4 Examples of Brilliant Content Marketing and Why They Work

Now more than ever, consumers don’t want to feel like they’re being “sold to”. They’re tired of being interrupted by impersonal, aggressive promotion ads. It’s no secret that traditional marketing tactics are becoming less effective. Fortunately, adopting a content marketing strategy can enable your business to attract customers, increase engagement, and win conversions.

As defined by the Content Marketing Institute: “Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”

It’s time to take your marketing to the next level. Keep reading for 4 important rules of content marketing, illustrated with expert examples.

1. Create content that provides value to your audience. 

The crux of content marketing is that it must be valuable to your audience. Valuable is a pretty vague term but that’s by design. “Valuable” means something different for every customer, brand, industry, and even content platform. This is why the most important step in developing a content marketing strategy is getting to know your customers. After all, you can’t know what they’ll find valuable if you don’t even know who “they” are. 

In my last blog, I wrote about the process of developing buyer personas, these semi-fictional profiles of your ideal customers will come in very handy for your content marketing. Your buyer personas will help you determine everything from what topics your content should cover to what formats/platforms you should use to disseminate that content. 

Not only should you create content targeted at each of your buyer personas, but you should also tailor-make content for each phase of the buyers’ journey. A great content marketing strategy holds the customer’s hand all the way through recognizing a problem, considering their options, making a purchase decision, and then using that purchase to solve their problem. 

For an example of content marketing that delivers amazing value to its audience, look no further than Nike Training Club. 

Nike has used what it knows about its customers to create something valuable to them; an app that provides hundreds of free at-home workouts, educational articles, recipes, and more. Staying true to the slogan, Nike offers free guidance on how to “Just Do It”. 

Now, if you were to begin your fitness journey with the Nike Training Club app and eventually decided that you’d benefit from a new pair of sneakers, which brand would be at the top of your list? Probably Nike. 

This content marketing is especially successful because it provides value to buyers at every stage of their journey. The app is a great resource for both fitness beginners that haven’t purchased a single piece of equipment and avid Nike collectors looking for more ways to use their gear. 

2. Be consistent (don’t join the blog graveyard).

If you’re looking for a one-and-done scheme, content marketing might not be the best strategy for your business. Creating and sharing content on a regular basis is essential to building your credibility, increasing brand awareness, and establishing an ongoing relationship with your customers. 

You’ve probably heard that it takes seven exposures to an advertiser’s message for a prospect to take action. Consistently sharing content will allow you to get those precious exposures. Regular posting will also allow you to generate more content, broadening the range of topics covered, and thus expanding the variety of customers you’re able to attract. 

Consistency is key to becoming a trusted advisor and reliable course of information for your audience. It can be daunting to step on the content creation hamster wheel but, making a content calendar can help. 

When it comes to consistent, sustained content marketing, AARP is a gold-star student.

The lobbying group concentrates on issues affecting adults over the age of 50, it also boasts a membership of almost 40 million and the nation’s top two most circulated publications. 

AARP made its foray into publishing almost 70 years ago in 1958, and has been publishing AARP Magazine (in its current form) six times a year since 2002. Cementing itself  as an evergreen source of lifestyle content for the 50+ demographic. Print may be dead in the eyes of many digital marketers but AARP demonstrates the value of consistency and knowing your customer’s media habits. 

3. Showcase your unique voice and personality.

Your content shouldn’t be a sales pitch, so it’s important to evoke your brand by creating content that relays the values and personality of your brand. While traditional marketing talks at customers, content marketing talks to them. When your content is written in your brand’s voice and targeted to customer wants and needs, it’s much easier for them to emotionally connect with your brand. That connection creates brand preference and loyalty. 

One brand that’s mastered this skill is Duolingo.

Duolingo manages to pull off a sassy, unhinged, corporate Tik Tok presence where so many other brands have tried and failed spectacularly. Duolingo is successful with this strategy because it makes sense for the product and feels authentic to the brand. The Duolingo app is positioned as a fun, engaging way to learn a language in the digital age so, it only makes sense that its content is fun, engaging, and demonstrates its tech savvy-ness.

Now, if you’ve downloaded Duolingo, you’re probably familiar with the incessant, vaguely threatening reminders to complete your daily lesson. When Duolingo saw the flurry of memes concerning these reminders, the brand embraced it and made the giant green owl character a little bit unhinged on social media. That decision has served the company very well but, it’d be a disastrous decision for most other companies. Focus on finding your brand’s voice and creating content that feels authentic.

4. Don’t be pushy.

Your content marketing should provide value to customers in a manner that both supports your business objectives and avoids a hard sales pitch. Any value you provide can be quickly undercut by overt promotion, the sales pitch hidden in your helpful article looks like a conflict of interest and is more likely to drive readers away than win a sale. However, this doesn’t mean that content marketing can’t steer customers to your products, quite the opposite, it just requires a bit more creativity and finesse. 

Take, for example, Michelin. Yes, like the tires AND the stars.

Over 120 years ago, the French tire manufacturer Michelin first published the “Michelin Guide”. When the guide was published, driving a car was still viewed as a novelty. The guide was a catalog of French restaurants, hotels, and gas stations, created to encourage customers to view the car as a practical form of transportation for driving between those restaurants and hotels. A few years later, Michelin began reviewing fine dining restaurants and adopted the now famous 3-star rating scale. 

Although many Americans aren’t aware that Michelin Stars are handed out by a tire manufacturer, the connection is well-known in its native France. Either way, no one can deny that demand for tires has skyrocketed since the introduction of the Michelin Guide in the year 1900.