Everyone has become aware that content marketing works quite well. There are a total of 198 million people utilizing ad blockers all over the world and around $21.8 billion in revenue is lost because of this. People want to be able to read stories with actual substance; not advertisements. That’s why coming up with amazing content matters a lot. The biggest reason for doing any sort of marketing is to generate sales.

Producing great content marketing helps improve sales figures. Companies who fully commit themselves to content marketing become understanding of their customer’s preferences and know how to leverage various strategies such as SEO, long-form content, infographics and so on, to help them decide on a purchase.

A study conducted by HubSpot’s State of Inbound Marketing reveals that increasing the amount of content you send out leads towards higher customer acquisition. 82% of those who publish a blog post everyday gain at least a single customer, as opposed to 57% who only post once every month. During the past two years, Kraft Foods has generated 4x better ROI using content marketing than traditional means of advertising.

For this article, we’re going to show you what we really mean by giving you some 10 examples of companies who are crushing it with some amazing content marketing, and what we can all learn from them.

1. Close.io

Close.io is a SaaS (Software as a Service) company that helps sales teams close more deals. They publish some top quality content, such as blog post that net them leads without focusing too much on stuff like SEO and podcasting. They also focus on helping their customers solve any issues they may be experiencing. When posting on their blogs, they usually discuss topics about hacking into the fear of public speaking.

They touch upon issues that appeal to the emotions of their target audience. Mainly due to their content tells emotionally captivating stories that really resonate with their readers, Close.io’s blog has become incredibly popular among salespeople as a must go to resource.

One of the most common mistakes companies can make when creating content is basing it solely off of keyword research and reverse engineering what they wish to share with their audience.

This issue has lead towards plenty of blogs in the marketing space to sound very similar to other content on the web. Always keep in mind to remain focused on what you share, but most importantly you should uncover the well of emotional hopes, fears, and dreams of your customers and focus on those aspects.

While Close.io doesn’t hold a lot when ranking high on search or any of the more traditional content marketing strategies, content still creates momentum in sales by the numbers for them.

Produce content that discusses a problem that you’re actually trying to solve. For instance, if you want to type something that helps sales teams close the deal, then maybe one of the deeper problems you need to address and solve is helping salespeople earn more commission or close their deals despite them being afraid too.

2. HubSpot

HubSpot is a SaaS company that helps businesses engage visitors, convert leads, and gain even more potential customers. Discussing the topic of content marketing without bringing up HubSpot is laughable. According to information provided by New Breed Marketing, HubSpot’s blog has successfully reached over 1 million page views a month, and each blog post is optimized for conversions.

A common theme among content marketers is to focus on chugging out content without concentrating on the most important piece, moving potential customers towards the sale. Fortunately for HubSpot, they didn’t make this common mistake. When HubSpot potential customer decides to search for answers with the help of Google to find a solution to their problems, they usually discover a blog post with an interesting headline near the top of the search result page, usually resulting in them clicking on a HubSpot link.

Once the visitor has read through the post and gained the knowledge for themselves about how to appropriately deal with the problem with a potential solution, HubSpot is one step ahead of them, prepared to guide them through the next step. Right at the bottom of the blog post, visitors can sign up to gain a content upgrade. After buyers become aware of their problem, a total of 30% of them shall consult white papers, case studies, and guides, so by giving them the option for a content upgrade, HubSpot is transitioning them towards a sale.

By offering an enticing content upgrade at the bottom of your most popular articles, you’ll be able to maximize the number of email subscribers so that you can continue to send them relevant content in order to further push them towards a sale.

3.Copy Hackers

Copy Hackers is a blog whose main focus is on conversion marketing. They separate themselves from the usual group by implementing personality into all of their posts.

Most content related to marketing will usually be very dry to read. They will go into details about data, tactics, ROI, and back up their thoughts with numbers and statistics, although it shouldn’t be done at the cost of personality. Without injecting any personality, you risk coming off as the same as anyone else posting similar content.

Introducing personality into your content increases the amount of trust that your audience will hold on you, which will lead to increased conversions. Instead of only concentrating on stating facts and support your statement with data, take the time to implement some of your own distinct characteristics into any piece you write. A simple way to pull this off is by reading your own content out loud to ensure it’s written in a similar way you would talk to another person.

This should lead to you gaining a boost in the trust of your audience and eventually allow you to utilize that trust to gain more sales.

4. Wistia

Wistia provides businesses with professional video hosting and video marketing tools. They have their own resource center available on their website that they have dubbed the Wistia Library. Going here reveals a variety of quality video, images, and blog posts filled with tutorials on topics their audience will find useful. For instance, they’ve posted about creating a social video strategy, selecting a backdrop for your video, and much more.

Wistia is a perfect example that businesses selling a serious product can still have an amazing personality backing them up. When they wanted to have their readers take a marketing survey, their entire team got in front of a camera and danced to a song they named “Take the Survey”.

Wistia successfully increased their response rate for their surveys and even gained 41 comments on the blog post where the video was added.

5. GoPro

GoPro is known for its manufacturing of cameras that are mainly used for adventures and sports.

