While advertising is still an essential part of a brand’s strategy and budget, content marketing campaigns and investments may be more vital today.
To help form your strategies and help your brand or clients succeed, we asked executives to share what they believe to be the most compelling content marketing campaigns. From B2C to B2B, here’s what they can’t stop raving about.
3 effective B2C content marketing campaign examples
When businesses sell directly to their customers, they’re considered B2C. To keep users engaged and excited about your brand, you need to create relevant, captivating, and useful content wherever they are in life.
As Joy Altimare, chief marketing officer for EHE Health, explains, strategic tactics help companies cut through the clutter to provide relevancy. “How can you reach users, or more importantly, have them actively seek out your product or company?” Altimare asks. “It’s simple: content marketing.”
Here, a few shining B2C examples of hitting the nail on the head, according to executives.
- SoFi sharing stories of how people paid off loans
- Match.com’s campaign around dating during a pandemic
- Canva’s influencer campaigns
1. SoFi sharing stories of how people paid off loans
Founder and president of Digital4Startups Reva Minkoff says personal finance company SoFi had a clever content marketing campaign that’s all too relatable to most people. How so? It was all loan payments — something the majority of Americans experience monthly.
They decided to encourage current and prospective customers to share a photo of the moment they paid off their final loan on social media to celebrate the pivotal accomplishment. Then, they would select many of these users to receive some free swag from the brand.
“I love that it’s relying on UGC, yet allowing the brand to amplify the messages. In doing so, it builds brand equity and trust, and it feels authentic,” she shares. “The people participating will be SoFi ambassadors for life. I think every financial services company should be doing programs like this.”
2. Match.com’s campaign around dating during a pandemic
Jamie Haley, founder of Haley Creative, says Match.com’s ‘Match Made In Hell’ was the B2C content campaign heard — and seen! — ‘round the world. Through a TV advertisement and supporting branded content, they profiled the moment when Satan and the year 2020 had their first date. As Haley describes, it was shot in an entertaining talk-show interview style, helping to bring to life a narrative that every single person felt as 2020 came to a close.
“It was a bold move for the brand, but I think it paid off for them in a big way because even people who had been married for decades were talking about this content,” she continues. “And while I don’t know if they saw an increase in subscriptions to the site, they most certainly differentiated themselves from the dozen other dating apps out there and made the brand extremely relevant.”
3. Canva’s influencer campaigns
Though businesses sometimes use Canva’s digital design platform, it’s also an essential tool for side hustlers who aren’t quite LLCs, Incs, or Scorps (yet). It could fall in both B2C or B2B, but for this particular campaign, B2C makes more sense, according to Altimare.
Since many one-person-shows are looking for ways to save money and be self-sufficient, you can use Canva to create beautiful, professional infographics, charts, blog images, and so on, all for free.
To illustrate this opportunity, Canva partnered with key influencers in the space to connect with customers and help them navigate their tools. Altimare says, through this content marketing campaign that was both informational and inspirational, they were able to grow and reach millions. To date, they have a $2.5 billion valuation, with a whopping 15 million users — and counting.
3 effective B2B content marketing campaign examples
Businesses need to reach one another so they can team up to improve one another’s bottom line. But how you create content for a brand-to-brand opportunity isn’t the same tactic used to reach customers.
Here, executives share three B2B campaigns that got it right:
- ShareASale’s onboarding email series
- An Iowan digital marketing agency’s virtual game show
- American Express’s resources center
1. ShareASale’s onboarding email series
Since customer retention is such a valuable part of marketing to invest in, smart brands know the importance of keeping a new user engaged from the start. And part of that can be accomplished through content campaigns. Minkoff raves about ShareASale’s onboarding series for new customers.
“They are thorough while being well-spaced out, keeping the brand top of mind, while also providing important information to their new customers,” she continues. “I expect it’s been successful for those reasons, helping onboard and retain newly-registered users.”
2. An Iowan digital marketing agency’s virtual game show
Ellen Yin, podcast host and Cubicle to CEO founder, was invited to participate as a contestant for a digital marketing agency’s virtual game show. This Iowa-based brand created a ‘Let’s Get Digital’ content marketing campaign that allows industry peers to flex their marketing chops in a fun, competitive environment. Yin thought it was innovative and creative how they were using gamification to present educational content.
