification and partnership programs. Additionally, they created videos for Facebook and other social media to increase traffic to their visual content.
The Search is one of the best examples of blog writing done right. Rip Curl is an iconic surf brand and The Search, their online publication talks about the surfers’ search for the best waves, surfing lifestyles, and stories told by the surfers themselves, besides featuring great photography. Rip Curl’s online presence has turned huge with more than 100000 YouTube subscribers and over 2 million Facebook followers.
Mankind has always had a thing for listening to good stories. The multi-billion-dollar company Microsoft understands this. The company’s website has stories about the employees and the brand that will have you gripped for hours. Well, Microsoft’s success needs no introduction or narration. Storytelling is a tried-and-tested method for building customer relationships.
The success of Hubspot made it clear that e-books are a great way to increase the awareness of your brand. E-books can actually be full-fledged books that you can add to your blog, without worrying about making them too long. Anyone with the desire to know more about a particular topic can refer to the e-books.
LinkedIn works on the principle that no one can know about LinkedIn more than they themselves. The professional social network has come up with a user-friendly, entertaining e-book that they call ‘The Secret Sauce’. This online publication has a series of tips and statistics to help any potential or existing LinkedIn user. This simple way proved so useful that LinkedIn actually came up with more marketing guides as e-books.
Simply Business is a UK-based business firm which uses B2B content marketing. On opening their site, you will be greeted by a series of useful tips and guides that have attracted thousands of links and shares, besides raising their profile.
Transparency is wholeheartedly appreciated by customers. McDonalds proved it when they started their ‘Ask a Question’ campaign, and took time to answer 10,000 questions. Grant Thornton, a data analytics company, took people behind the scenes at the Tony Awards showing exclusive content on YouTube and Twitter. The impact was huge. The initiative registered 3.7 million Twitter impressions, and they beat their YouTube goals by 115%.
Charmin sells toilet paper and flushable wipes; it is one of the biggest ventures by Procter & Gamble in the area. What makes it so special when toilet paper can be brought from anywhere? The company always had a sense of humour in its TV ads and then came their Sit or Squat app. This mobile tool helps people to find clean bathrooms when they need them. Imagine the practicality of having such an app. The result? The app has been downloaded more than 100,000 times.
Buzzfeed used all their resources to combine every type of content, be it research-heavy guest content, evergreen blog content, as well as gated content. Their vision was to become a thought leader within the industry. The nine-month campaign resulted in a record-breaking number of new signups.
Lush as a cosmetics brand is breaking barriers. From it’s quirky to appealing ethical values, the firm was doing well as a business anyway. However, what made it a huge hit were the videos that showed how their products were made. On social media, they encourage users to use hashtag photos of its products they use.
The average consumer might look at GE as a business with little scope for creativity. They may be a world leader in power generation and water technologies, but this part of B2B is what people would consider dull. To give it a bit more zeal, the firm launched an Instagram marketing campaign. They combined it with influencer marketing by getting six Instagram influencers and several superfans to do the #GEInstWalk. They uploaded beautifully-taken pictures of their products and got the influencers and fans to tour the manufacturing facilities and upload hashtagged pictures. The results? They got 8 million views on their Instagram account and 3 million reaches per hour without any paid advertising.
Superdrug is one of the biggest UK-based health and beauty retailers. Now they wanted to raise awareness around body image issues. They contacted 18 graphic designers from around the world, and asked them to edit the picture of a model to bring it in line with their country’s beauty norms. Their stress was on the factor that there is no beauty standard that anyone should follow. The news was internationally-covered, many celebrities expressed interest in the campaign, and the study got 3 million views and 1 million shares.
Social media feeds on visuals and videos. Stone Temple Consulting shows that tweets with images have a 65% better chance of being retweeted.
The former restaurant-finder now turned food delivery app operates in 24 countries. Zomato has a history of creating and sharing popular culture images. They are simple to understand, creative and entertaining, and Zomato soon jumped to 1.3 million followers on Twitter. Zomato has recently started sharing random food facts from around the world on its app, and the followership has only increased.
Who knows better use of images than someone who’s in the business of images. Shutterstock uses infographics to make a creative trends report. Of course, people always love reliable data, and this one catches your attention. Last year’s infographic attracted an unbelievable number of over 6 billion site visits.
Blendtec is a mill, mixers and blenders business. Sounds quite boring. But Blendtec proved that notion wrong. Blenders may be boring, but blending weird stuff is not! Their Will It Blend video series increased their product sales by upto 700% in a three-year period.
Everyone knows Old Spice; they have been here since 1937. How are they still popular? Some years ago, they had started to give ground to their competitors. They corrected themselves, came up with a series of humorous videos and ads featuring trendsetters of the modern generation. In some cases, they didn’t even mention the product they were promoting. Soon, they became relevant for the new generation too.
JetBlue came up with a series of flight etiquette videos. Hootsuite literally changed the game with a spin-off of the famous Game of Thrones title, which showed just how important it was to play on the virality factor of the moment. AARP The Magazine has won awards for their quality, content and design. But there is nothing mysterious about their success. They listen to their audience. They have been rumoured to follow the readers’ mails, letters, social media chatter, and use that information to understand what appeals to them most.
A video is an excellent way to promote your book. Unboxing books, trailer launches, and book reading are all great ways. But Reid Hoffman took a different way to create a trailer for Blitzscaling. He launched a slide deck on Slideshare, a platform most often used by startup founders and business executives: the main audience he was targeting for his book. The book trailer on Slideshare has got more than 1.3 million views and maintained its place on Slideshare’s “Today’s Top SlideShares” for more than a year.
Influencers are individuals who have a hold over a vast audience, and are no less than celebrities. Getting them on your side, and using them to engage your customers is one of the best and probably the cheapest ways to attract an audience.
The cosmetics brand shared videos of nine female influencers speaking about their challengers on Instagram under their #FaceAnything campaign. Greatly appreciated by the celebs and people alike, their engagement on social media platforms went through the roof.
If your content doesn’t interact with your customers, then there’s no use to them. So, how do you make it useful to everyone? Lets find out…
Avvo is a legal marketplace showcasing reviews, profiles and ratings for lawyers across the United States, complete with links to the lawyers’ own profiles. While this alone is a great example of content marketing, Avvo went a step further. They have a feature called ‘ask a lawyer’ where anyone can ask legal questions for free. Avvo doesn’t pay anyone; the lawyers answer the questions as a form of self-promotion. Later, the questions and answers are added to the Q&A section of their site.
Behance started off as an independent project. However, as soon as Adobe laid hands on it, it turned into a great content marketing tool for their creative cloud project. Behance was the platform where people could upload their individual projects, show-off their portfolios as well as get inspiration from the works of others. A perfect captive audience for Adobe. Behance.net now has an estimated 29 million visits per month.
The firm became a powerful content marketing piece for LinkedIn. Since acquiring SlideShare, they have not added its branding throughout the site, but in order to upload, comment, download or even link to any slide deck, you need to have an account on LinkedIn.
This site has created the largest bodybuilding community in the world. Their forums cover much more than just bodybuilding, such as supplements, weight loss routines, normal workout problems, and so on. The “Misc” section by the people involved (mostly customers) has 94 million posts. The forum has backlinks from 9,897 domains and their organic search visits per month are more than 500,000.
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