Editor’s note: Because several more content marketing examples have been unearthed, we’ve updated this post.
You’re about to witness some of the most amazing content marketing efforts in the world. The universe of content marketing is changing, and these brands are driving that change. When it comes to innovation, power, and masterful expertise, these are the ones to watch.
But why should you watch them? So you can learn and imitate. There is still room for innovation in your industry. You may not have the massive audience of, say, IBM, but that’s no reason why you can’t take their innovative ideas and transfer them into your own vertical.
As you read through this list of the paragons of content marketing, take one or two ideas and put them into practice in your content marketing efforts today.
1. IBM – Technical and authoritative expertise
How did IBM become such a respected voice in its field? Part of the reason is its long, rich history. But another part – the part that I’m interested in – is its powerful content strategy.
To uphold the reputation of a more-than-130-year-old company, it has to produce authoritative content. Because the company is a technical one, it has to ensure that the content is technically authoritative. And because the company is trusted by millions, it has to make sure that the content is at expert level.
IBM delivers on all fronts. It’s a huge company, so it has a lot of different blogs. Here’s a sampling:
IBM works in a variety of industries, and its content reflects these broad areas. Much of its content is collected in a library of resources. These include analyst papers, education, training, case studies, data sheets, executive briefs, FAQs, systems red books, white papers, consultant reports, and just about any other technical documentation you might want.
All of IBM’s content reinforces these themes: It’s technical. It’s authoritative. It’s expert level.
What you can do about it:
If you want to create a content campaign that will compete with the biggest brands in the industry, take a page from IBM’s playbook. Trustworthy content is well written. It possesses authority. It has an expert voice. And it deals with technical information in a masterful way.
2. Hootsuite – Popular appeal
How do you make a popular product even more popular? You let it ride the coattails of something wildly successful. Hootsuite’s viral video, A Game of Social Thrones, spiraled it to heights of popularity, capitalizing on the success of Game of Thrones:
Hootsuite’s value proposition is that it “lets you do more with social media.”
This value proposition could potentially reach a huge audience. Hootsuite knows that its audience consists of people who enjoy Game of Thrones. That’s why a video like Hootsuite’s could garner nearly a million views within a few months.
Hootsuite fights serious and boring content like it’s the plague:
Although a lot of Hootsuite’s blog content deals with important topics, it does what it can to make it entertaining, too.
Part of the genius of great content is its ability to have popular appeal. Although your brand or product may be technical and specialized, you can still write content with which your audience will identify on a popular level.
What you can do about it:
Don’t be serious all the time. Create some fun, light content now and then.
3. Buffer – Social promotion
Buffer does a lot of things right. Take the blog articles. The top three of the last 12 months each averaged 2,289 words and 22 images. Each is highly authoritative. That alone is reason enough to laud Buffer.
Check out the articles’ stats:
The Ideal Length of Everything Online, Backed by Research: 2,768 words, 17 images
The Science of Emotion in Marketing: How Our Brains Decide What to Share and Whom to Trust: 1,598 words, 10 images
53+ Free Image Sources For Your Blog and Social Media Posts: 2,528 words, 40 images
Now, take a look at their social signals:
There’s something going on under the surface. Remember, Buffer is a social-sharing service. It’s not just a blog. It pioneered the generation of scheduled content for maximum visibility and shareability. Buffer is the business that told us to update Facebook at 2 p.m., retweet at 5 p.m., limit tweets to 100 characters, keep Facebook posts to 40 characters, and stick to 60 characters for Google Plus. So, of course Buffer follows its own research in creating, publishing, and promoting its content.
The Buffer articles’ social signals tell the story. The brand’s success is less about killer content (which is a requisite), and more about its highly sharpened spear tip – social strategy.
Why are Buffer’s blogs so eminently shareable on social media? There are at least five reasons. Buffer:
Doesn’t forget about killer content – A blog article is going nowhere fast unless it has the sizzle of great information.
Asks for shares – Most of the articles end with a CTA like this one:
Spreads strategically – The data-driven information on best time and length for posting actually works.
Uses subtle cues to advance social sharing – In particular, Buffer’s blog posts reinforce the sharing message by reminding readers about how many others are sharing the brand’s content.
Has social fans – Buffer speaks to an audience of social sharers – social media professionals, brand managers, and social gurus. These people click the “share” button in their sleep.
What you can do about it:
Promote the heck out of your content. Social sharing is just as valuable as creating the content itself.