“They reinvented familiar games like Taboo into challenges like ‘Jargon Hunting,’ ‘Survey Says,’ ‘Fact Check,’ and so on, to engage their audience and peers,” she continues. “I love how the format of a game show featuring their fellow marketers fosters a spirit of collaboration over competition and creates a platform for fostering deeper relationships. The game show content is innately shareable, which also draws huge brand awareness to their agency.”
3. American Express’s resources center
Though technically it’s not a ‘campaign,’ American Express’s Trends and Insights resource center is content marketing at its finest, according to Haley. As she explains, Amex has always positioned itself as a brand for business owners, and its impressive blog database proves it.
“From the ‘Office Hours’ video content, which features Q&As-with top industry entrepreneurs to articles on timely topics like taxes or cash flow management from thought leaders, this is content marketing where you’ll find relevancy regardless of what kind of business owner you are,” she shares. “And this is the reason it will continue to rank high on the best examples of brands doing content marketing correctly.”
3 effective DTC content marketing campaign examples
While B2C and direct-to-consumer (DTC) are very similar and sometimes overlap, DTC allows businesses to get in front of their userbase quickly. That’s why many influencers and brands created by influencers fall into this bucket.
They are known for producing oodles of content, and here are some campaign examples that executives recommend following:
- Jay Shetty’s storytelling-style videos
- Delta Air Lines and Coca-Cola’s Holiday Horizon partnership
- Glossier’s Beauty X Community campaign
1. Jay Shetty storytelling-style videos
Altimare says if you haven’t heard of Jay Shetty, you should. He’s an influencer who promotes positivity, the power of intention, and the purpose of setting goals and aspirations. He was able to create his personal growth lessons — including being a monk in India — to develop new, entertaining, unique, and uplifting content for others.
By consistently sharing via YouTube, Instagram, and other channels, he was picked up by Ariana Huffington and went viral. Today, he sells coaching programs to more than 2 million followers. Altimare says the secret of his content campaign was in his storytelling delivery.
“His videos leverage relatable scenarios that speak to a universal truth. That’s the hook,” she shares. “Then, he looks at the story and speaks to the moral of the story to give the viewer actionable advice. Next, he leverages an omnichannel strategy. Now, he’s everywhere.”
2. Delta Airlines and Coca-Cola’s Holiday Horizon partnership
Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines teamed together to create the Instagram account @holidayhorizons to celebrate different traditions around the globe. As Haley describes, the idea was a contest to highlight nine traditions in nine destinations and promote nine chances to win a trip around the world.
Generally speaking, Haley says content marketing campaigns that bring greater awareness to the customs and traditions around the world do more than just elevate a brand but also play a positive role in highlighting the diversity — and similarities — of cultures.
“This was a simple idea for a contest, but it played to consumers’ desire to travel. And it also acknowledges that it is okay if you’re not ready to travel yet. Plus, it gave both brands the added bonus of user-generated content that could cross over into their owned social channels.”
3. Glossier’s Beauty X Community campaign
Founded by an influencer, the beauty brand Glossier has a cult-like following — and for good reason. They have invested heavily into connecting customers to one another, and thus, building a fan base. As Altimare says, since Glossier has leveraged community to enhance its growth, their Twitter followers are advocates, helping them to spend far less on marketing than other competitors would.
“The team at Glossier built a loyal following by interacting with Twitter users in a very personal way. If you look at their typical interactions, it usually looks like two friends enthusiastic about their new beauty find, not a makeup company doing great marketing,” she continues.
“Most of Glossier’s Twitter feed consists of fan retweets, and these testimonials are priceless. Glossier seems to have maximized the value of creating a community that encourages repeat customers while capturing new advocates for the brand.”
Get high-quality content for your next content marketing campaign that will help you reach your goals. ClearVoice’s talented team of strategists, writers, editors, and more, can help you get more leads, sales, and repeat customers by handling all of your content needs. Talk to a content specialist today to get started.
