Even though most of the companies implement marketing strategies including good content marketing strategies into their business, not a lot of them succeed.
Today, it is not enough to produce only content. Competitiveness and innovativeness are on a high level and you have to master both in order to stay ahead of your competitors.
If you want to be successful in producing good and relevant content, you have to think out of the box and listen to your audience.
And if you want to be extremely good, you have to learn how to predict your audience’s content needs before they can know themselves.
However, many companies are reluctant to make large investments in the area of content marketing because the results are usually felt after a longer period of time.
Moreover, the complexity of these strategies and the efforts businesses have to put in are the major reasons why many companies just scratch the surface when it comes to content marketing.
In this article, I will mention a few content marketing examples that are successful, innovative, and generally well-thought.
This might give you the needed inspiration to build a good content marketing strategy for your own business.
Let’s start with a big-brand and extremely famous content campaign that Coca Cola successfully started back in 2011, and it’s still around.
It is considered to be one of the best examples of a good and successful content marketing strategy in the past decade.
Although Coca Cola is known for always having a lot of innovative marketing strategies, this one really did catch up on a huge scale.
The campaign gives customers the opportunity to personalize their drinking experience.
If you visit their website, you can look for your name or a friend’s name on a bottle at the supermarket.
The campaign went viral quickly, and based on this, Coca Cola decided to provide pre-personalized bottles with a name that is common in a certain country.
The reasons why this campaign worked so well is personalization and emotional connection.
It let people buy their product and share it with their loved ones which really grabbed the attention of the audience.
Later, Coca Cola supported the campaign with social media efforts showing people that sharing a Coke with their loved ones, brings people together.
2. Marketing Library [Buffer]
The Marketing Library of Buffer is a hub of resources that are helping people to advance their marketing skills.
Buffer came up with the Marketing Library in 2018, December. Although it was created then, the content was not new.
52% of all the organic traffic to Buffer’s website belongs to this library which is quite a lot.
They got rid of their blog and put all the content that they had into the library.
Now, this was more of a technical thing more than a content strategy. They built a bank of content with certain quick links to different content for social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
Even if this example doesn’t seem like an innovative groundbreaking solution, it made a big difference for this one company, and maybe it can for yours too.
3. Burberry’s kiss [Burberry]
Burberry is a luxury fashion company that has had a lot of interesting content marketing strategies in the past.
One of the best strategies was Burberry kisses, which had a simple goal: send a virtual kiss to someone by choosing their lipstick colors.
Burberry partnered with Google which offered a special image capturing technology through an app.
The app allowed people to press their lips on the screen and have their own digital kiss.
The kiss then could be sent to a person located anywhere in the world, and you could actually see the path that the kiss went on to reach the target.
This was made possible by Google’s Street View and Google Places.
The campaign was interactive and fun, and what’s most important it engaged the consumers which is why it was such a huge success.
It certainly was a unique content marketing strategy that appealed to consumers.
I am aware that smaller businesses might not be able to aim this high, but this might give somebody a new inspiration for an idea suitable for their own business.
Anyway, having interactive experiences of any kind is a gain when it comes to grabbing the attention of your audience.
This also makes people remember your brand for the next time they need to make a purchase in your industry.
4. Sit or Squat App [Charmin]
Charmin is an American toilet paper brand that really deserves its place in the best content marketing examples.
The company created an app for the customers that is called “Sit or Squat”. The app basically allows people to check if the local toilets around them are clean or not.
The idea is to know whether you are safe to sit on the public toilet or avoid potential infections and just squat over it.
Although the idea might sound pretty silly- it did its job! It got people’s attention and everybody started talking about it.
Moreover, Charmin did a whole social media campaign around this interesting app and if paid off for them.
What’s best about this app is that it addressed a real problem that people have in their daily life, and connected it to a product that is in the same lane.
This also proves that you don’t have to be a huge brand and have an enormous budget to make an interesting content marketing campaign.
