Remarkable content marketing is able to inspire us to reach out and try for newfound levels of success, through powerful storytelling and the kind of compelling and relevant information that provides best-answer results.
Here are five recent examples of how this kind of remarkable content marketing wins minds, hearts, and wallets — utilizing tactics that are memorable, well-targeted, and helpful.
#1 — Sigstr’s Customer-Fueled E-book
Email marketing platform Sigstr prominently incorporated some of its brand customers into a fashion-styled e-book for a recent campaign, a unique twist on a tried-and-true format that garnered the campaign the first-ever B2B Choice Award at B2B Marketing Exchange’s eighth-annual Killer Content Awards — The Finnys — in addition to the event’s customer lifecycle marketing award.
This type of customer-centric content showcases a fun take on a traditional format, leveraging it to boost engagement with potential customers. An interview with two of the people behind the Sigstr campaign, Brad Beutler and Justin Keller, shows how the campaign unfolded.
Only four days after launching the campaign, the e-book quickly topped Sigstr’s view count records for both e-books and case studies, and led more than 50 percent of asset visitors to explore additional Sigstr content, including over 25 percent of traffic sourced from the issue’s selected customers sharing the resource with their social media networks.
Creating a great customer experience from the very beginning takes skill, time, and effort, and our own Joshua Nite has taken a dedicated look at the process, in “How Marketers Can Improve the Customer Experience (And Why They Should Want To).”
Every touch point with a customer or potential customer is an opportunity to enhance the #customerexperience. It’s everyone’s responsibility. - @NiteWrites says to #marketers everywhere Share on XBuilding memorable and strong customer experiences is also an important part of successful marketing, and customer service and experience expert Shep Hyken presented his insight on the subject at Social Media Marketing World, and our own Anne Leuman was there to cover his fascinating session, in “How to Use Customer Service as a Marketing Opportunity With Shep Hyken.”
“Even though you compete with your competition, your customers compare you to the best service they ever received from anyone.” @hyken Share on XView the Sigstr campaign here.
#2 — Oracle’s Influencer Marketing Campaign
Multinational technology company Oracle* built a pilot influencer marketing program featuring blog stories from five internal and seven external influencers, to both expand its thought leadership efforts and build new influencer relationships.
The program was successful in numerous areas, and went on to win top influencer campaign at the 2019 Finnys, using cohesive storytelling and a “Benchmark Yourself” element, to subtly tie-in to certain Oracle engineered systems products.
“B2B tech marketers’ adoption of influencer marketing is expected to grow to 48% by the end of 2019.” @marketingcharts Share on XCombining internal experts with well-known external thought leaders brought the Oracle campaign over 2,000 social media engagements, more than 134,000 social impressions, and over 4,300 combined blog views.
Building strong B2B influencer relationships is a subject near and dear to our hearts at TopRank Marketing, and driving success using influencer marketing is the subject of several of our recent helpful articles, including the following three:
- 7 Top B2B Influencer Marketing Trends for 2020, by our CEO Lee Odden
- Sowing the Seeds of Success: 3 Elements of Strong B2B Influencer Relationships by Caitlin Burgess
- 5 Essential Questions to Guide Your B2B Influencer Marketing Strategy, by Ashley Zeckman
View the Oracle campaign here.
#3 — Adobe’s Creative Cloud Multi-Touch Campaign
Adobe* Creative Cloud partnered with the International Design Association (IDA) in a multi-touch campaign that created a series of global one-day events highlighting “diversity and inclusion in design” to unite the design community.
Search-optimized blog posts accompanied hundreds of events which took place worldwide and heavily utilized videos, photos, and quotes from the people behind the content. The campaign showed the power of partnerships, as cross-promotion from the IDA drove massive reach and amplified the varied content through social efforts.
Cutting edge B2B influencer marketing focuses on both online and offline engagements. @konstanze Share on XCollaborative marketing efforts make sense in many situations, and our team has examined best-practices from the basic how-to’s through the sutler nuances of collaboration with both individuals and businesses, and here are three recent articles exploring the practice:
- The Future (& Present) of Marketing: Collaboration, Technology & Innovation, by Ashley Zeckman, featuring insight from Jeanniey Mullen, former CMO of Mercer and Vince Walden, Partner at Ernst and Young
- Inspiring Examples of B2B Influencer Marketing in Action, by Lee Odden
- How to Intertwine Online & Offline Tactics to Cultivate B2B Influencer Relationships, by Caitlin Burgess
View the Adobe Creative Cloud campaign here.
#4 — PathFactory’s GDPR Wars Design Concept
Content insight and activation platform PathFactory used a creative take on a “Star Wars” theme to build a campaign turning the generally dry issue of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance into an entertaining promotion and to boost email opt-ins.
Creativity is an important element in marketing, and PathFactory presented GDPS as a “new hope” for the ubiquitous email inbox, enlisting subscribers to ward off the “dark side” by joining the fight through opting-in.
The fun design and clever copy succeeded, and led to performance 241% greater than average.
“To go from boring to remarkable, marketing doesn't have to be loud or flashy. Show up daily (consistent), be yourself (authentic), and become a guide (add value).” @sangramvajre Share on XAugmenting your marketing efforts with the right creative content is covered in detail in the following recent article, to help you strike the right creative balance in your own campaigns:
Click Here to see the Break Free from Boring B2B Guide in Full Screen Mode
View the PathFactory campaign here.
#5 — NBC News Brand Studio’s State of Pay Video Campaign
An example of marketing success from powerful video comes from NBC News Brand Studio and Synchrony Financial, who partnered for a video content series — State of Pay — focusing on thought leadership and innovation.
Video interviews and a variety of supporting digital content including written analysis and stand-up reporting combined to boost engagement rates and greatly expand content reach.
Achieving more than 18,000 page views, successful social media amplification on Twitter and Facebook, and over 9 million impressions, the campaign also saw more than 700,000 video views and engagements.
A recent breakdown of video channels used by marketers shows YouTube as the leading platform, followed by Facebook, as seen in the following graph.
The power of video to deliver meaningful brand storytelling is an area we’ve covered in detail, and here are three of our most recent looks at video marketing to get you started:
- Where Do Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn Stand With B2B Video?, by Nick Nelson
- Twitter Has Renewed its Live Video Push & Here’s What You Need to Know, by Nick Nelson
- Allen Gannett Shares His Secrets to Racking Up Millions of LinkedIn Video Views, also by Nick Nelson
View the NBC News Brand Studio campaign here.
Remarkable Content Marketing with Best-Answer Results
The content marketing campaigns we’ve seen here from Sigstr, Oracle, Adobe Creative Cloud, PathFactory, and NBC News Brand Studio can serve as helpful examples for our own future content efforts, and we hope that they also encourage you to consider using some of the tactics they’ve implemented in order to be the best answer for your audience.
Whether it’s from the use of influencer marketing, storytelling through video and imagery, powerful design concepts, multi-touch campaigns, or e-books, there’s always plenty to learn from great examples.
It takes time, skill, and sometimes a massive effort to build campaigns such as the five we’ve looked at, which leads some to choose a top marketing agency, such as TopRank Marketing. We recently had the honor of being named by Forrester as the only B2B marketing agency offering influencer marketing as a top capability in its latest “B2B Marketing Agencies, North America, Q1 2019” report.”
* Oracle and Adobe are TopRank Marketing clients.
