5 Content Marketing Strategy Examples to Inspire Your Marketing
- Updated on: 2023-07-09
- Read original article here
Content marketing strategy is the fundamental method of promotion for businesses of all industries. However, in order to enable business growth, it is important to correctly choose the right direction of your promotions in order to meet the requirements of your target consumers.
We explored the best content marketing strategies of brands known and recognized all over the world. Some of these companies will remain in high demand in the market for decades due to their content marketing efforts today. What is the secret to their success? Keep reading to find out the key methods and approaches they follow in their content marketing strategies.
We all love IKEA and its high-quality furniture elements. This brand offers such an extensive range of products for home decor that no competitor can beat their records. IKEA has stores all over the world where they see the demand for their services among citizens. Commonly, the IKEA store is a large area where people can find everything needed for their homes—from a cup of coffee to the entire set of furniture for the kitchen.
So it is pretty interesting how this company succeeded in becoming a number one retailer in home furniture and decor. Of course, it is all successful content marketing strategy work. The main value of IKEA is their customer and their needs. But they dig much deeper than you can imagine. The slogan of this brand sounds like “We improve people’s everyday lives”. And these words are not empty.
IKEA workers not just collect information from customers for nothing but aim to understand the needs and troubles of customers to help them cope with them. They try to visit the homes of their customers in order to listen to their reviews of the products they have bought in IKEA, whether the quality is high and some changes are needed. These workers, who are mostly designers, provide customers with pieces of advice on their home interiors.
Then, this information from the real consumers and their experience with IKEA goods is processed within offices in order to reveal the main concerns and find ways how to resolve them. All these researches and changes are announced through marketing channels to keep customers aware of their activities.
Moreover, IKEA hires experienced home interior designers who travel across the United States visiting houses of their regular customers. They not only advise them on their home decors but also provide them with all required IKEA products to upgrade their decor and record this process on video. It shows a great value of customers and their opinions, translating all these activities into the social media profiles and website. In conclusion, we see that exactly the great value of customers and their reviews lead IKEA to global success and recognition.
McDonald’s is the most popular fast-food company in the world, having a restaurant in the major part of all countries, including even small towns. Despite this food being not really healthy, everybody loves attending this café, from kids to adults. What makes McDonald’s in such high demand globally?
Foremost, it is delicious food—a vast variety of burgers, french fries, milkshakes, ice cream—you will not find any awful dish here. Another component is the excellent marketing strategy, as even people who follow a healthy lifestyle visit McDonald’s from time to time.
The marketing strategy of this company is complex and follows the approach of 4P: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. Let’s start from the beginning.
Mcdonald’s menu is famous globally as all restaurants have basic positions in menus while still having some unique products depending on the location. The company workers investigate the sales of each position on the menu, the satisfaction of the consumers, their reviews, tastes, and so on. As the needs and demands of customers change depending on the area, restaurants implement new positions in order to retain customers and satisfy their preferences.
Another marketing approach Mcdonald’s uses is the affordable prices for all positions on the menu. No matter whether it is a burger or ice cream—you can still have it under $10. That is the key to success actually—being able to keep the prices on the same level despite the development of the restaurant business and increasing prices of products. Of course, all prices are expected to rise. So Mcdonald’s decided to offer combo menus that offer combinations of several positions at a lower price than separately.
As we have already mentioned above, Mcdonald’s has lots of restaurants all over the world—in huge megalopolises as well small towns. It means that this place is easy to access for all people who would like to eat at McDonald’s. Moreover, they spend certain amounts of money on renovations and implementing new technologies like mobile apps with promotions, terminals, modern interior designs, and so on.
This is the final component of McDonald’s marketing strategy—promotion. All these advantages and changes in the previous components need to be promoted and announced to customers. The company creates a sort of community where customers get special promotions and discounts.
Moreover, McDonald’s deals with charity, organizing different funds for gathering money. The brand is promoted on social media, on TV screens, in the printed way on billboards, digital ads in different mobile apps, and so on.
