Content Marketing Done Right: 8 Examples You Can Learn From

More than 85 percent of brands use content marketing. But less than half think they’re any good at it.

Why?

Because content marketing makes you vulnerable.

It lets you show a side of yourself your customers wouldn’t normally see. You’re putting your thoughts and ideas on the line and hoping people respond.

It’s the marketing equivalent of dating. And it’s scary.

But the harsh truth is: While some content marketing is good, not a lot of it is great.

Thankfully, with this article, you’re going to learn what it is that makes great content marketing — and how you can use it yourself. The following are eight examples of content marketing done right.

1. Coke’s “Share A Coke” Campaign

If you haven’t seen or heard of this campaign, then you’ve probably been living under a rock.

Welcome back to the world.

Coke’s “Share A Coke” campaign gave everyone the opportunity to personalize their favorite drink.

They took the 150 most popular names in Australia and added them to the side of the bottles. And, well… people went crazy for it.

Everyone was talking about Coke.

Since then, the campaign has spread all around the world.

Why was it so successful? Personalization.

Coke made you feel special. It was just you and your bottle against the world.

And this personal touch is the crux of content marketing.

Coke wasn’t tracking online behavior, (re)targeting customers or looking at vanity metrics.

Instead, they targeted the most important thing to customers — their name. After all, everyone’s favorite subject is themselves. And if you want to get someone to pay attention, using their name is a great place to start.

Research shows that 74 percent of marketers know personalization increases customer engagement. But, only 19 percent of them ever use it.

That’s like knowing you’ve got a clean diaper in your bag but never actually changing the baby.

Coke revolutionized emotional connections by asking people to “share” its product. It’s a viral campaign in a bottle.

What You Can Learn:

Think of your customers as people with emotions, just like you. How do you want to make themfeel? Personalization and emotional connection are key.

2. Buffer’s Open Blog

Buffer is a social media-tracking app. It allows you to schedule posts and track your growth via social media.

But the magic isn’t in their product. It’s in how they market it. Enter the Buffer Open Blog.

The foundation? Transparency, openness and trust.

And while that might sound simple, it’s genius.

They show you not only what they do, but how you can do it, too — giving you incredible value with each and every post.

When you read their blog, it’s like you’ve been given the key to a secret club — that there are hundreds of people wandering aimlessly, but you know the secret knock to get to all the juicy information.

It’s the velvet rope effect.

They tell the stories people want to hear. They’re finding solutions to specific problems for specific people — and doing a damn good job.

What You Can Learn:

Focus all your time and effort on value. Inform and educate your customers. Give behind-the-scenes solutions. How else will they know how awesome you are?

3. Hootsuite And A Game of Social Thrones

Hootsuite is a social media management tool that lets you manage all of your accounts from one place. Not exactly what you’d call a fun and exciting topic, right?

Well, their marketing team had different ideas. And it started with this epic viral video:

“Game of Social Thrones” was a huge hit.

It did what every marketing campaign should do. It sparked emotion.

If you’re an ardent “Game Of Thrones” fan, it’s funny, timely and makes you want to shout, “Hey, dude! Have you seen this? By the way, what the heck is Hootsuite? Let’s check it out…”

And, if you’ve never watched more than five minutes of the first episode (like me), it tells you this is an epic product that cares about its users — and, you know, more than just the hard sell.

What You Can Learn:

Have fun! By all means educate, but be innovative. Find a new and exciting way to connect with your audience.

4. Microsoft And Stories

The guys at Microsoft know how to tell a good story. And what better place to do it than a blog?

It’s aptly named “Stories.”

Enjoying a good story is in your DNA. You’re hardwired to connect with it.

Storytelling releases the feel-good hormone oxytocin. And if you can get your audience to feel emotion with your story, they’ll trust you — and they’ll buy from you.

In fact, author and entrepreneur Seth Godin’s whole marketing philosophy is based on this principle. The better stories you tell, the better you’ll connect with your audience. The better the connection, the stronger the relationship.

What You Can Learn:

Be human. It’s the one trait you and all of your customers have in common.

5. HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing

HubSpot is an innovator in marketing. So much so that they actually coined the term Inbound Marketing. You’ve probably heard of that, right?

HubSpot does it with their simple process:

1. Attracting
2. Converting
3. Closing
4. Delighting

In that order.

And, much like Buffer, they create lots and lots of valuable content to help people progress their marketing. So whether you buy from HubSpot or not, you’ll always think of them as an important resource.

Their guides are detailed, authoritative and free: e-books, marketing kits, user guides, webinars and video courses. Oh, and the odd blog or two. Is there anything this company can’t do?

Their content is high-quality, relevant and engaging, which is key for great search rankings.

What You Can Learn:

Create top-notch content. This may seem like an obvious statement, but quality and relevance trump quantity.

