7 Content Marketing Examples That’ll Inspire You (2021)

Want some great content marketing examples? An example or two (or seven) from the pros you can admire and emulate? Read on.

Content marketing is one of the best marketing channels to make all of your other marketing efforts more effective.

Develop and execute on a strong content marketing strategy, and you can reap benefits such as:

• Email subscribers and leads;
• Conversions and sales;
• Free traffic and backlinks;
• Brand awareness.

In this post, you’ll see seven content marketing examples from some of the best content marketers in the world.

If you’re working on your content strategy and want some inspiration, take a page out of these content marketing books.

1. LeadPages’ Conversion Marketing Webinars

Does this sound too good to be true?

A type of content that:

• Has a high conversion rate;
• Can be repurposed into other pieces of content;
• Generates leads and email subscribers;
• Helps you build a relationship with your audience;
• Increases customer retention.

It’s not too good to be true. This type of content exists: it’s called a webinar, and it can be your secret content marketing weapon.

LeadPages incorporated video content in the form of a free Email List Building webinar into their content marketing strategy to educate, engage, and introduce their target audience to the LeadPages product.

Participants register to attend the webinar with their email address, helping LeadPages collect relevant, engaged leads.

The webinar content demonstrates the strategies being taught in the training using the LeadPages product, and there is an offer on the webinar replay page for 20% off the product:

This helps LeadPages convert the webinar attendees into customers.

Why I love this campaign

Webinars are an essential part of any content marketing strategy because they check multiple marketing boxes.

This webinar enables LeadPages to:

• Record the webinar and offer it on their website as a lead magnet to build their email list and expand their email marketing efforts;
• Use the webinar participant’s questions to inform future webinar and content topics;
• Post the webinar in full or part to YouTube to build up their video audience;
• Slice and dice the webinar content into shareable snippets and post them on social media;
• Publish the audio from the webinar to a podcast.

Webinars are a versatile and powerful audience-building, content marketing tool.

How this campaign can inspire your own

Use this campaign as inspiration to plan your own webinar to collect email subscribers, engage with your audience and increase conversions.

To choose a webinar topic that’ll resonate, consider what challenge your product or service helps your audience overcome.

If nothing jumps to mind, use Google Analytics to inform your topic by finding out what existing content your audience comes to your site for.

Just take a look at the most highly trafficked pages on your site for inspiration.

For example, my blog’s most highly trafficked pages are ones about how to start an Etsy shop or how to start, set up, and choose a domain name for a website.

I might consider doing an interactive webinar that walks my audience through the process of either of those tasks.

What do your analytics tell you?

2. Sumo’s Essential Growth Hacks Guide

Sometimes, you develop a piece of content that can benefit all stages of the customer journey, from the awareness stage all the way down to the retention stage.

This content marketing campaign is one of those.

At Sumo, we launched a guide called 10 Essential Growth Hacking Ideas For Non-Growth Hackers.

The guide goes over growth hacking ideas which is highly relevant to Sumo’s audience.

It also uses Sumo’s product to illustrate how to execute the ideas in the guide, which expanded brand awareness and helped us convert readers into customers.

Why I love this campaign

I love this campaign because it was effective for so many different metrics and pain points. It:

• Attracted Sumo’s target audience. The content in the guide is relevant to anybody looking to grow their websites, which is Sumo’s target audience. The people seeking the information in this post were prime leads for Sumo.
• Increased our email subscribers. The bonus material in this content marketing campaign was a Website Optimization Checklist, a resource that our audience was hungry for.
• Drove conversions and activations. Because we used Sumo’s app as an example of how to execute the strategies in the guide, it introduced our audience to the product, and drove conversions and activations.
• Improved customer retention. Customer retention is one of the most important metrics, and with any app or tool, the biggest hurdle to retaining a customer is the customer not using it properly. Sumo was no exception, and this content campaign helped to educate our existing customers about what is possible within the app.

How this campaign can inspire your own

To create a piece of content like this for your own business, choose a topic that’s relevant to your target audience. Use your product or service as an example to illustrate your points within your content.

Make sure your content is relevant to your audience even if they aren’t a customer of yours (yet). This will keep those still in the awareness stage engaged.

3. Smart Blogger’s Beginner Blogging Guide

A pillar of any content marketing strategy is comprehensive pieces of cornerstone content that guide your audience through a topic relevant to your product or services.

To build authority in your niche, generate awareness, build your email list and nurture your leads, take a page from Smart Blogger and create a go-to resource guide.

Why I love this campaign

Smart Blogger’s How to Start a Blog resource guide is a one-stop shop, establishing Smart Blogger as the authority on starting a blog.