During the AdAge, CMO Strategy Summit, the SVP of GoPro stated: “We’re not just a camera company anymore. We’re an enjoyment platform for people all over the world to watch.” They’ve successfully become one of the most popular brands when it comes to developing user-generated content.

As a matter of fact, according to information provided by Content Marketing Institute, over 6,000 GoPro tagged video is being uploaded onto YouTube each day. They’ve successfully garnered over 4 million subscribers.

Their content has managed to become viral consistently because people are able to live vicariously through the videos and witness firsthand what it’s like to do things they normally wouldn’t attempt to do.

Here’s a video by GroPro called Red Bull Stratos – The Full story, a video that manage to gain over 21 million views: https://youtu.be/dYw4meRWGd4

6. Moz

Moz develops SEO software to make inbound marketing as seamless as possible. Similar to other top tier companies, MOz takes their blog towards a whole other level. In addition to generating an assortment of a regular post, they also maintain a resource page with long-form guides about learning SEO and search marketing.

Normally, marketers don’t take the time to consider utilizing content marketing to increase user retention, but the largest marketing ROI actually comes from developing a positive relationship with your existing customers. It’s much simpler to sell to customers you’ve already established a relationship with than acquiring ones who aren’t aware of you.

7. Unbounce

Unbounce allows marketers to create and test landing pages without needing to handle code or software. According to information provided by Contently, Unbounce’s blog gains over 140,000 unique visitors each month. Their blog has become a huge successor in helping them generate over 23 million leads and up to 6,000 customers.

One part that’s made Unbounce successful is not because of the variety of content available on their blog, but how easy it is for readers to navigate through the site. For example, they discuss topics such as content marketing, A/B testing and copywriting, and their sidebars allow readers to easily access categories they want. This allows content that they want to see rather than have to search through tons of stuff they could care less about.

They also combine long-form content with e-books and infographics and create visually appealing content that’s connected to their own product. For example, they may create a post full of landing pages templates or amazing website designs. Visual content, particularly infographics, get shared far more than any other kind of content, and Unbounce has placed a tone of focus onto them.

Furthermore, they also do something that’s quite unique when compared to other businesses. They share information about their company and their day-to-day work with the public with a blog they’ve named Inside Unbounce. For this section of the blog, they described it as a staff-written un-curated window into our journey, and the lessons learned along the way.”

This allows them to have their readers go on an adventure, which develops a deeper level of trust so that the audience becomes even more invested in Unbounce.

8. Birchbox

Birchbox is a subscription service that sends subscribers a box filled with a selection of beauty products each month. They’ve successfully gained some amazing rapid growth, mainly due to their content marketing strategy.

According to Newscred, Birchbox launched with only 600 subscribers and manage to grow that into 800,000 people in less than five years. They established a new line of products targeting men, they made some strategic acquisitions, they expanded into other countries and their revenue skyrocketed.

The reason they were capable of leveraging content marketing for both customer acquisition and retention as stated by Head of Program Office at Birchbox, Bene Cipolla: “Content was there from the beginning. It was never an afterthought. It is core to our business strategy.”

Due to their products being all about aesthetics, they focus on developing aesthetically pleasing content. These results lead them to host their blog on Tumblr.

The blog offers informative and interesting articles, mainly involving tips on fashion and interesting facts on beauty care. As a matter of fact, for the majority of their post, they place focus on images rather than enticing headlines. This works quite well for their specific product and audience since they’re selling products to improve a person’s image.

9. Buffer

Buffer automates social media posts and makes it easy to share any content you may find interesting.

Content marketing is Buffer’s main choice for growth strategy and they gain up to 1,900 shares per post. During their earlier days, they’ve attracted almost all their customers with the help of guest blogging. Guest blogging is a fast way to get exposed to tens of thousands of potential customers, even when you have no customers of your own. Buffer became aware of this strategy and got featured in up to 100 blogs in only two months.

With the tools currently available to us today, getting featured on popular blogs isn’t too difficult. One rapid way to pull this off is to write a post on Medium, wait until it gets a certain amount of views, then contact an editor at a major publication and offer to cross-post the content.

10. Intercom.io

Intercom is a software product that’s designed to help companies communicate with their customers more efficiently.

What they manage to do quite amazingly well is repurpose content. For instance, they have their own podcast where they interview various experts and thought leaders about topics in business and marketing. Once an episode is recorded, they take that interview and repurpose it into a blog post of their own. This way they gain even more reach out of the same piece of content.

As a matter of fact, if the content was great, you could potentially have two different articles of your own content reaching the top rank on Google for a certain keyword.

Intercom also does an amazing job of utilizing images and graphics in the correct spots within a blog post. For example, for one article there’s a section that discusses why customers leave. To accompany that info, Intercom produced a graphic to visualize the concept.

Conclusion

While it may seem easy to discuss why content is amazing and why we should all be generating more content, executing it is a whole other story when it comes to getting results.

In today’s increasingly growing online landscape, content marketing isn’t simply about developing a few blog posts and sharing them with your social media. Actual content marketing requires much more to be successful, just ask the pros.

If you’re looking for high-quality custom content that works, then reach out to us anytime! We’ll handle all the grunt work for you 🙂

• wilson@sumodash.com