Content is one of the most valuable assets in modern marketing, acting as the bridge between brands and their audience. High-quality content not only educates and engages, but also builds trust, establishes authority, and fosters meaningful connections.
But when it comes to content, staying ahead of the curve requires creativity, strategy, and a keen understanding of what truly resonates with audiences. In this blog, we’ll discuss the purpose of content marketing and explore inspiring content marketing examples that have successfully captured attention and driven real results.
Whether you’re looking to boost engagement, build brand loyalty, or increase conversions, these standout campaigns offer valuable insights into the strategies that work.
What Is Content Marketing?
Content marketing is a strategic approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and engage a clearly defined audience.
Instead of directly promoting a brand or product, content marketing aims to provide information or entertainment that resonates with the audience’s interests, needs, and challenges. The goal is to build trust, foster relationships, and ultimately drive profitable customer actions, such as making a purchase or becoming a loyal brand advocate.
Whether through blogs, videos, social media posts, or email newsletters, content marketing helps businesses connect with their audience in a more meaningful and impactful way. It is also an opportunity to position your brand and business as a trusted authority in the space, and consequently, the logical go-to solution for their problem.
In the next section, we will cover the different types of content your business can create and distribute to win your customers over.
Types of Content Marketing
While blogs and videos are usually the first to come to mind for distributing knowledge and information, there are many other types of content marketing formats. Content can come in many forms: text, visual, interactive, and PDF or document-based content.
Here are some common content marketing formats and how you can strategically use each type.
Blog Posts
Well-crafted blog posts can establish a brand as a thought leader, enhance SEO by increasing visibility in search engines, and provide ongoing opportunities for customer interaction. Beyond driving traffic to a website, blogs help build trust by consistently delivering valuable and relevant content to readers.
They also serve as a hub for storytelling, brand messaging, and addressing customer pain points, making them a key tool for nurturing leads, generating conversions, and fostering long-term brand loyalty.
Perhaps one of the most important aspects of blogging is this: you can host all your blog content on an asset that belongs to you. What that means is your blog lives on your website–something you own and can control completely. You have full ownership and only you can choose to remove or delete it.
Check out this post from Ahrefs on popular types of blog posts you can bring into your blogging rotation.
Videos
As our attention spans only continue to get shorter, video content is becoming an even more prevalent content format due to its ability to quickly grab the user’s attention and provide an immersive experience for the audience.
Video content is visually engaging and easily shareable–these qualities make it easier for content to go viral, which drives significant brand recognition. YouTube is a leading platform for longer video content, but social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are also popular channels to distribute brand video content on.
Nach Angaben von Sprout Social, here are the best-performing video lengths for each social media platform:
- Facebook: 2 to 5 minutes
- Instagram: 26 seconds
- Twitter: 15 seconds or less
- LinkedIn: under 30 seconds
- YouTube: 10 minutes at minimum
However, virality shouldn’t be the end goal of video content marketing. Rather, focus on providing customers with an informational experience that captures their attention and provides value.
Newsletters
Similar to blogs, newsletters are a great way to consistently provide valuable content to your audience. They deliver news and information to your subscribers’ inboxes, and can come in a few different styles: journalistic reporting, analytical bulletin, curated newsletter, artistic perspective, hybrid models, etc.
Newsletters are a unique content marketing tool because they offer a direct line of communication with your customers, via their email, and are a great way to distribute other content, such as blog posts, to get more eyes on them.
They also offer instant content marketing insights as email marketing tools like Mailchimp or Klaviyo can provide hard numbers on how many people on your list:
- Opened your email
- Clicked on your links
- Converted
- Unsubscribed
These illuminating insights can help you better cater your content to your target audience and make your next newsletter campaign better than the last. Check out how marketing expert Kate Bourgoin’s tips for finding success through a newsletter.
Podcasts
Podcasts are like radio programs, but they’re pre-recorded sessions for those on the go, allowing listeners to pause, fast-forward, rewind, and skip to sections as desired.
They can be educational audio programs, such as an exclusive interview with a subject matter expert (SME), where the host asks questions and gathers information on behalf of the audience. The host can also treat the podcast like an informal lesson, being the one to deliver valuable knowledge to listeners. Or, podcasts can provide a form of entertainment, such as in narrative episodes, using storytelling to provide an immersive experience for the audience.
Podcasts can be a great content marketing tool for brands to provide valuable knowledge or a valuable experience to listeners, but they require a commendable effort to produce. If you can keep a consistent production of podcast episodes, this channel can be a great opportunity to build a loyal audience.
Social Media Posts
Last but not least, social media posts are a common form of content marketing that brands rely on heavily because of the sheer number of users on these platforms. A recent article published in the Search Engine Journal shared the following social media statistics:
- There are 4.8 billion social media users worldwide (and counting).
- The average social media user uses six different social media networks every month.
- People spend an average of 2 hours and 24 minutes on social media, daily.
Imagine the reach and impact your brand could have if you could put your content in front of even a small fraction of the daily social media users worldwide. You can learn more about how to use social media marketing to achieve your business goals with Hubspot’s informative guide here.
Successful Content Marketing Examples From Popular Brands
Let’s look at a few content marketing case studies from successful brands to understand what strategies they used for their successful content marketing campaigns.
Duolingo
Duolingo is a great example of a brand that successfully garnered the attention of millions of social media users online through its content marketing. Its social media approach was a radical breakthrough in traditional social media marketing.