4. Microsoft – The power of story
Humans are wired to listen to stories, love stories, and tell stories.
A Harvard Business Review article explains that storytelling prompts the body to produce the neurochemical oxytocin. Oxytocin is the “feel-good” hormone; it also is released when people demonstrate trust or kindness toward one another. In one study, Berkeley scientists discovered that the body produces oxytocin when exposed to character-driven stories.
If your content can prompt the body to produce oxytocin, then you know you’ve done something right.
That’s exactly what Microsoft has done. And that’s exactly why Microsoft’s content is so compelling.
Microsoft isn’t supposed to be hormonal. After all, it produces software, right? Software isn’t exactly a topic to produce gushing acts of affection or feel-good surges … or is it? Microsoft thinks that it can be, and the blog Stories proves it to be so.
Stories is just that — stories about people. This article about sportscaster Daniel Jeremiah doesn’t contain the word software. It’s a human-experience story – of triumph, challenge, redemption, and probably a good bit of oxytocin.
And then there’s this brilliant piece of content, a tear-jerking narrative with the theme of helping others.
Why does the world’s largest software company tell a bunch of stories about people?
I can think of a few good reasons. There’s one that is especially important: Stories connect people in powerful and compelling ways.
A story of a sportscaster may not cause you to go out and buy Microsoft Office, but it will stick in your mind, maybe pump some oxytocin into your system, and create a few warm-and-fuzzy feelings toward a software company.
What you can do about it:
Tell stories, and make your content about people. You need to speak as a human to other humans. In their November CCO article, Kevin Lund and Eileen Sutton explain three easy steps to speak human:
Be storied. (Sounds kind of like Microsoft’s blog, huh?)
Be humble.
Be relevant.
5. McDonald’s – Customer service through content
McDonald’s has a lot of haters. But, it more than makes up for what it lacks in quality and health with its content genius.
Jay Baer of Convince & Convert is so taken with McDonald’s content strategy that he is using it as a central component of his forthcoming book. He calls McDonald’s strategy “the best example of content marketing ever.” Coming from Jay, that’s a pretty significant statement. He goes on to claim that this “could be the start of a cultural change that impacts every business.”
What is this of which he speaks? Take a look.
McDonald’s Canada took on a campaign to answer customer questions about the food. It received a lot of questions – not all nice ones.
Why would McDonald’s take on the challenge to review 450 questions per day, and answer more than 10,000 in total? What compels McDonald’s to commit to transparency, and let the spite-filled questions linger in a public space?
It’s customer service. McDonald’s wants to answer all food questions, good or bad. It wants people to gather around this information. It wants customers to be informed. It wants customers hungry, not just for Big Macs, but for a brand that speaks truth to them.
Baer interviewed Joel Yashinksy, CMO of McDonald’s Canada. Here’s what he had to say:
If you have a good story to tell, tell it. But you have to do it in a way that’s authentic, and you have to have that conversation with the customer. You can’t just preach to the consumer these things that you know are true. You have to engage them so that they can come to learn it and believe it and build that trust with you.
That sounds to me like a pretty solid customer service plan. And McDonald’s Canada is doing it with content. Not bad.
6. Disney – Spreading magic
Disney’s most treasured asset isn’t something that you can touch, see, measure, weigh, or toggle on Google Analytics. It’s magic.
Disney sells magic in vacation packages. It promotes magic as a lifestyle. Its bus is even called the Magic Express and its cruise name is named Magic, too.
Even if you’re a stalwart and dour parent with extreme self-discipline and a scrooge-like approach to life, you aren’t immune to this Disney magic. It is like a drug. Once people taste it, they crave it. Even children who never visited its theme parks somehow know that Frozen’s Anna and Elsa are wonderfully appealing and oh-so-magical.
Disney knows that its magic is transportable. That’s what it strives to do with its content – spread the magic without spilling.
Look at its blog:
This is a helpful post. Parents, eager (or desperate) for a Valentine’s Day party to satisfy the expectations of dream-filled young ones can get some ideas, including how to make a Mickey cake and singing balloon. Disney’s content conveyed its trademark – the intangible commodity of magic.
A quick search for “magic” on the Disney blog alone brings up nearly 13,000 results.
What you can do about it:
What does your brand specialize in? It doesn’t have to be magic. Whatever it is, be the best at it. Shape all your content around a single concept, and saturate the web with top-notch content on that single theme.