It provides a comprehensive resource to anybody looking to start a blog, even if they don’t know anything about blogging or SEO, and walks them through every step of the process.

Readers don’t need to leave the page, and it accomplishes all of the benefits of content marketing.

It incorporates:

• Affiliate marketing. Many of the links in the resource guide are affiliate links, driving revenue for Smart Blogger.
• Email list incentives. This campaign incorporates calls to action to sign up for Smart Blogger’s email list to receive an incentive. This serves to grow Smart Blogger’s email subscriber base.
• Engagement. This guide helps users navigate Smart Blogger’s site by linking to relevant content to further educate the visitor.
• Lead nurturing. This resource guide can be considered a “top of funnel” piece of content, which means that it drives awareness and engages the target audience at the beginning of their customer journey. Many of the visitors will start their own blog using the guide, some continuing to educate themselves on how to run a successful blog. Many of the serious bloggers will seek information on monetizing their blogs, freelance writing, or content marketing. Smart Blogger’s products include courses and communities covering all of these topics, and this resource guide engages these potential customers early in their journey to nurture those leads toward enrolling in a course.

How this campaign can inspire your own

To create your first ultimate resource guide, consider the basics of your niche. Where must your target audience start to continue down the path to your products or services? What is the awareness stage?

For example, if you sell photography courses, perhaps your target audience starts by seeking a good beginner DSLR camera.

You could create a resource guide covering how to choose the right camera for you, types of cameras and their respective skill level, what to look for in a camera, most popular camera brands and their price points, pros and cons and basic camera functions.

You can then collect leads and nurture those new photographers into participating in your courses.

4. Wine Folly’s Wine Pairing Infographic

65% of the human population are thought to be visual learners.

Even if you don’t consider yourself a visual learner, research suggests that you’re more likely to recall and memorize information if it’s presented visually, and visual information is processed by the brain 60,000x faster than text.

Pair that with the fact that visual content is shared more readily on virtually all social media platforms and you’d be remiss not to incorporate visuals like infographics into your content marketing strategy.

This is what Wine Folly did with their Wine & Cheese Pairing Infographic.

Why I love this campaign

Wine Folly’s wine pairing infographic is the perfect visual content marketing example because it can be repurposed into many other pieces of content for each platform to amplify reach.

This high-quality infographic has been posted to social media and it’s been shared thousands of times between Facebook and Pinterest alone.

The marketers at Wine Folly have broken the infographic up into smaller infographics to accompany their blog post about the same topic:

They also repurposed the infographic into a product in and of itself — a poster.

This infographic, and the smaller infographics developed from it, can be repurposed into a slide deck, a downloadable PDF,  a blog post, social media posts, and even an explainer video for ad creative.

How this campaign can inspire your own

Almost every niche has a topic that would benefit from visual content. The best infographics visually communicate the problem that your product solves.

Because infographics distill potentially complex information into simple visuals, consider your elevator pitch when thinking of an infographic topic.

If you had to describe what you offer in under a minute, what information would you include? That crucial information should make it into your visual content.

For example, we created an infographic to educate our audience on the health impacts of flying for my company FLIGHTFŪD, because our flagship product helps reduce those effects:

We then were able to repurpose the same content into:

• Explainer prints to send in the package of each order
• A page on our website
• Facebook ad creative that brings in a 220% ROI:

Creating an infographic may seem daunting if you’re not an Adobe Illustrator wiz, but visual content doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated.

If you have a budget to spend on marketing collateral, consider finding a graphic designer to create your infographic, or create templates for your business.

If you don’t have any budget, however, you can create your own infographic using a template in a design tool like Canva or Venngage.

5. Sephora’s Hair & Makeup Tutorial Videos

When you think of content, do you automatically think of articles and blog posts?

Written content is certainly the most popular content type, but as we’ve seen in this post, content marketing spans audio, visual, and in this case, video content.

Sephora had a unique and undoubtedly effective approach to content marketing, using a series of Instagram Story videos to tutorial a product.

The final couple of frames include a Swipe Up to Shop link for the products in the tutorial.

This campaign uses influencer marketing as well as content marketing to extend the reach of both Sephora and the influencer, and get the content into more hands.

Why I love this campaign

This content marketing campaign is excellent for two reasons. It:

1. Leverages several marketing channels. This campaign pairs influencer, social media, and content marketing together to work triple duty. The model in the video is an influencer with over 6 million Instagram followers, the founder of the product featured in the tutorial, and the perfect person to be creating the content for Sephora’s tutorial. She can share it with her own audience, driving sales and followers to her partners at Sephora, and to create the style in the tutorial, the hair product is recommended.
2. Can be republished and repurposed. This video tutorial series can be modified and repurposed into several pieces of content with different KPIs depending on the platform. This video can be repurposed into a Facebook or Instagram ad, YouTube video tutorial, TikTok video, blog post, and more.

