Content marketing is known as one of the most powerful ways for brands to engage with audiences. The Content Marketing Institute says 70% of brands are creating more content than they did one year ago. This means more marketers are starting to plan their content strategies in advance, as opposed to just shooting from the hip every day on social media. But this doesn’t mean the quantity of digital content will determine your success. Quality is still key.
Several successful brands around the world have used creative content to realize their marketing potential. Here are five leading brands that have crushed it with content marketing in recent years.
Marriott
This global hotel giant is stealing the spotlight in both the travel and marketing sectors with the launch of Marriott Global Creative and Content Marketing Studio. In a Q&A session with Media Planet, David Beebe, Marriott’s VP of global creative and content marketing said:
“We try to create real value with our content, and to entertain and inform rather than trying to sell something. That’s why we launched this content studio — to develop informative, entertaining content. Our strategy has been to stop interrupting what consumers are interested in and to instead become what they are interested in. Creative storytelling allows us to do that.”
The success of Marriott’s content studio became evident in the two short films it produced. The videos, titled “Two Bellmen” and “French Kiss”, pulled in over 5 million views on YouTube. The brand also launched Marriott Traveler, a digital magazine that offers tips for both leisure and business travelers. The e-mag contributed more than 7,200 Marriott room bookings in its first ninety days.
GoPro
GoPro is one of the world’s most versatile action cameras that lets users capture and record precious moments in life. If you take a peek at GoPro’s social media, namely Instagram and YouTube, you’ll be wowed by a series of awe-inspiring clips captured on GoPro cameras.
The clips showcase a plethora of extreme sports alongside various heartwarming micro-moments from people’s lives. GoPro takes a transformative approach, subtly suggesting your life can be this way too, if only you commit to it. This, in turn, creates strong engagement with the audience.
With the use of stellar video clips, GoPro has gained more than 7.9 million Instagram followers, and 3.6 million subscribers on YouTube. The brand was was voted Marketer of the Year by the Fisher Association of Marketing Professionals.
McDonald’s
To fight the perception of its food as unhealthy, the world’s largest fast food chain launched a bold and creative marketing campaign called “Our Food, Your Questions” in Canada. Essentially, the site lets visitors ask any kind of questions they want about McDonald’s food production. This encompasses everything from where the firm sources its meat to why hamburgers look different in advertising than they do in real life.
A series of videos was released via the company’s YouTube channel to support the answers. The campaign has been followed widely in Australia and the United States. To date, thousands of questions have been answered via the website and McDonald’s YouTube videos have garnered millions of impressions. The campaign succeeded in earning more trust from the public, but also took something potentially harmful to the brand’s image, and flipped it to work in McDonald’s favor.
Lenovo
Lenovo is one of the largest tech companies to take a bold and creative content marketing approach. The company understood the editorial value craved by IT enthusiasts and the importance of audience engagement.
Lenovo’s Think Progress is an insightful editorial website with eight different portals in seven major languages (English, French, Danish, German, Dutch, Italian and Spanish). The media aims to deliver value to the audience by exploring tech trends and publishing insights from industry experts. The campaign was recently nominated as the best content marketing execution of the year by Content Marketing Awards. King Content, the official agency behind Lenovo’s Think Progress, claimed that the brand was able to increase the value of its sales leads by 63% as result.
Coca-Cola
It’s fair to say that Coca-Cola has full awareness of how content marketing is developing as an industry. In the firm’s Content 2020 campaign (a collection of video documentaries explaining the importance of content in the future), Coca-Cola says it is now moving from “creative excellence” to “content excellence.” This campaign focuses on social media, real-time experiences, and short online videos to tell real stories.
The most notable action of the campaign so far has been the “Coca-Cola Journey,” a new corporate website with inspiring stories and informative news. The “Share a Coke” project features personalized bottles and cans with common first names of people on them. To date, the campaign has generated 45 million conversations and received 3 billion impressions on social media. The brand’s sales volume in North America grew by 5% post-campaign. The campaign started in 2013 in the UK, but it is still going strong today, with final results due by 2020.
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