15 Great Content Marketing Examples You Can Use for Your Business
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Running content marketing campaigns for your brand can feel like a constant uphill struggle.
With so many new platforms, ideas, and tools popping up, working out what works best for your business is hard.
Some brands, however, manage to combine all of the best bits of content marketing to create campaigns that are vibrant, engaging, and, most importantly, convert a vast number of customers.
Our team of experts has searched the internet for some of the best content marketing examples to help inspire you. From big-budget bonanzas to small but mighty campaigns, we’ve featured an array of ideas to help you get started on your content marketing journey.
What is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach that centers around the creation and distribution of creative and engaging content to your target audience.
This content can be anything from blog posts to infographics, eBooks, or videos. Content marketing focuses on content that’s valuable to users – it usually combines various existing marketing platforms, including social media, email marketing, and your website.
Content marketing pyramids and strategies can help brands with an array of key objectives, such as improved SEO performance, an increase in social media followers, and driving more website traffic.
Find Out More
Learn more about what makes a good content marketing strategy and how to create yours in our full guide: What Is Content Marketing
15 Great Content Marketing Examples
Below you’ll find 15 of our favorite content marketing examples to help inspire your own content marketing strategy and campaigns.
Spotify Wrapped
Spotify Wrapped is a great example of a data-driven campaign that manages to make data exciting, engaging, and valuable to users.
Launched back in 2017, Spotify Wrapped provides users with key stats about their listening behavior from the past year. User data can often be overwhelming and boring, but Spotify cleverly presents the facts and figures in an engaging and shareable way.
The campaign was so successful that it’s now an annual event, with Spotify users eagerly awaiting the launch every year. One of the things that make it so successful is the shareable nature of the campaign.
Spotify presents users with slides to share on their own social media channels, helping to spread the word. This shareable nature also creates a sense of FOMO (that’s “fear of missing out” if you’re not down with the kids), encouraging people to sign up to the platform so that they’ll also get a Spotify Wrapped breakdown.
The shareability of the campaign has led to it trending on social media every year since it launched.
Canva’s Design School
Online design tool Canva launched its Design School as a way of providing value to users.
The design school provides users with tips, tricks, and lessons on how to create various designs and image types using the platform.
Users can “enroll” in a design course and undertake lessons in their own time. The campaign successfully showcases some of the platform’s key features to users and ensures users are getting the most out of the tool.
Canva markets itself to beginners and design novices, so the addition of a design school is a great example of content marketing that aligns with a brand’s mission and value offering.
Coca-Cola: Share a Coke
Coca-Cola’s Share a Coke campaign is the perfect example of a personalized campaign that got everyone talking.
The brand took the iconic bottles and switched up the branding, replacing the Coca-Cola name with common names from across Australia. From Daniel to Deborah, personalized coke bottles were hitting the shelves and everyone was desperate to find their name.
The campaign soon spread worldwide and was an instant success. Why? Because the addition of your name to a coke bottle made customers feel special. Seeing your name on such iconic branding is sure to get people talking.
Coca-Cola relied on word of mouth and the excitement of seeing your name on a bottle for this campaign – and it worked.
Hootsuite: A Game of Social Thrones
Social media management platform Hootsuite created a great content marketing campaign with its Game of Social Thrones video.
Imitating the opening credits of the hit show Game of Thrones and timed to launch at the start of a highly-anticipated new season, the video put a social media spin on the famous theme.
The video went down a treat and ended up going viral and doing exactly what Hootsuite wanted, educating people about the platform.
Let’s be honest, a social media management tool isn’t exactly the most fun or engaging product to market, but this clever campaign allowed the brand to target a whole new segment of users who would enjoy the Game of Thrones-style content.
The key takeaway from the success of the video is the importance of having fun. Not taking yourself too seriously will always go down well with potential customers.
Apple: Shot on an iPhone
Apple’s Shot on an iPhone campaign was aimed at showcasing how good the camera on the new iPhone 13 was.
Customers were encouraged to take a photograph using the new phone camera and share it on social media using the hashtag #ShotOnAniPhone. Apple and 10 professional photographers then judged the photos and selected a group of winning images.
This campaign was a great way of encouraging user-generated content as well as showcasing the quality of the latest Apple product.
By asking normal people to take the images, it added a sense of reliability to the brand’s claims, and the social sharing factor helped to create an online buzz, sparking social conversations.
Mailchimp: All in a Day’s Work
Mailchimp may be a CRM system but that doesn’t mean the brand doesn’t need to run its own content marketing campaigns too.
The All in a Day’s Work campaign was centered around a series of stop-motion videos themed around the daily trials and tribulations of small businesses… and how Mailchimp could help.
This was a great way of showcasing the value the brand could provide to users and also reiterating the fact that the brand understands its audience and their needs.
Moz’s Topic Clusters
A topic cluster is a common SEO and content marketing tool that brands use to show Google and users that their content is relevant and structurally organized in a clear and easy-to-follow way.
