The 7 Most Effective Content Marketing Examples

Looking for some inspiration for your content marketing campaigns? You are right where you need to be. The goal of content marketing is to attract and convert viewers into customers by using the right type of content. Constant content creation can be a perpetually exhausting journey. There are plenty of amazing content marketing examples that can provide you with inspiration for your next campaign and bring your business superb results.

Content marketing campaigns succeed when they combine compelling content with a unique creativity that can persuade visitors to act in accordance with the campaign objectives. By incorporating your creativity and using these concepts as inspiration, you will be able to create the most compelling and high-performing content marketing campaigns. Let’s understand how some of the most reputable brands set up their content marketing campaigns, which served them well in these examples below.

1. General Electric’s #GEInstaWalk Campaign

General Electric is viewed as a regular industrial company. However, their content marketing efforts made them more visually appealing and attractive to the next generation of potential stakeholders. They started an Instagram campaign that demonstrates the experience of people who use their facilities and comprehensively portrays the benefits. General Electric used six different Instagram influencers for their campaigns and included the hashtag #GEInstaWalk. They used it for different tours and encouraged the public to participate in these walkthroughs to experience using contests and events.

The images from the GE walk on social media amplified their brand visibility and brought many amazing results to their business. For starters, this campaign brought over 3.8 million unique viewers to their official Instagram account. Next, they even got over 200,000 engagements within just a few days of the launch of their campaign and gained 3,000 new Instagram followers with no paid media support at all!

Even though their campaign focused on brand awareness and visibility, it also amplified their engagement rate and other metrics. It planted the seeds of interest in the younger generations and encouraged them subtly to invest in their company. Thus, we can understand that no matter what the present public perception is about your brand, you always have the opportunity to transform it by integrating the right elements with a smart content marketing campaign.

2. GoPro’s Usage of Consumer Generated Advertising

GoPro mainly leveraged user-generated content for their content marketing campaign. The campaign of GoPro Awards included a well-crafted content strategy using user-generated content. Instead of clicking amazing pictures and videos with the GoPro themselves, they focused on using videos made by their users using their cameras and shared them on their social media. Apart from the regular users, they also collaborated with famous athletes to boost their brand awareness and gain more followers. 

Here the users who sent their videos and enrolled in the contest get a chance to win amazing prizes and rewards, which is a great source of active participation in the campaign. GoPro witnessed a massive 75% hike in their sales from year to year after this campaign, and their Youtube channel views went up by 84%, with a watch time above 140%. Currently, GoPro has over 10 million unique Youtube subscribers.

Using user-generated content is often overlooked by businesses. However, when leveraged correctly, user-generated content has a massive potential of transforming your business over time. 

3. Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” Campaign

The next content marketing campaign is an excellent example of personalization. The Share a Coke campaign from Coca-Cola in Australia added 150 most common names in their bottle. They encouraged people to purchase their bottles and share a coke with the people they love with the names. 

This campaign went viral in no time and hit a massive sale count of over 250 million bottles in Australia. They also had over 500,000 photos shared and 25 million new followers on Facebook. 

This consumer-driven advertising is simply a result of extensive knowledge about their target audience and personalization. This strategy may also work great for small businesses since you can never go wrong with personalized campaigns.

4. How Drift 138x Their Blog Traffic in Less than a Year

Businesses with blogs ideally witness two times more traffic on their websites than those that do not have a blog. Similarly, Drift leveraged blogs to bring their visitor count from 198 to 27,000 in just a few months. 

However, they had a special element for their blog campaigns. Since Drift knew blogging is not a quick scheme to gaining customers, they focused on being consistent with their content posting schedule. They consistently pushed quality content for several months and reaped a 76% hike in blog traffic from 20% of their posts.

They also focused on ample promotion of their content and included the right set of keywords to bring maximum visibility to their content. Using these strategies together, Drift gradually boosted their blog traffic and attracted a great customer base to their business over time. 

5. Dollar Shave Club’s Effective Use of Storytelling

Dollar Shave Club is one of those businesses that have achieved a great feat by selling subscription-based products wherein customers pay a flat monthly rate, and the company sends the monthly supply of their products to them. This eliminates the hassle of purchasing the products or services separately.

It started with a viral video demonstrating the quality of their blades. The creator Michael Dubin was the star of the video, and over 48 hours of the video’s release, they received over 12,000 orders! The video blew up to 26 million views in no time! 

After they understood the drill, they continued posting such hilarious video content and entertaining their audience while attracting them to their business. 

They also have a newsletter content called “The Bathroom Minutes,” which is all about grooming and hygiene of the customers. Hence, this results in a good combination of humor with education.

The importance of creating the right content tailored to your target audience is highly important. When you include your creativity in your campaigns, you can easily set your campaigns apart and make them huge in your industry.

6. SecureWorks’ Mastery of the Marketing Funnel

In case you think your business is too complex to launch such content marketing campaigns, here is an example of a cybersecurity company, SecureWorks, that also made it huge in their industry with a unique content marketing campaign. 

They focused on optimizing their content based on marketing personas and buyer journeys. Their strategy was based on understanding the questions, problems, and pain points of potential customers and creating content around it. 

Kira Mondrus, the global marketing director, started by segregating the buyer’s journey into Engage, Nurture, and Convert.

They focused on answering general queries at the beginning of the journey and made their way ahead with every possible query and pain point of their target customers. Their content was optimized for each stage of the funnel. They also leveraged different types of content in their campaigns, such as webcasts, white papers, case studies, videos, demos, podcasts, and many more. With this content marketing strategy, they witnessed a hike of 50% in their sales and closed half of their new leads. 

The key is to know your target audience to its core. When researching your target audience, emphasize learning about their interests, pain points, and potential questions and try to solve them via your content. This builds their trust in your business and makes it stand out from your competitors.

7. LeadPages Goes from Underdog to Serious Competitor

This popular landing page template provider is highly popular right now. However, it was not the same a few years ago. With such a massively competitive industry, Clay Collins, the CEO and founder of Leadpages started their journey with just 4 content creators. They developed multiple streams of content such as blogs, webinars, infographics, ebooks, marketing courses, podcasts, etc.

These channels together contributed mainly to the success of their content marketing campaigns. Their podcast “ConversionCast” gained massive popularity by enlisting the elite podcast creator Tim Paige in their team. This series of this podcast which discusses the latest marketing news and strategies, help them to stand out from their competitors real quick. 

With this content marketing strategy, they achieved over 35,000 customers in 3 years as well as a 16 million revenue. 

With only 4 content creators they could pull up, such massive success is a great inspiration. With the right strategy paired with smart and hard work, you can easily beat the best names in your industry.

Summary

There is no strict rule for creating successful content marketing campaigns. The content marketing campaigns examples mentioned above portray a blend of multiple strategies together, such as video marketing, blogs, user-generated content, podcasts, market funnel optimization, personalization, and so much more. Once you choose a specific content marketing campaign, ensure to use the right advertising strategies such as SEO, PPC, SMM, etc., to promote the campaign and make it viral. Now that you have some good inspirations for your next content marketing campaign, what are you waiting for? Kickstart the journey today and make it big in your industry!