11 Amazing Content Marketing Examples and Ideas For Your Next Campaign
Dominic Tarn
Head of Content
05.03.2020
Probably, the most difficult part of any content marketing strategy is generating new ideas for promotion. What methods should be used to attract and retain visitors, ultimately turning them into customers?
The specifics of your business, your customers, as well as leading brands from your and other industries, can give you a lot of content marketing tips if you are ready to take them.
In this article, I decided to help with your task and compiled a list of the best content marketing cases that you can reuse, repurpose and retry for your business.
Content Marketing Examples That Will Bring Your Results to a New Level
So, let’s get started with the best content marketing examples that leading brands have already implemented and confirmed their efficiency.
1. Share Your Values With Your Subscribers in Social Networks
The time when customers make purchasing decisions based solely on price and quality are long over. Yes, these are certainly important factors, however, the universal values of your company, your business ethics, and environmental friendliness of your production are more important than ever.
It is definitely necessary to transmit these values to your users and social networks are the best place to do this. Remember your values and think about how you can tell your customers about them on social networks.
Let’s look at one of the social media content marketing examples created by Airbnb. They came up with the #WeAccept campaign, which told users across the world that our differences are conventional.
Regardless of skin color, race, gender, religion, lifestyle or education, we are all just people with equal rights. Equality of people, rights, and opportunities are one of Airbnb’s values – everyone can rent a home anywhere and from any user.
Pro-tip! If you can connect your values with a specific hype topic at the moment (ecology, abortion, women’s rights), be sure that this will provoke a strong wave of discussions – and around your brand as well, as it was with Airbnb.
2. Educate Your Users and Take Care of Them
Educational content on your site is always a good idea. However, you need to do this in an original way. Let’s analyze one of the following content marketing examples.
Worldwide Breast Cancer has launched the KnowYourLemons educational content campaign. Its main goal was to draw the attention of users to the problem of breast cancer, as well as to their health by describing and visualizing the disturbing symptoms that may be the reason for going to the doctor.
The campaign found a positive response among the target audience – and as planned, attracted the attention of people to this problem.
Pro-tip! Pay attention to the visual part of this campaign and use it in your content ideas. Here lemons are symbols – each lemon is an analog of the female breast. Sometimes it’s not necessary to portray things as they are — a good analogy or symbol can convey the essence of a marketing message very well.
3. Target the Right People by Speaking Their Language Online
The moment you start talking to users in their language, any marketing strategy will succeed.
Do you want an unexpected content marketing example? Okay, this is a social media hiring campaign launched by the British army. The goal of the campaign is to attract millennials to their ranks.
They wrapped one of the characteristics of this generation (love of selfies) in attractive marketing packaging – and did not call it not egocentricity, but self-confidence.
Pro-tip! Try to address one of the characteristics of your users this way. Moreover, this idea is suitable not only for hiring but also for establishing contact with a new foreign target audience.
4. Use the Phenomenon and Power of Influence
Influence marketing is a strong trend, and it is definitely worth using it.
Olay cooperated immediately with nine influencers from one niche, and gave users very valuable material, showing that the brand understands their problems, authoritative personalities understand their problems, and there is a way to deal with their problems.
It is not surprising that the campaign was called #FaceAnything, plus they used a branded hashtag #MeToo so that users are as involved as possible.
Pro-tip! In fact, working with a large number of very famous personalities cannot be cheap, so if you have a small business, you should start by finding one influencer who solves the same user problems as you or at least shares your values.
5. Create a List of Life Hacks, Tips, Tricks and Things to Avoid
Most often, users look for information in the “how-to” format – they want to get an action plan. I suggest that you continue to develop this idea, to not go the most standard way, but still create valuable content in the end. Here is a content idea you can reuse for your business.
Recently, Eat This, Not That published an article – 40 Drinks You Should Never Drink After 40. This is a good example of things to avoid, plus – pay attention to their title.
They use numbers – and numbers in titles work better.
They hit a clearly identified user segment – people after 40.