One of the best examples of a topic cluster is Moz. The SEO software tool created a “Beginners Guide to Content Marketing” page on its website.
This guide features a list of useful content and links to other, relevant content marketing articles on the Moz website.
This is a great way of clustering your content together, making it easy for both users and search engines to journey through your content, providing value to users and ranking signals to search engine bots.
Airbnb: Design Personality
Short-term rental company Airbnb created a design personality quiz in collaboration with interior specialists Domino.
Users answer a series of brief questions about the areas of their property they want to spruce up and the quiz will present them with expert tips from Domino. They’ll also then be directed to more content from Domino, as well as bespoke property suggestions from the Airbnb website.
Quizzes are fun, engaging, and interactive and this is a great example of using one to direct users further on their journey and open them up to other content on the website that they may usually have missed.
The New York Times: Wordle
Back at the start of 2022, everyone was playing Wordle. Morning commutes were full of people trying to beat their high scores and couples were battling it out to see who could guess the word the quickest.
Bought by The New York Times, Wordle is an online game where users have to guess a five-letter word within six guesses.
While the game may not seem to be marketing, it’s a clever tactic to drive more traffic to The New York Times website.
In April 2022, the webpage received over 10 million organic views – traffic that the brand could have only dreamt of before.
Wordle is a great example of creating something simple and engaging that can catch the attention of users, as well as the sheer power of word-of-mouth storytelling.
Google Web Stories
Google Web Stories are the web-based version of Instagram or Facebook stories.
Creators can place their content online and get it seen by a wide audience by uploading it to the backend of a website.
Focused on video content, Google Web Stories are used to portray individuals or brands as experts on a topic, driving traffic to their websites.
Google is continuing to evolve by showcasing video results for search queries, and its web stories tool is a great way of encouraging users to create content that the search giants can utilize.
MINDBODY Education Content Hub
MINDBODY is a SaaS company that provides business management services.
To collect all of its content and resources in one place, the brand created an online education content hub.
Categorized by industry, this hub is full of webinars, blog posts, and events to help businesses of all shapes and sizes.
The MINDBODY content hub is a great example of a brand collecting all of its content together in one place to provide value to users.
The content and resources will help users to reach their own business goals, subsequently creating a sense of trust and brand loyalty toward MINDBODY.
Old Spice: The Man Your Man Could Smell Like
Old Spice is a brand that’s been around for years but, unfortunately for the business, this meant that its brand image was often seen as old-fashioned and out of date.
Enter a content marketing campaign! The Man Your Man Could Smell Like campaign totally revitalized the Old Spice image and online presence. Younger men were featured in more modern scenarios, and some of the videos didn’t even mention the Old Spice name at all.
Old Spice used this content to become relevant to a new generation, inserting fun and excitement into the brand, which is an approach it still uses today.
Warby Parker’s Email Marketing
Eyewear brand Warby Parker is a great example of a brand utilizing emails for its content marketing.
The brand showcases its eyewear lines via vibrant, eye-catching, and engaging emails that land directly in the inboxes of customers.
Within its emails, the brand cleverly makes product suggestions and links specific products to the time of the year, such as summer vacations.
This is a great example of creating content around your existing product line and incorporating it into your email marketing strategy.
Colgate’s Research Page
If you’ve been creating content for a while then chances are you’ll have lots of pages of useful content that you want to direct users to.
One of the best ways to showcase your masses of content is by creating a dedicated page that directs users to different topics.
Toothpaste brand Colgate does this particularly well via its research page. Here users will find links to all manner of topics, including over 1,200 pieces of content dedicated to gum disease alone!
To prevent users from having to sift through all 1,200 articles to find what they’re looking for, the resource page breaks down the topic into subsections, such as “what are the stages of gum disease” with summary content and links to further reading.
LinkedIn’s eBooks
LinkedIn may be a platform utilized in other brands’ content marketing strategies, but the platform also undertakes its own content marketing too.
The networking platform launched an eBook detailing its own experience of using LinkedIn as a marketing tool. That’s right, they literally wrote content about using their own services.
The brand enhanced this clever idea by setting up a landing page to download the eBook from, featuring stats and insights to whet the appetites of potential readers and encourage downloads.
Following its initial “Secret Sauce” eBook, the platform has since gone on to launch more focused content on different marketing tips.
This is a great example of putting your money where your mouth is when it comes to content marketing. The best value you can give users is intel on how to get the most out of your services – and who better to tell them than you?
Content Marketing Examples: Summary
So there we have it! 15 examples of content marketing that we think are exciting, engaging, and inspiring for brands of all shapes and sizes.
The digital world of today is fast-paced and always changing, which means brands need to constantly keep an ear to the ground and find new ways to communicate with customers.
Content marketing is a great way of offering users value that can help to convert them into returning customers time and time again. Now that you’ve explored all 15 of the examples in this article, you can consider what you’ll take away from each one to inspire your own content marketing work.
And, if you feel inspired after reading this article, why not take a look at our digital marketing tips and ecommerce content marketing strategies too?
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