6. McDonald’s Question Time

Ever wondered what is actually in a beef patty? You’re in luck. McDonald’s will tell you.

This content marketing strategy is changing public perceptions through honesty.

McDonald’s Canada decided to take on the challenge of answering customer’s questions: all of them.

Answering around 10,000 customer questions has a way of helping you build strong relationships. McDonald’s stepped out from behind the brand and shared the facts. And, people loved their transparency.

As Joel Yashinsky, chief marketing officer for McDonald’s Canada, told author Jay Baer, “If you have a good story to tell, tell it. But you have to do it in a way that’s authentic.”

This builds trust and belief. With this you can turn even the worst reputation on its head.

What You Can Learn:

Have superior customer service. Engage with the customer on their terms, at their level.

7. GoPro And Visual Content

Visual content is increasingly powerful. Infographics and visual content will boost traffic, and GoPro knows it.

Their marketing strategy is all about quality: quality visual content and quality products. The facts and figures? They have 3.4 million subscribers on YouTube and 6.8 million followers on Instagram.

If that’s not proof of the visual pudding, I don’t know what is.

They focus on the user. What do their customers love? Pictures. Really great pictures. So that’s what they provide.

When used properly, infographics can potentially double traffic, according to entrepreneur Neil Patel. Posts with photos are proven to engage users more than those without.

You see a funny/great/slightly weird picture or meme on social media and you share it. It creates a personal connection, and it works.

What You Can Learn:

Get friendly with pictures. Visual content is increasingly powerful in content marketing. Learn to do it well.

8. Share As Image

Another company making strides in visual content? Share As Image.

They let you create high-quality images with shareability, and Buffer recommends them as one of the best content marketing tools out there, for good reason.

On top of this, their blog churns out high-quality content, with expertise from the inside. (It’s that velvet rope effect again.)

Share As Image helps you build your own brand with premium visual content.

What You Can Learn:

It’s a visual content for dummies kind of site. They focus on the basics, do them effectively, and always strive to add value.

The 5 Key Elements To Remember

Phew! You made it to the end.

Ideally, by now you’ve got your creative juices flowing. In fact, if you’re not overflowing with ideas, go back and read it all again.

Before I send you on your way, let’s look at the five traits all of these campaigns share, so you can use them in your own campaign from today onward.

1. Tell powerful stories.
2. Be honest and open.
3. Personalize where possible.
4. Quality over quantity — but if you can have both, then do.
5. Employ visual content at all costs.

Follow these examples, and you won’t just be good at it — you’ll be great at it.

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You’re Thinking About Social Media ROI All Wrong

Adam was being a bit tongue-in-cheek with that comment, but there’s also truth to his words.

The problem is that these promises either over-simplify the issue, or over-complicate it. We hear it so often, from so many places, that the term Social ROI doesn’t really mean anything anymore.Social ROI is one of those terms that drives social marketers crazy, and for good reason. We hear about it so often that promises to “solve the Social ROI problem“ have become as ubiquitous as new Drake songs.

The Over-Simplified Example

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: “How many sales were driven by social?”

Seems simple enough. Let’s call that the definition of Social ROI…unless you operate a brick and mortar storefront and don’t have this direct digital pipeline…or aren’t able to attribute every sale to a specific source…or there’s overlap between social and other marketing channels…or countless other reasons that this becomes difficult.

The Overly Complicated Example

Perfect. So I plug in my social numbers, including sentiment because somehow that factors into Social as quantifiable return, do some math, and then I know my social media ROI? Sweet. I bet that works for every business, because we all have the exact same goals and tactics for our social program.

The Right Way to Think About Social ROI

Social ROI is a problem because it’s not easy to solve. And it’s not easy to solve because we’re thinking about it wrong.

How are we wrong, Kevin? 

Great question, fictional reader…great question.

During his keynote, Adam followed his Social ROI joke by saying that we should stop talking about Social ROI and start talking about Social Attribution.

I believe this focus on ROI instead of attribution is a fundamental disconnect in the way we operate as marketers, and one that will continue to get in our way until we learn to address it.

Attribution has to Come Before ROI

Social media is a marketing function. Whether it feeds top-of-the-funnel brand awareness, mid-funnel conversions, or customer satisfaction and lifetime value, we can’t talk about Social ROI until we address the Social Attribution problem.

For the most part, social marketers are missing a huge piece of the puzzle when it comes to attributing traffic, conversions, and sales to social media, because we can’t see exactly where a lot of traffic actually came from.

We call this lack of attribution “dark social” and its a bigger issue thank you’d think:

• According to RadiumOne, 70% of all social sharing is dark.
• According the The Atlantic, more than 50% of social traffic is dark.
• According to InsideSocial data, more than 50% of digital sales are dark.