7. HubSpot – Sheer quantity
HubSpot coined the term inbound marketing, which gives it an almost unfair advantage in the content marketing game. The inbound methodology turns “strangers into customers and promoters of your business,” as described by HubSpot.
So what precisely do you do to accomplish such awesome results? Content. It’s all about content. Below is HubSpot’s diagram of the inbound methodology. I put red boxes around content-focused tactics.
Image Source: http://www.hubspot.com/inbound-marketing
HubSpot explains that “inbound is about creating and sharing content with the world. By creating content specifically designed to appeal to your dream customers, inbound attracts qualified prospects to your business and keeps them coming back for more.”
HubSpot obeys its own dictum with astonishing compliance. Let me prove it.
For starters, HubSpot publishes books or guides in PDF form. They’re detailed. They’re authoritative. And there are hundreds of them freely available in HubSpot’s library.
HubSpot has more than just e-books. Its content library includes:
Marketing kits
Templates
User guides
Case studies
Webinars
Worksheets
Plus, HubSpot has video courses, too.
When it comes to topical categories, HubSpot delivers a huge array geared toward marketers:
Agencies
Analytics
Blogging
Content creation
E-commerce
Education
Email marketing
HubSpot software
Inbound marketing
Inbound sales
Lead generation
Marketing automation
Media
Mobile marketing
Nonprofit
Other
PPC
PR
SEO
Social media
Viral marketing
Website design
I could stop there, and leave you to gape at HubSpot’s overwhelming amount of content. But there’s more. HubSpot has blogs.
Each blog category includes a flood of content on a daily basis. I dipped into them on a random Monday morning. Here’s what I saw – two posts published eight minutes ago, one published an hour ago, two hours ago, three hours ago …
HubSpot doesn’t stop there. It offers hundreds of evergreen pages, product pages, review pages, informational pages, pricing tools, and an incredibly wide variety of other content.
If it weren’t so awesome, the sheer quantity would be exhausting. As it is, HubSpot is clearly winning at the content marketing game. It’s not just because it invented “inbound.” It’s because it innovated content marketing away from a one-and-done-blog concept to create a Vesuvius eruption of content.
What you can do about it:
Don’t create content just to have more content. I focused on HubSpot’s quantity, but more is not better unless that more is better. Quality matters. Produce better content before you think about producing more content.
Create more content deliberately. Drive yourself to become a productive blogger who publishes content worthy of attention.
8. GoPro – Jaw-dropping visual content
You know that you’re supposed to use visual content. It’s a best practice that everyone believes, repeats, and heeds. I’ve discovered huge traffic upticks from infographics and other visual elements.
But have you ever used visual content like this?
Image Source: https://gopro.com/channel/photo-of-the-day
GoPro does. In fact, the video camera company’s entire content strategy is built around the visuals. Its website hosts a huge library of videos. If you’re not careful, you could spend the entire day watching this stuff.
It’s pretty appealing. GoPro’s YouTube channel has 2.7 million subscribers, plus several hundred thousand subscribers to its alternate channels (World, MX, and Tutorials). On Instagram, it has 4.2 million followers, and equally retina-blasting images and videos.
This is a brand that has something to say in a very visual way.
Here’s the thing about GoPro. It doesn’t showcase its product. It’s virtually nonexistent in the brand’s content marketing efforts. Instead, GoPro focuses on its users.
It’s all about being a hero. GoPro makes a camera called the Hero, but it also turns its customers into heroes. Most of the content is created by passionate users who are, in turn, becoming public heroes.
There is power in visual content. I’ve doubled my traffic with infographics. Posts with photos get higher engagement. Visual content is powerful and shareable. It’s the perfect solution to a boring content strategy.
What you can do about it:
What’s that you say? You aren’t in a visually oriented product business? No problem. You can do visual appeal whether you make a camera or sell less-exciting software – think about how to visually tell your stories or use images to enhance your text content.
Conclusion
You can watch and learn from some of the world’s greatest content marketing efforts, learning as you go how to:
Become a technical and authoritative master of your subject.
Make your content appealing to the masses.
Share it like crazy on social media.
Tell a story and be human.
Focus on a single powerful theme.
Produce content in sufficient quantity.
Augment your content with amazing visuals.
I guarantee that if you start doing this, your content marketing will never be the same.
What are your favorite content marketing companies, and why?
See how more of the best brands on earth are conquering their content marketing challenges. Download our e-book: Get Inspired: 75 (More) Content Marketing Examples.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
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