Content marketing is one of the most important branches of digital marketing and it’s vital that you get it right. Good quality content acts as an educational tool for consumers and outlines all of the benefits of your product. A persuasive piece of content that shows customers why your product is better than all of your competitors can boost your sales in a significant way.
Content that is rich with carefully chosen keywords is an essential part of your SEO strategy. If you want to drive more traffic to your site and increase the number of qualified leads that you get, you need to master content creation.
Social media is another essential part of your digital marketing strategy, and content feeds into that as well. When you are posting on social media, you are in direct competition with all of the other companies on there. If a user is going to stop scrolling and look at your post, you have to offer them something worthwhile, like an informative or entertaining piece of content. That quality content is likely to be shared, which helps to expand your reach and boost your follower count.
Finally, content helps you to improve your company image. When you offer consumers detailed information about products, you demonstrate your expertise. This helps you to position yourself as a leader in your industry, and consumers will have more trust in your products as a result.
The problem is, content marketing can be difficult to get right because you are competing against a lot of other companies. You have to convince consumers that they should read your content over anybody else’s, and you need to ensure that you are using content in a way that benefits your business. If you are not seeing a good return on investment from your content marketing, it can be useful to look at examples of other businesses that are doing it well.
These are some of the best content marketing success stories that you can use for inspiration when designing your own campaigns.
John Deere Content Marketing Strategy
This first example is often considered the world’s first piece of content marketing. If you work in the agricultural industry, you have probably heard of The Furrow. It’s an industry magazine that was first launched in 1895, long before the concept of content marketing even existed. After its launch, it grew in popularity and today, it is read by 2 million consumers globally. When it was first launched, the aim was to help consumers deal with agricultural issues by using John Deere products. It offered consumers good advice, and also advertised products at the same time.
As the years went by, the nature of the magazine changed to keep up with content trends. The current version is far less text heavy and includes a lot of large images. It has even become a collector’s item and people often trade and buy old editions, although finding a copy of the very first issue is notoriously hard.
The very first example of content marketing is also one of the most successful, even to this day, because it performs the basic functions that all good content should. It provides consumers with valuable information and demonstrates the expertise of the company. This helps John Deere to position itself as a leader in its industry, which is vital for building trust with consumers.
Further to this, The Furrow serves as a way to advertise John Deere products to readers of the magazine. But the important difference between content and simple marketing materials is that you are offering the reader something of value at the same time, rather than simply trying to sell them a product. The Furrow has allowed John Deere to become one of the most recognizable and respected brands in its industry.
Evernote Content Marketing Strategy
Evernote is a note taking app that individuals and businesses can use to organize their work. Their product is functional, but it doesn’t offer that many opportunities for interesting content. When creating content, it’s important that you entertain and engage people while also informing them, and that is a potential problem for companies like Evernote. They could create content that outlines the different features that their software offers, but these overly technical articles are not very engaging and readers will soon become bored.
But Evernote have come up with a great solution to this problem by focusing content around customer stories. They produce great articles that show how different individuals and businesses are using their platform in new and interesting ways, and this benefits them in two ways. Firstly, it creates more interesting and engaging content that is likely to be shared on social media, and secondly, it showcases the potential of the product. As demonstrated by John Deere, purely information content can work in some industries, but Evernote’s strategy shows how you can create engaging content about a product that is not particularly exciting.
Rolex Content Marketing Strategy
Rolex is the world’s best known watch brand, but even they can benefit from content marketing. Their content is another good example of how to bypass overly technical content in favor of something more engaging, and they also demonstrate how powerful visual content can be as well.
Rolex could focus on producing articles that outline the care and attention that goes into building their watches and how the materials and expertise creates a superior product. But consumers that don’t know anything about watchmaking will not be able to relate to this at all. Instead, Rolex focus on building a social media following using visual content. Their Instagram page has over 10 million followers, and their Facebook page has over 7 million. All of these users follow the page to view the incredible, high quality photographs that they post of their watches.
This works so well because Rolex understand that people wear their watches to make a statement, and it’s all about the aesthetic. They’re expensive and showy, and their social media pages lean into that. High quality close-up photographs of the watches demonstrate this aesthetic well and the detail also shows the quality of the build.