We don’t even know which traffic comes from social, so how can we prove the ROI of our social media programs? Attribution is important, and not just for your peace of mind.

As a social marketer, you need to understand and measure the impact your efforts are having on web and conversion metrics. You're driving site visits, signups and sales. Without attribution, you can't prove that you are actually doing this and all of the credit goes to "direct", so you are unable to illustrate your true business impact by implementing tracking and attribution tools.
-Brewster Stanislav 

There are three steps to consider when trying to solve this problem for your company.So How Do We Fix the Social Attribution Problem?

1. Identification 

The first step is developing an attribution model is to identify this direct traffic and dark sharing of your web content and site traffic.

Link shorteners are a good start, and Google Analytics UTMs shorten the gap, but they’re not solving the whole problem, because users don’t always behave how you tell them to. I don’t always use a share button, sometimes I just copy a link and send it to someone. I don’t always Tweet that link, sometimes I text it, email it, or post it to a private Slack group.

If you look at the URL above this post, you’ll notice a hash and a tracking code appended to it. This allows us to see how this specific blog post is being shared all over the place, even across dark social.

Cookies and other tracking mechanisms allow you to see return visitors, because sometimes I look at a pair of shoes and then go about my business, but that doesn’t mean I forgot about the shoe company, and it doesn’t mean I won’t be back. Partial attribution is going to be a critical component of social activity in the years to come. This is something we should all be focused on.

2. Communication and Integration

One of the reasons that the identification above hasn’t been addressed yet is because of another problem. Social marketing programs are not aligned with other digital marketing functions. They’re not aligned because social isn’t always viewed as a viable marketing channels. It isn’t viewed as viable marketing channels because it isn’t aligned with other marketing functions…See the problem here? This is a cycle that we won’t get out of until we take it on ourselves to make it happen.

We can’t attribute traffic correctly because we’re not partnering with our web optimization team to identify where our “direct” traffic actually comes from. Work with your web team to identify the dark traffic. This will make their program easier to run, and yours more effective.

3. Alignment

Once you’re able to attribute social’s full impact on your business, you can align with the rest of the marketing team, and focus efforts on the areas you have the greatest impact.

This map from Simply Measured’s Senior Director of Marketing Uri Bar-Joseph offers guidance on where to focus when leveling social up to broader marketing objectives.

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Why Millennials Love Video Marketing (Infographic)

If you’re not incorporating video into your content marketing strategy because you think it’s too expensive or ambitious, you’re missing a big chance to make an impression on millennial consumers. Recent research from Animoto shows that Generation Y is primed to spend more than $200 billion annually starting in 2017, and that video marketing plays a starring role when it comes to influencing what they buy.

As Wired reports, YouTube reaches more millennials than “any single US cable network,” and according to Omid Kordestani, Google’s chief business officer, the average mobile YouTube session lasts over 40 minutes. During that time, young people are watching everything from cat videos to movie trailers to even branded content. Animoto found that 76 percent of millennials follow brands on YouTube, and a whopping 84 percent do so on Facebook.

Why is this so important? Because 80 percent of millennials use video to help them decide which products to purchase.

Take a look at the infographic below for more useful data on the power of targeting millennials with video.

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5 Critical Pieces of Social Marketing Advice

All eyes are on social marketing. Social marketing has become an expansive part of the marketing organization as a whole, and we’re constantly seeing updates to each network’s ecosystem and algorithms. 

This is challenging for those of us that have been tasked with keeping up with both social media’s advances and the Joneses. I’ve been officially employed as a social media marketer for a few years now and I’ve got to say, if it weren’t for these five really good pieces of advice, I would’ve pulled my hair out by now.

#1) Don’t try to be everywhere at once 

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, don’t try to do it all! The majority of social media teams only consist of 1 – 3 people.

Don’t overextend yourself and your team in a futile effort to be #1 on every social media channel. Pick where you want to be and do it to the best of your ability. It’s about quality, not quantity.

#2) Don’t be afraid to experiment

Social media is rapidly growing. There are constantly new networks, features, and best-practices popping up.
Although I do believe that you shouldn’t overextend your social presence, don’t be afraid to try something new! Social media is ripe for experimentation, so have some fun and see what sticks.

#3) Never fly blind

Someone once told me that social marketers should spend 60% of their time planning, 10% of their time executing and 30% analyzing and reporting.

Initially, this didn’t make sense to me. Attributing 60% of my time to pre-campaign planning seemed crazy! However, after many hits and misses, I’ve come to find that the stronger the plan, the stronger the performance. Never go into a campaign blind — always have a plan. 

#4) Set S.M.A.R.T. goals

Back in the ‘80s, Peter Drucker came up with a way to think about goal setting called S.M.A.R.T: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-Bound.

