I’ve been learning a lot about content marketing lately. Content marketing is all about creating compelling content, in all different forms, to get people engaged and interested, without directly promoting a product or brand. (If you want to learn more, I recommend checking out Content Marketing Institute.)
There are a lot of great examples of very different companies doing content marketing. Below are a few.
Travel Quiz
Orbitz for Business has created a travel quiz, “Is Your Travel Partner A Perfect Match?” It’s a personalized quiz that, according to Media Shower,“targets corporations that book travel for their employees since the company offers business travel booking services. The quiz is designed to introduce corporations to the service and essentially steal people away from their current travel partners.”
There are pros and cons to creating interactive content, according to Content Marketing Institute, so keep those in mind when you’re creating this type of content. (For example, it’s engaging and can give you insightful information about your audience, but it can be expensive and time-consuming to make.)
Playlist
Honey Nut Cheerios has a Spotify playlist, according to Media Shower. On Spotify, when the Honey Nut Cheerios ad pops up, there’s an option to get a “feel good playlist.” You can choose from a list of feel good messages, such as“Spread Some Good Around,” and you get a playlist where each letter from the message you chose is represented by a song.
360 Degree Videos
At least two countries have created interactive videos to try and attract more tourists: Australia and Switzerland. Australia’s videos let you click around and be your own travel guide in the video. And Switzerland’s videos let you have a choose your adventure experience, where you choose from a few options periodically to have a unique experience (for example, in one video you can choose to see Switzerland in summer or winter). These kinds of videos can be expensive, so Media Shower recommends a more cost-efficient way to share with people via infographics.
Maps
The map example I found, fear and happiness in historic London, as mapped by Stanford researchers, isn’t necessarily content marketing, but I do think maps can be a great way to share information and get people engaged. For example, you could map out where famous writers worked and lived in a particular city, or key locations in a city from a particular book. Going back to the Stanford example, the map the researchers created “illustrates the ways 18th- and 19th-century British novels associate feelings with various parts of England’s capital.”
Delivering a Positive Experience
If you decide to go the content marketing route, you need a way to track your content and evaluate how well it works, and then improve where you can. In other words, you need a content strategy. Content Marketing Institute has a post about the success of FedEx. Basically, they used an ABLE problem-solving method (Assess, Build, Launch, Evaluate).
Have any examples of innovative content marketing? Please share in the comments!
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in October 2017.