Engagement is a vital part of content marketing, especially when posting content on social media. But users are selective about what they will comment on and share. Nobody is likely to share a technical article about the inner workings of a watch, but they are far more likely to share an impressive photograph. These images capture the attention of various different groups on social media as well. People that are interested in watches are likely to share them, and so are people that have a more general interest in fashion. The high quality nature of the images also appeals to people that are interested in photography, so this content helps Rolex to gain exposure outside of their normal demographic.
Casper Content Marketing Strategy
Casper is a relatively new pillow and mattress company that have only been operating for around 5 years, but in 2018, they generated over $400 million in revenue. Part of that is down to the product, but it was largely due to their amazing content marketing campaign that managed to get a lot of people excited about a mundane, everyday product.
The blog on their website has a lot of the typical articles that you would find to expect. They write informative posts about improving your sleeping patterns, for example, and their mattress will be advertised as part of that. But they manage to make this basic content a lot more interesting by giving it a bit of personality. It has a very tongue-in-cheek feel to it, with titles like ‘7 Reasons This Blog Post is Trying To Sell You A Mattress.’ The writing style is very informal and witty, so it injects a bit of life into an otherwise boring subject matter. It is clear that they are aiming at the younger generation because they are increasingly health conscious, and sleep is a big part of a healthy lifestyle.
But the blog is only a small part of the reason that their content marketing is so effective. The real genius is in what they are doing elsewhere. A lot of companies rely on collaborations with celebrities but you would expect somebody like Kylie Jenner to promote a makeup or fashion brand. However, Casper managed to get her, amongst other big celebrities, to post pictures on Instagram with their brand new mattresses.
They also have a strong focus on video content and they have built a large following on Youtube. Instead of posting informative videos that show diagrams of springs and foam inside a mattress, as you might expect, they have tapped into another pop culture trend that young people engage with; unboxing videos. These videos started out with tech products mainly, and people would post videos of them opening a new product and testing the features for the first time. Social media influencers often post unboxing videos of clothes or makeup that brands have sent them. But Casper were the first company to start a trend in unboxing videos for mattresses. There is a lot of enthusiasm for these unboxing videos online, and they do a lot for the brand.
Social proof is vital when trying to build a strong brand, and the best way to build it is through the testimony of other customers. Reviews are the most common way that businesses try to do this because consumers listen to the opinion of other consumers more than they would a business, and the majority of people check reviews before purchasing a product online. Reviews are still a big part of Casper’s strategy, but these unboxing videos are a more innovative way to build social proof and strengthen their brand.
Casper’s content marketing strategy is such a great example to follow because they have managed to take a product that the younger generation would not normally have any interest in, and make it appeal to them. They achieved this by experimenting with different platforms and tapping into content marketing trends that would not normally apply to their industry.
Undertaking LA Content Marketing Strategy
A funeral home is one of the most difficult businesses to market. People do not want to use those services, they do so out of necessity and the whole process is a negative one. It’s important for these companies to be delicate with their marketing because they risk downplaying the seriousness of the work that they do. Content marketing is particularly difficult because the subject matter is a sensitive one, and it’s not something that people want to read articles about.
Undertaking LA are a business in this difficult sector and they have a very different approach to content marketing for funeral homes. Caitlin Doughty has 8 years of experience in the funeral industry and she spends a lot of her time trying to change the conversation around death. In 2011, she founded the Order of the Good Death, which is a death acceptance collective, and she has written books on the subject. This has helped her to gain exposure for the business, and she has translated her ideas into a great content marketing campaign.
The Ask A Mortician Youtube channel has 911K subscribers and it’s growing fast. Caitlin posts videos where she answers questions sent in by users. There are some great informative videos on the ins and outs of being an undertaker.
For example, she has videos on what happens to artificial joints after a person is buried, or how a mortician keeps a person’s mouth closed during a funeral. Undertaking LA have managed to take a subject that nobody wants to talk about and create a hugely popular Youtube channel where they can post content that brings a lot of brand exposure. Regular series like the ‘Morbid Mystery,’ or ‘Iconic Corpse’ videos keep people coming back over and over.
These are all great examples of how content marketing can be used in innovative ways to promote brand awareness, improve SEO, and increase sales, even in the most difficult industries. If your business adopts some of these practices, you will see a vast improvement in the return on investment from your own content marketing campaigns.