Whether you’re new to content marketing or need to revitalize your efforts, checking out content marketing strategy examples is great for finding inspiration. Take a note from successful B2C and B2B brands to see how they’re using content to attract and engage their audience. Pick out the elements that work best and apply them to your own strategy — let’s get started!
Content Marketing Overview
Before we jump into strategy examples, it’s helpful to understand what is content marketing. It’s a powerful inbound marketing strategy that increases brand awareness, builds relationships, improves search engine optimization (SEO), and more.
Types
‘Content’ refers to written, visual, and interactive formats. Here are some popular types of content:
Videos
- Blog posts
- Social media
- Newsletters
- Infographics
- Webinars
- Templates
- Case studies
- White papers
- Podcasts
- Ebooks
- User-generated content
- Memes
- GIFs
- Interactive content (e.g. augmented reality)
- Tools (e.g. calculator)
Your strategy doesn’t need to include every type of content to be effective. In fact, it’s better to focus on creating a few high-quality pieces over a lot of low-quality pieces.
Benefits
Similar to SEO, it can take a while to see the fruits of your labor when it comes to content marketing. It’s well worth the wait though! Benefits of content marketing include:
- Increasing website traffic
- Increasing time spent on the website
- Improving search ranking positions
- Generating conversions
- Increasing brand awareness
- Establishing expertise
- Building brand trust
How long it takes to experience these benefits vary, but the more you keep up with content marketing, the easier it’ll be to achieve its rewards.
Strategy
An effective strategy explains the “why” for creating content, who you’re helping, and how you’ll help them. Although a strategy will look different for each business, there are common elements that content marketing strategies share.
- Research: Examine your audience, keywords, competitors, and market to inform and guide the planning process.
- Goals: Clearly define your objectives to clarify ideas, improve productivity, and track progress. Goals also help your team be on the same page.
- Audit: Look at your past and current content to find out what has and hasn’t worked for your business. Update or re-purpose popular content to save money.
- Budget: Set a budget for creation, publication, distribution, and analytics. Sticking to a budget will improve your ROI.
- Plan: Generate content ideas like topics and types. Then, create a content calendar to stay on track with your strategy.
- Measure: State how you’ll measure the results of your content marketing. Analytics is best for obtaining real data for developing and reviewing your strategy.
Your strategy doesn’t have to look slick to work. What matters is that it provides insights, objectives, and actionable steps to execute your strategy.
4 Noteworthy Content Marketing Strategies
There are a lot of brands producing great content it would be impossible to list them all! Here are four noteworthy strategies to inspire your content marketing.
Canva
Canva is an online tool that allows you to easily create beautiful designs for websites, social media, and more. What makes Canva’s strategy stand out is their comprehensive Design School filled with courses, tutorials, and events to help users get more out of their tools.
HubSpot
HubSpot offers a variety of software products for marketing, sales, and customer service. Their robust Resources section is impressive on its own, but what elevates their content marketing to the next level is the HubSpot Academy that has courses and certification as well as their wide array of free tools like Make My Persona and Blog Ideas Generator.
L’Oreal Paris
L’Oreal Paris is one of the biggest beauty brands, but that doesn’t mean they’re resting on name recognition to engage consumers. In 2020, L’Oreal Paris launched the first digital makeup line called “Signature Faces” which are augmented reality filters that users can access via Snapcam, Snapchat, Instagram, and Google Duo. Talk about interactive and cutting-edge!
TED
TED is a nonprofit that began as a conference for technology, entertainment, and design (TED). They’ve evolved from conferences to a global community. What makes TED’s strategy unique is it demonstrates the power of repurposing and curating content. TED Talks get turned into videos, podcasts, blog posts, and books, allowing people from around the world to join the conversation.
Provide Value with Your Content
Creating content for the sake of content won’t deliver the kind of results you want. As the examples demonstrated, content must provide value to attract and engage a target audience. It’s essential that your strategy is clear on how your content helps customers. Partnering with a digital marketing agency is an excellent way to elevate your strategy with a fresh perspective and expertise.
Contact Mavericks Marketing today to set up a call to explore content marketing solutions to disrupt your industry!