For the first time, a brand showed that content marketing doesn’t have to be professional and boring to attract users. In fact, it did the complete opposite. Duolingo’s social media content provides entertainment in the form of trendy and relatable content, while boosting brand awareness.
With nearly three million followers on Instagram and 12 million followers on TikTok, Duolingo’s social media content marketing strategy is peculiar, but undeniably effective.
Red Bull
Red Bull’s infamous tagline is: “Red Bull gives you wings.” The brand took this tagline almost literally and created a unique, adrenaline-filled content marketing strategy based around extreme sports–events where athletes are often mid-air and undertaking challenging jumps, dives, and more.
Red Bull’s Extreme Sports content comes in the form of videos, documentaries, and social media posts. Those watching the point of view of the athlete performing these stunts feel the adrenaline rush and anxiety inside.
This content is a form of entertainment for the audience, as well as a source of inspiration for those watching–not to perform the very stunts, but to challenge conventional ideas of human potential.
With on-brand content and a network of brand ambassadors that each have their own loyal followings, Red Bull has dominated the food and beverage industry, clocking in just under 13 million followers on TikTok and just over 22 million followers on Instagram.
Coca-Cola
Coca-Cola’s Share-A-Coke campaign might just be one of the most successful content marketing campaigns in history. This campaign sold over 250 million bottles and cans of Coke in Australia, a nation with under 23 million people, in one summer. This campaign went on to be replicated in over 70 different countries. So, what made it so successful?
The Share-A-Coke campaign connected the brand with consumers in a truly unprecedented way. Coca-Cola personalized each Coke bottle and can with 150 of the most common names in Australia. Consumers who found their names on bottles were overjoyed and, they’d go looking for bottles for their family and friends, prompting a viral hashtag trend on social media: #ShareACoke.
Coca-Cola’s Share-A-Coke campaign featured product personalization, making customers feel seen and valued. It also leveraged the power of social media content marketing, collecting user-generated content for marketing, and encouraging new brand ambassadors of regular consumers, who helped increase brand awareness on behalf of Coca-Cola.
Tips to Create a Powerful Content Marketing Strategy
Crafting an effective strategy requires more than just producing quality content—it involves thoughtful planning, understanding your audience, and consistently measuring your results.
Let’s dive into actionable tips and best practices to help you create a content marketing strategy that not only engages but drives real results for your business. Whether you’re starting from scratch or refining your current approach, these insights will guide you toward success.
Create Content People Really Want
In 2012, the Content Marketing Institute created an infographic on the 21 types of content that really resonate with people. A decade later, even with the rise of different content marketing formats, many of those content marketing examples still hold true.
As a business owner looking to leverage the best content marketing practices, here are some content marketing examples from that list that may help you better connect with your audience:
- Content that tells a story: Why did you start your business? How did you get started? What obstacles did you encounter on the way?
- Content that reveals secrets: Show your audience the behind-the-scenes of your work or share an industry misconception and provide a solution.
- Content that inspires us to action: Show how customers can use your product in their daily lives.
- Content that makes us cry: Share a powerful story of a client who was struggling immensely before they worked with you—how has their life improved because of your services?
- Content that educates while entertaining us: A conversational skit that educates the audience on a topic while providing a form of entertainment.
- Content that takes us along a journey: Tell a story–what’s a customer interaction that you remember and why?
If you study successful content marketing campaigns by other well-known brands, you can see how brands leverage these different content types to execute a well-rounded content marketing strategy.
Check out the list for yourself and see how you can adapt each prompt, for the content you create for your business.
Include All Phases of the Content Marketing Funnel
The content marketing funnel is based on developing content that caters to which stage your customers are on the marketing funnel (awareness, consideration, conversion, loyalty). In content marketing, you’ll often hear:
- Top-of-Funnel (or “TOFU”)
- Middle-of-Funnel (or “MOFU”)
- Bottom-of-Funnel (or “BOFU”)
Top-of-funnel content is dedicated to those in the awareness and interest phase. Your potential customers are not familiar with your brand yet. The best content marketing examples for the TOFU phase are informational blog posts, simple infographics, paid social advertisements, influencer marketing, and more.
Middle-of-funnel content encourages potential customers to consider your products, services, or offers. This is where you show them why, amongst their other choices, you are the sensible solution. The best content marketing examples for the MOFU phase are educational blog posts, landing pages, social media posts, product guides, and case studies.
Bottom-of-funnel content encourages the conversion or sale. Your potential customers now fully understand their problem and how you are the answer to their prayers. Content marketing examples that can push them over the line include social proof content, testimonials, customer success stories, and emails conveying urgency.
Ultimately, when you’re building out your content marketing strategy, make sure you plan for content that hits all the different phases of the content marketing funnel. Your content should educate, entertain, inspire, and sell. How much of your content should be dedicated to each, is up to you.
Nurture Customer Relationships to Build Lifelong Fans
As we’ve seen in the content marketing examples we explored in this guide, content marketing isn’t about what you can take from your customers. It’s about what you can give to them. Providing valuable content or a valuable experience for your customers cultivates positive interactions between your business and the people who keep you running.
Another way to nurture relationships with your customers–especially new ones–is to use personalized marketing. Oppizi’s hand-to-hand flyer and leaflet distribution ensures that you get started on the right foot–or the right hand. Ready to build lifelong fans for your business? Launch your campaign with us today!
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