Pro-tip! Add a shock element to your blog post. The example that we just looked at refers to drinking yogurt – a product that everyone finds useful, but that you don’t need to consume after 40. Most importantly, do not forget to back up your shock statement with research or statistics.
6. Come up With Intrigue or Hint at a Secret Nobody Should Miss
A secret or intrigue is a classic marketing approach that works at the expense of a sense of human curiosity (just like feelings of scarcity and urgency). And you can use this as one of the content marketing tips as well, and the scope of this idea is limitless.
For example, let’s take a look at LinkedIn. It released an e-book with the intriguing title The Secret Souce and explained how they use Linkedin to market LinkedIn. Unexpectedly, right?
Pro-tip! Use this bait in the mold for lead generation. Fueled by a sense of curiosity, potential customers will be more willing to leave their phone number and email address.
7. Repurpose the Content Already Published on Your Blog
Best content marketing cases do not always imply that you should create something new. Sometimes it is enough to update and repurpose the material you already have.
And here is one of the easiest but the most striking content marketing examples when the already published material was converted into a different format and reused. Copyblogger just turned their article “The 3-Step Journey of a Remarkable Piece of Content” into a Slide-Share presentation and got 84k views to date.
Pro-tip! Guides and how-tos can be transformed into a whiteboard video, research and statistics into infographics, article series into ebooks.
8. Choose or Create the Images That Sell to Boost Your Visual Marketing Campaign
Visual material is a mandatory component of any content marketing strategy, and sometimes it can even be singled out in a separate approach. Regardless of whether you will use your images in your blog or a guest blog, on social networks or street banners, they should sell.
The visual content marketing tips actually deserve a separate article, but I will try to say the most important thing and look at the Nikon example.
What function does this image advertise? Right, it’s a face recognition feature. The whole point is that you need images that will convey a marketing message without words.
Pro-tip! Create images that show people who are like your users and tell stories – then your marketing message will resonate correctly.
9. Showcase the Life of Your Company From the Inside
The whole truth is that people want to buy from people (and by the way, influence marketing is also based on this), but now we will talk about something else. Your users want to know what is going on inside the company they choose and the best way to show it is to shoot a backstage video. Want more content marketing ideas?
Here is Vistaprint work and life environment video. There is nothing innovative and complicated about it – but your customers may see your employees, your spaces and your work style from the inside, without a thousand words.
Pro tip! Tell the stories and show your culture – here are more good youtube marketing ideas you may be inspired by.
10. Empower Your Videos With Subtitles
An unexpected turn, isn’t it? In fact, such a simple thing as transcribing your clip is really capable of taking your video marketing strategy to a new level for a number of reasons.
Users show the best behavioral factors due to the fact that they can read the content of the video – which means they spend more time on your page.
Users get the opportunity to watch your video anywhere, for example in public transport and without earphones – which means you get more coverage.
Users who are unable to hear can also enjoy your video without any problems, which means that you express your indifference to certain categories of your potential clients.
Do you remember we talked about values? The last point is about this as well.
Pro-tip! Embed your video with some keywords for better searchability, visibility, and optimization.
11. Turn Your Guest or Blog Post Upside Down
This is a bold content marketing idea, however, with this approach, you will be able to:
provoke user curiosity
increase their engagement.
Moreover, this approach works equally well for both content ideas for your blog and guest blogs.
Let’s look at an example. Here is an ultimate guide on the worst ways to research a paper. Humor is a key element in this case, plus this content can also be perceived as educational, that is, as a list of things that are not worth doing.
Pro-tip! How to do it? Find a problem – Find a way to exacerbate this problem – Make a list of things one needs to do – Employ a bit of humor – Explain to users how to do it right.
Conclusion
In this article, I’ve collected the most inspirational and adaptive content marketing ideas. There is no need to repeat them exactly as I described. Use them as a creative pool to brainstorm your own creative approaches, and of course, always take the expectations of your target audience into account.
And what are your favorite content marketing examples and ideas? Share your insights with our community!
