Content marketing is a new form of marketing to replace the outdated and traditional forms of marketing; consumers these days have the luxury of shutting out information and are able to tune out ads that they’re being bombarded with on a daily basis.
In the age of information, there are pros and cons as there are in everything else in life, but instead of treating cons as an obstacle, they could be treated as a challenge to be taken on.
Content marketing is a valuable marketing technique whose purpose is to attract and hold on to existing customers by always creating valuable and relevant content.
It shouldn’t be taken lightly by marketers these days, some might still think that more traditional marketing aka the four P’s (Product, price, promotion, place) is the way to go, but consumers are smarter and more aware these days and it’s time for marketers to bring their A game.
Here are some successful content marketing examples along with the 2014 trends they followed to achieve their success:
How-To Content
- Intelligentsia Coffee’s Brew Guides:
How-to content is trending these days, not to mention extremely helpful.
Intelligentsia’s brew guides provide a large variety of coffee-making tools with awesome photography and the content makes your mouth water and want a cup of their coffee as soon as possible.
- Anthropologie’s DIY drink recipes:
This is a great example of a blog with how-to content that’s main aim is not to drive sales but to help people out with fun topics and great ideas.
Their DIY drink recipes provide seasonal drink recipes with unique ingredients (e.g. coconut cooler).
Share-able Visuals:
- Beats by Dr. Dre on Instagram:
Beats’ Instagram page is awesome because it has great visuals, content of current events, short videos, behind the scenes photos of the company and of course celebrity photos wearing Beats, which is quite powerful I must say.
- Lana Del Rey’s Tumblr:
This has absolutely no complicated marketing tactics; this is simply singer Lana Del Rey’s way of promoting her new single by putting a series of GIFs captured from her new music video “West Coast”, but even if it seems effortless, it generated some positive feedback and popularity as it achieved 20,000 Tumblr notes; but another could be because Lana Del Rey has tons of fans and people wait for her to release new music.
Clever Crowd Sourcing and Curation:
- Arcade Fire’s Fan-Sourced Gallery:
Arcade Fire is a famous music band; they used a very clever content marketing technique by asking their fans to submit their own photos of the band’s Reflektor tour and in return their photos could end up on the page or on the website, this generated a lot of traffic, not to mention a lot of photos for both their Facebook page and website that they can use to promote their tour, so everybody wins.
- Intel has Content Marketing IQ:
Intel has a blog called IQ that shows sneak peeks into cutting edge design, technology, social and big date; they created a social algorithm allowing employees’ to share their content involuntarily through this algorithm, it’s a way of leveraging employees, plus an employee filter that crowd sources what they are saying and sharing and uses that as a discovery tool.
Behind-the-scenes Magic:
- Google Takes Street View Behind the Scenes:
Google uses Street View to provide imagery of almost every location around the world and now is operating in 7 continents; they are working hard to bring Street View imagery to people through Google Maps and the process they go through to bring Street View to the people; this tactic shows people how far they’ve come with technology, especially technology freaks who are interested in how Google progress.
- J.Crew’s Backstage Photoshoot Passes:
J.Crew is well known for their amazing style and photography; they decided to show viewers a sneak peek into how their photo shoots are being conducted with behind-the-scenes blog content.
A+ Brand Building:
- Whole Foods Tells the Whole Story:
Whole Foods is an exceptional brand, especially their brand, it’s known for its organization, eco-friendliness, friendliness of its employees and healthy food.
Instead of being straightforward and trying to make the hard sell, they have content that is relatable and relevant.
- GE Reports on Inspiring Technology:
Another example for great blogging is GE, where they have a separate domain for their blogs about technology on its GE Reports site.
The stories in that site has news on what’s new in tech, brilliant machines and advanced manufacturing to educate readers in current tech innovations. It has awesome images and easy to use social share buttons to widen the site’s audience.
Here are some Content Marketing tips that could be of use:
- Focus on generating high quality content.
- Make sure that your content strategy covers a wide variety of content types.
- Create strict guidelines on tone, voice, style and your core messages.
- Identify the problems in your industry, the questions people are asking and act as a valuable resource in your industry.
- Spend as much time marketing the content as you do creating the content itself.
We hope we helped you hardcore marketers out there..
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