Utilizing the S.M.A.R.T. technique can actually transform your social strategy by inserting structure, KPIs, timelines, and a sense of direction into every campaign… down to the Tweet.

#5) Define success for YOUR brand

Before you run any type of campaign on social, you need to identify what success means to you.

For some marketers, it’s engagement, for other’s it’s conversion, or traffic, or impressions…and so on, and so on. There is not a one-size-fits-all metric for success. You should pick a success metric based on your goals as a marketing function.

Well, there you have it! What are the best pieces of social media marketing advice you’ve ever received? 

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How A Content Marketing Strategy Drives Your Bottom Line

Your CEO doesn’t care about the number of tweets a blog post gets or how many times a white paper is downloaded. Instead, the higher-ups in your organization want to hear how content marketing makes or saves money for the business.

By communicating the bottom-line benefits, you’ll have an easier time getting internal buy-in on your content strategy. A recent infographic by Fractl (my employer) looked at content marketing’s potentialimpact on the bottom line. I’ve pulled out some of the most compelling points to illustrate the big-picture benefits of a content marketing strategy.

The Benefits Of On-Site Content

On-site content attracts prospects and brings them closer to your brand. As the backbone of your digital presence, on-site content drives traffic, increases search rankings, builds trust, increases return visits and warms leads.

Blogging

By consistently publishing valuable, authoritative content on your blog, you can create a powerful engine for audience building and lead generation.

A company blog offers several bottom-line benefits:
Improve search rankings. Because 88 percent of consumers conduct searches to research products and companies, it’s essential to appear in your target customers’ search results. Establish a consistent blogging schedule to provide search engines with fresh content to crawl on your site, which is an important factor for increasing your search rankings.
Gain organic traffic. By creating blog content around the long-tail keywords your target audience is searching for, you’ll see an uptick in organic traffic.
Convert visitors to leads. Beyond its ability to drive traffic and improve SEO, blogging is a main lead source for some brands – KISSmetrics generated an incredible 5,057 leads from blogging in just one month. For tips on optimizing your blog for lead generation, check out this resource: How To Create A “Lead-Generation Pipeline” With Your Blog.
With these benefits, it’s hardly surprising that marketers who prioritize blogging are 13 times more likely to see a positive ROI.

Long-Form Content

By publishing in-depth content such as white papers, e-books, case studies and webinars, you can provide deeper insights into your audience’s problems and challenges.

Long-form content features multiple bottom-line benefits:

Grow Your Email List. Requiring users to opt in with their email to access long-form content can help you grow your email subscribers. Because this type of content is often perceived as more valuable, visitors are willing to give their email address or other identifying information in exchange for it.

Create Warm Leads. Cox Media generated 2,000 leads from a downloadable “Small Business Success Kit” composed of multiple assets, including an eBook, a white paper and case studies.

Close Leads. You can then nurture these contacts through email marketing or by passing them along to your sales team. Demandbase closed $1 million in new business from a campaign that included high-value content such as a white paper and a webinar.

The Benefits Of Off-Site Content

For brands without a lot of recognition, off-site content is especially effective for getting in front of new audiences. Publishing a range of high-quality content on a variety of sites is like sprinkling breadcrumbs around the web that lead back to your site.

Off-site content initiatives should be clearly tied to a goal, such as increasing awareness or driving conversion events. The type of content you create and where you place it will depend on your goal.

Awareness Campaigns

In the past, the only way to reach a massive audience at once was through expensive traditional advertising campaigns. Getting your content published on high-authority sites is a relatively inexpensive, highly targeted way to expose your brand to a massive audience.

Software startup Groove has reached more than a million people through off-site content initiatives on authoritative blogs.

Maximize your content’s potential reach:
Choose content topics with wide appeal. Be sure the topic relates to your industry; however, it does not need to be directly about your brand.
Make your content visually appealing.
Get your content featured on sites with large audiences.

Conversion Campaigns

In addition to building awareness, off-site content can lead interested readers back to your site and pull them further down the sales funnel. The difference between this type of campaign and an awareness campaign is you’ll be targeting potential customers further down the funnel.

Content topics should be directly tied to your industry or brand and placed on a site that your core demographic reads.

Here’s a top-level look at how this works:

Publish content on a site your target audience reads. 

Include a relevant call to action that links back to your site.
Present a conversion opportunity on your site, such as downloadable long-form content.
Through the above approach, BuzzStream broke its record for new user signups (disclosure: BuzzStream was a Fractl client).

Using a mix of awareness and conversion-focused off-site content, you can increase traffic, improve SEO, drive conversion events, increase brand awareness and grow revenue.

In order for you to maximize the bottom-line benefits of an on- and off-site content strategy, your content needs to provide a value-added link between your customers’ needs and your business goals. Consistently produce content that strikes this balance, and you’ll be well positioned to reap the full benefits.
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