As long as you address a real problem with a relevant solution, people will get interested no matter how silly the idea may sound.
5. Perceptions of perfection [Superdrug]
Superdrug is the second-largest beauty retailer in the UK, and they have a very good content marketing campaign behind them.
In 2015, the brand started the “Perceptions of Perfection Across Borders” campaign that was a masterpiece of a campaign.
Namely, they asked female graphic designers from different countries in the world to edit a photo of a woman making her “more attractive” according to their nations’ preferences.
The results were extremely interesting as the retouched photos had lots of differences depending on the country from which the graphic designer was.
The aim of this campaign was to let their customers know that perfection is a relative thing. It is something that is subjective and can vary a lot between different types of people.
This campaign spoke a lot to people because body image is a controversial and sensitive subject. The post was shared a lot for those reasons.
Another thing that helped this campaign to be as successful as it was is that, in 2015, body positivity was really starting to get lots of attention and reporters were more eager to cover stories related to this subject.
The takeaway here is to just follow what is happening in the world right now and try to include that in your content marketing campaign.
The things that are relevant in the world at one point in time can really kickstart your brand.
Also read how to improve user experience through eCommerce design here.
6. Car loan calculator [Cars.com]
Cars.com is the second-largest automotive classified site and their car loan calculator deserves a place on this list.
Cars.com decided to make an automatic loan calculator to answer the need of their customers who want to know how much exactly they would need to pay per month for their car.
You enter the price of the vehicle, the down payment, the sales tax, the length of the loan term, and other things and the calculator tells you the estimated payment.
Another genius thing is that as soon as you put the car price, underneath you will see a search box that offers you cars with the car price you put above.
If you put for example $10,000, you will be able to search cars by price up to that amount. You can choose for new or used cars, different models, makes, distance, zip code, etc.
This campaign worked because it addressed a real need that a lot of people had – to easily calculate their car payments.
7. Try before you buy [IKEA]
We are all familiar with IKEA and their products. They made an augmented reality app that allowed users to choose a product and see how it would fit in their home.
The problem that users had was that they could really see how a product would l fit in their home but only if they spent some time assembling it.
And after you did that, returning the product was even more problematic.
This was an even bigger problem for people who couldn’t visualize if some piece of furniture would fit in their homes’ style, or if the dimensions were right.
The app solved all of these problems.
Users can see more than 2000 furniture items and try them in their homes without any assembling problems.
The app was a huge success and is a very good example of creative content marketing.
It combined two things, bringing extra value to the customers and solving an existing problem that the customers were faced with.
Again, this is not a possible option for a small or medium-sized brand much less for startups.
However, it can show you what you can plan in the future, or inspire you in a completely different way.
8. BatKid campaign [Make-a-wish Foundation]
Content marketing is not only for consumer-focused brands.
Make-a-wish foundation is a non-profit organization that tries to surprise and offer unique experiences to children that are battling life-threatening diseases like cancer.
Since these types of organizations work on donations and volunteers, they still need to attract the attention of people.
The BatKid campaign was the foundation of helping a kid who was fighting leukemia and whose wish was to become Batman.
Miles’ journey was captured in a short documentary that was promoted on several channels of the foundation.
With the movie, the foundation lets people know how they help in a very emotional way.
The campaign was successful in inspiring action in many people.
The inspiration here is that it might be a good idea to involve your local customers and their stories because they are relevant in the eyes of the other customers.
Conclusion
To summarize, an inspiration for a good content marketing strategy can strike from anywhere.
But the best place to look for it is to see what your customers need, and how you can add extra value to their decisions.
Behind these successful examples of content creation, there are countless failed attempts. However, they should never hold you back from trying to create something amazing.
Whether you want to do something minimal like reorganizing the content and making it more accessible to the customers, or you are into creating something more innovative, you have to take some risk.
And again, whatever you decide to create, always keep your audience in mind!
If you liked this post check out my other brand and marketing connected posts:
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Leave a comment letting me know what topic you would like me to cover next.
