Must-see content marketing strategy examples to inspire your marketing strategy

To be successful at content marketing, your first task is to create a content marketing strategy.

Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to gain more leads and customers. But there's one problem: content marketing is a lot of work.  

For example, consider a study by Zazzle Media. In this study, 60% of companies say they find it difficult to produce content consistently while 65% find it hard to produce engaging content.  

There's a solution though. To be successful at content marketing, your first task is to create a content marketing strategy.  

In your content marketing strategy, you have details such as: 

• Marketing goals 
• Ideal audience  
• Marketing channels 
• Content frequency 
• How to measure results 

Once you have your content marketing strategy, you need to start creating content to help you achieve your content marketing goals. Here are some must-see content marketing strategy examples to help inspire you and give you ideas of what directions you can take with your strategy: 

1. HubSpot

When it comes to content marketing strategy, HubSpot is one of the most successful companies at implementing it. The Inbound marketing company offers detailed content at every stage of its sales funnel to convert more leads.  

These stages include: 

• Attracting 
• Converting 
• Closing 
• Delighting 

Apart from the detailed content on its marketing and sales blog, HubSpot also uses other content marketing strategies such as reports, e-books, lead magnets, etc.  

Through the use of content marketing, the company has risen to become a multi-billion-dollar company over the years – and yes, content marketing has been a large part of that success. They used content to become true thought leaders in their niche and become known as the go-to source for marketing and sales content.  

Plus, they’re taking over search engine searches as well; chances are, any Google search involving marketing and sales topics will results in at least one Hubspot post.   

2. Buffer

With over 1.5 million visits to their blog, Buffer receives a huge number of visits. But what's their secret? It turns out the secret is open to most marketers.  

In a blog post, Alfred Lua says this result was achieved due to 3 strategies: 

• Understanding their audience 
• Planning and publishing consistently 
• Promoting their content 

Added to this, Buffer used guest posts as a content marketing strategy at the beginning of the company. Co-founder, Leo Widrich, wrote 150 guest posts in 9 months which led to an increase in their user base from zero to 100,000.  

What’s more, Buffer are all about transparency and they use that in their content marketing strategy as well: they want you to know that their content is always genuine and honest, helping establish them as thought leaders.  

3. Mixpanel

One vital part of your content marketing is landing pages because they're critical to acquiring leads. On your landing pages, you use content to promote an offer and a viewer submits their details to claim that offer.  

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Apart from your landing page content, another way to use content on your landing page is to promote a lead magnet. This is a piece of content that's relevant to your audience and solves an immediate problem for them.  

Here’s Mixpanel's landing page offering a lead magnet: 

As an analytics company, it's obvious that this lead magnet is relevant to their ideal prospects and can enlighten them about the benefits of using an analytics tool. Mixpanel often use this strategy to help them generate as many leads as possible.  

4. McDonald's Question Time

Often, big companies find it easy to attract negative perceptions of dissatisfied customers. It's a continuous effort to shape customers’ perception of your business.  

And this is what McDonald's did with the "Question Time" page. McDonald's Canada decided to answer any question their customers might have about the brand.  

During this campaign, the company answered about 10,000 questions from its customers. Showing transparency like this can help to build trust and a better reputation – and this is a constant struggle for McDonalds, who are consistently criticized; however, by leveraging content to be more transparent, they can work on their reputation.   

5. Tourism Queensland

While marketing your business, it's great to create valuable content. But you don't have to always do the heavy lifting. What if your customers could create content for your content marketing campaign? 

This is what you get through user-generated content. Furthermore, user-generated content can have a highly positive effect on consumer’s their buying decision.  

For instance, bazaarvoice found that user-generated content has an impact on the buying decision of 84% of millennials and 70% of boomers.  

In their content marketing campaign to build brand awareness, Tourism Queensland told its followers to create video applications for the best job in the world. The campaign went viral and 35,000 people created video applications.  

Through this, Tourism Queensland had 8.4 million unique website visits, 55 million page views, and $368m in media coverage.  

6. IKEA

Your content strategy should always aim to be relevant to your audience's needs. Because without that, it's difficult to get positive results.  

Augmented reality (and virtual reality) is a technology growing in popularity as it provides a new way of consuming content. For a brand like IKEA, augmented reality can help customers test products even before paying for them.  

Through their augmented reality app, buyers can see how a piece of furniture will fit into their homes before they make the buying decision. This app became popular and got over 8.5 million downloads.  

7. GoPro

Over the years, visuals have become a vital part of content marketing – images, videos, live streaming, etc.  

And as a manufacturer of action cameras, it's no surprise that GoPro favours visual content marketing. The company uses mostly visuals on its website as this type of content is suitable for their audience.  

Plus, they get to promote their products through each video posted. 

8. Zillow Porchlight

Zillow has personas like renters, agents, and homeowners who need to be satisfied. In light of this, the company's blog, Porchlight provides pieces of content to satisfy these personas.  

Generally, the ultimate aim is to help users find their next home. To achieve this, the blog features authoritative guest contributors and publishes posts consistently every week.  

For businesses that serve more than a single ideal customer, you need to create different types of content personalized to those personas.  

9. Airbnb Guidebooks

A large number of Airbnb users are guests in new cities and countries. In other words, tourists. The Airbnb Guidebooks provide pieces of content that tourists can view when visiting a particular location.  

Tourists get ideas from locals about tourist attractions to visit and what to avoid.  

By creating these pieces of content, Airbnb makes traveling fun and also attracts more people to use its service.  

10. Superdrug

Creating a report on interesting topics to your audience will always attract their attention. And this is what Superdrug did when the company asked 18 graphic designers to build an ideal model in their country.  

After creating the report, Superdrug promoted it through publishing placements and social media. The post was published on BuzzFeed and Huffington Post. Consequently, it went viral.  

As a result, the post was published in other big publications and even endorsed by celebrities. Amazingly, the company got 700,000 views within five days of this promotion.  

Over time, the study got 1 million social shares and 3 million views.  

If you want to boost brand awareness, going viral is possible – but you need to think outside the box and try unique, interesting ideas that people will actually want to share.  

Conclusion 

As you can see, there are so many different ways to go about your content marketing strategy. First, though, you need to consider your objectives; once you know what you want to achieve, you can come up with a strategy to support those goals.  

If you need some help coming up with ideas on how to reach those goals? Just use these examples as inspiration to help get you started.