Content Marketing Examples

Content marketing is one of the biggest marketing phenomenon of our time. More and more businesses are pouring money into content in order to support their sales funnels. For many, it remains one of the best ways to attract new customers.

Getting content marketing right, however, is hard. Far too many businesses throw money into content that produces little results.

So how do you really win with content? Follow these content marketing examples to crush it with content.

1. HubSpot

When it comes to content marketing, few businesses do it better than HubSpot. As one of the biggest champions of the inbound marketing movement, content forms a core part of HubSpot’s growth strategy. It publishes a ridiculously large amount of blog posts, eBooks, slideshares and webcasts on nearly every marketing and sales topic under the sun.

A closer look at HubSpot’s content marketing examples shows that its efforts are focused across four divisions:

• Blog: HubSpot runs seven different blogs – one each for marketing, sales, web design, and its academy. It also runs two separate blogs in Spanish and German.
• Academy: The “HubSpot Academy” is the company’s central repository for user guides and how-tos to master the HubSpot software.
• Marketing Library: Every piece of content published by HubSpot that’s not a blog post ends up in the Marketing Library. This includes templates, eBooks, webinars, user guides and worksheets.
• Social Media: Social is a big customer acquisition channel for HubSpot. It publishes content on most major social networks, though it has a particularly strong presence on content-heavy platforms like LinkedIn, Slideshare and Facebook.

So does all this content actually help HubSpot?

You bet. As Mike Volpe, the company’s CMO himself says:

“I cannot emphasize enough the importance of inbound marketing in our growth”

The company went public in late 2014. It has a market cap of nearly $1.6B today with close to 800 employees in three countries around the world. It is also one of the top 1,000 websites in the world in terms of traffic.

2. Buffer

Buffer is a simple app that makes it easy to schedule updates on social media. The company was started in 2010 and has grown to over $549k in monthly revenues within five years.

So what has content got to do with Buffer’s growth?

Plenty. As Kevan Lee of Buffer readily admits:

“Early on, we gained all of our new customers from content marketing. I believe it was right near 100 percent of new users who arrived via the content marketing tactics”

Currently, Buffer maintains three separate blogs:

• Social: The company’s primary blog about social media, marketing and productivity. There are at least four new posts every week.
• Open: A blog about the company’s unique culture of transparency. There are between 2-5 new posts every month.
• Overflow: Buffer’s engineering blog. Posts are infrequent – once in 3-6 months is common.

Aggressive content marketing through guest posts helped the company go from 0 to 100,000 new customers. It’s still their primary engine for growth, and Buffer continues to pay its content creators industry-leading salaries.

3. KISSMetrics

KISSMetrics, a marketing analytics company founded by two marketers – Hiten Shah and Neil Patel – was early to jump aboard the content marketing bandwagon. It runs one of the most comprehensive content marketing machines online, publishing high quality blog posts, catchy headlines, marketing guides and infographics.

According to co-founder Neil Patel, KISSMetrics receives over 100,000 visitors every month through its blog alone. New posts are published every day and topics covered range from split testing and optimization to marketing strategies and growth hacks.

That’s not all though. KISSMetrics also publishes several in-depth marketing guides, mostly on social media, analytics and optimization.

Finally, it supplements these content marketing efforts with infographics and webinars.

4. Groove

What does a bootstrapped customer service software company do to drive growth on a tiny marketing budget?

Content marketing, of course.

Groove, a SaaS tool that helps small businesses manage customer support requests better, runs one of the internet’s favorite founder blogs. This blog shares Groove’s journey from $0 to $100K in monthly revenues (and beyond), all told from the perspective of founder Alex Turnbull.

The blog was critical in landing Groove its first customers. As Alex says, blogging has the highest ROI of all marketing tactics for the company.

Along with new customers, the blog has also helped Groove land on lists such as ‘8 best CRM blogs’ alongside HubSpot and Salesforce.

We’d say that’s pretty good company.

5. Red Bull

Remember Felix Baumgartner?

You might not remember the name, but you definitely remember the feat: on 14 October, 2012, Felix Baumgartner jumped from 24 miles in the stratosphere to Earth, making a new world record.

The entire spectacle was streamed live on YouTube as part of the Red Bull Stratos campaign. It ended up attracting tens of millions of viewers, making it a massive win for Red Bull.

This is a great reminder that content marketing isn’t just about creating blog posts and articles; it’s also about creating experiences that wow your audience. Red Bull invests heavily in video content, which has done wonders for the company’s brand. Sales in the US alone jumped 7% after the Stratos campaign.

Take notes if you’re in the B2C field – create content that your audience will love, and your brand will prosper.

6. Lifetime Fitness

Do all B2C content marketing examples have to be big budget affairs?

Not quite so, as Lifetime Fitness shows. The billion dollar fitness center company runs Experience Life, a blog and magazine dedicated to helping people eat and live better.

The magazine started out as a members-only magazine for Lifetime Fitness customers. As readership grew, it expanded online and started catering to everyone, regardless of their membership.

Today, Experience Life is one of the top 25,000 websites in the US. It’s available in print and online and adds serious value to the Lifetime Fitness brand. It’s also the perfect example of content marketing that actually enriches customers’ lives.

7. GE

Old, boring, stodgy.

These are usually some words you’d use to describe a 100 year old company that makes industrial machinery, locomotives and electrical products.

Except in GE’s case, you’d be wrong. This global behemoth absolutely crushes it on social media. It runs a beloved YouTube channel (68,000+ subscribers), one of the most popular Google+ pages (800k+ followers), and a tech-focused blog. It was also one of the first companies to take full advantage of the Vine platform (110k followers, 22M loops).

Yet another example of a big business doing content marketing absolutely right.

There’s a lot you can learn from these examples. on the road to creating your content strategy. Whether you’re running a B2B or a B2C company, investing in content pays rich dividends, regardless of your business size and stage.

What do you think? Which of these businesses has the best content marketing operations?