This campaign undoubtedly works harder for the marketing team at Sephora and the featured brand.

How this campaign can inspire your own

When planning your next tutorial or how-to content campaign, consider whether you can incorporate other valuable marketing channels into the campaign.

Can you partner with an influencer to record a video series or take photos to walk through the steps?

Perhaps you can team up with a digital marketing brand that targets the same audience as your business to launch a co-marketing campaign that’ll extend both of your reach.

After the piece of high-quality content is published, consider how you might repurpose that content into campaigns for other platforms to make the piece work harder for you.

6. CheapCaribbean & Darling Escapes’ Co-Marketing Campaign

If you haven’t dipped your toes into content marketing yet, it may seem daunting.

What if you spend your time and energy ideating, creating, and publishing a piece of content that gets no traffic, shares, or comments?

You can solve for this by teaming up with a blogger or influencer who already reaches your target audience to develop a co-marketing content campaign like CheapCaribbean.com did with the popular travel blog Darling Escapes.

The two sites teamed up to create a Dominican Republic travel guide. Published on Darling Escapes, the guide has enjoyed over 6,000 shares on social media:

The guide was able to reach Darling Escapes audience which may not have been aware of CheapCaribbean prior to the partnership.

Why I love this campaign

This campaign is brilliant because it introduces the sponsor company (CheapCaribbean) to a sizable portion of their target audience by getting in front of them via influencer marketing.

Darling Escapes has nearly 200,000 followers on Instagram, mostly made up of female travelers.

CheapCaribbean reduced their risk of investing time and energy into publishing content that wouldn’t get the attention it deserved by teaming up with this influential blog to create the campaign.

The two sites were also able to pool their resources to create a series of content marketing collateral, including photography, article content, and a video.

How this campaign can inspire your own

Use this campaign to inspire your own by developing content with a blogger or brand in your niche that reaches the audience you’re targeting.

Many bloggers with large audiences will require a sponsorship fee. If you have even a small budget for content development, this can be an extremely effective way to spend it.

If you don’t have a marketing budget, start with approaching smaller or “up and coming” influencers to develop a co-marketing campaign that can be beneficial to both of you.

Perhaps there’s another large or small business in your niche that offers a complimentary product or service that wants to reach your audience, too.

Team up with them to create content that you can both use to introduce your brands to a broader audience.

7. Dave Asprey’s Bulletproof Radio Podcast

Dave Asprey, the CEO and founder of the health supplement company, Bulletproof, took a unique spin on content marketing when he launched his podcast, Bulletproof Radio.

The podcast covers the “biohacking” topics that Bulletproof’s target market is hungry for, and delivers it to them in the format that they’re most likely to consume: audio.

Why I love this campaign

While audio content such as podcasts, audiobooks and radio aren’t as widely used as other content formats, they can be a powerful tool for building both brands and relationships.

Being that podcast listeners hear the voices of the hosts regularly, and they listen to them talk about topics they’re interested in regularly, listeners begin to feel as if they personally know the host, even if they’ve never come close to meeting in person.

Podcasting, therefore, can be a secret weapon to amassing a cult-like following, or even just capturing your 1,000 true fans.

Your podcast subscribers become sort of like your email list: they’re there when you launch a new product, listening when you gush about your Black Friday sale, or just hearing you talk naturally about your business in the natural flow of your episodes.

How this campaign can inspire your own

Unlike with written, visual, and video content, you don’t have to give audio content your undivided attention to consume it.

As a marketer, this helps you provide an accessible, digestible way of consuming content because your audience can listen when commuting, working out, or doing their dishes.

You don’t have to have hundreds of episodes and thousands of iTunes reviews to make podcasting a worthwhile content marketing format.

Use podcasting to supplement and support your written, video, and visual content and to introduce your brand and product to those members of your target audience who prefer to listen to their content.

Are You Ready to Level Up Your Content Marketing?

I’ve just given you seven epic examples of content marketing to help inspire your own content. And in these examples, you’ve learned some valuable insights:

• Not a writer? Try your hand at infographics or visual content.
• Audio-junkie audience? Meet them where they are with a podcast or audiobook.
• Running out of ideas for resource guides? Spin your existing guides into webinar content.

With very few exceptions, content marketing works for every business.

As you can see from these examples, content marketing isn’t just publishing the occasional blog post.

It’s a strategic discipline of educating your target audience that checks the box at every single stage of the buyer’s journey.

So choose the content marketing example that resonates with you the most, and get to creating.

The post 7 Content Marketing Examples That’ll Inspire You (2021) appeared first on Smart Blogger.