Further Reading: What Branded Content is. What it’s Not. And How to Get it Right
Coca-Cola or Coke is supposed to be the most famous soda water in the world. This brand is a partner for lots of other famous companies, including McDonald’s, by the way. You can find a bottle of Coke literally in all possible retail stores—supermarkets, small local stores, gas stations in the middle of nowhere. What makes them so different and popular among their direct and indirect competitors?
As we all know, the variety of soda water is really huge, but Coca-Cola is still on top of them all. The key to their success is a powerful content marketing strategy.
Coca-Cola has already won the reliability and trust in its brand for years of existence. So now they can boldly and openly build friendly relationships with their consumers. Basically, their content marketing strategy example consists of three approaches which they use by turn considering the location and needs of their customers:
This content writing method is considered to be the most popular in current marketing strategies of different brands for the purpose of building trust relations with their consumers. Coca-Cola content makers create exciting and emotional stories of how their services improved the lives of their consumers. The stories can be different, but they also have a particular structure of what information each article should contain.
This type of content is fundamental to Coca-Cola’s marketing strategy. It entails the promotion of your brand using content written by your consumers on social media accounts or other platforms where your brand is present. It can be reviewed about the product, the services within the stores where their product is available, mention gratitude, questions, etc. All these mentions need to be considered and processed to show the value to each of the customers. Of course, this process is scalable but has a great impact on the brand reputation.
This approach implies following the unified content marketing strategy example in all channels where the company communicates with customers. Coca-cola follows their initially created brand concept without deviation, utilizing a variety of content marketing techniques (e.g. email segmentation) and an array of content types (e.g. explainer videos). Their primary focus is uniqueness and quality of content which is why they work with the most experienced content creators, always craft creative titles for their content, and find interesting topics to cover.
Further Reading: Brand Storytelling: How to Tell Stories That Will Increase Conversions
Nike is a sports brand known all over the world. Its products are used among famous sports teams as team outfits. Nike is supposed to be quite an expensive brand, as its quality and convenience are recognized by all its consumers.
The company spends plenty of money on successful content marketing promotion in different channels—websites, email marketing campaigns, websites for their partners, television, social media, and printed advertising.
We all know their famous logo and slogan “Just Do It” which encourages people to believe that they are capable of everything in their lives. So let’s take a close look at what marketing methods they use which make them so in demand.
As we figured out, Nike follows the 4P marketing strategy, just like Mcdonald’s. Here is Nike’s interpretation:
The range of products is constantly evolving. Originally, Nike was selling athletic shoes, some equipment for football and basketball, and sports outfits. Currently, Nike is selling clothes for all seasons, bags, backpacks, swimsuits, and many other products for men, women, and kids. Nike is also a partner for many famous sports teams in different kinds of sports.
Nike divides prices into two segments—value-based and premium quality. Nevertheless, Nike’s products are not really affordable, but the quality is top-notch. If you buy a pair of Nike shoes, you will wear them for several seasons, for sure. All prices are made based on customer expectations and capabilities.
There are three selling channels Nike provides—partnering with huge retailers, in the official online store available in many countries, and official outlet stores. The company covers audiences of different types offline and online. Outlets are a great opportunity for people to buy some products at lower prices, which makes this brand affordable for everybody.
Nike creates fascinating advertising videos and other types of visual content, engaging celebrities to take part in it. When consumers see the demand for Nike’s products among people of different positions and statuses, the brand gains trust and credibility for years. It also shows the high quality of their products and material, so the prices are justified.
Further Reading: Why Your Content Marketing Strategy Isn’t Working (And How to Fix It)
No surprise, Starbucks as many other worldwide companies follow the 4P example of content marketing strategy that makes them a recognized and popular coffee brand in every part of the world. Starbucks pays huge attention to the content they post on their social media accounts and website pages, focusing on high-quality and engaging texts and visual content.
Each post is well-thought-out and is included in the chain of logic within their content plan.
Talking about social media profiles, the company uses high-resolution and bright photos of their products and location to attract attention to the post and directly text under this photo.
Each picture or video has to clearly show it is Starbucks. They use a friendly and open communicative writing style, like inviting their consumers to drink a cup of coffee together. Additionally, all their photos and videos look tasty and attractive, and this is another approach they follow in the content and social media marketing strategy.
Then we look at their official website to learn more about their brand, the services, products, and quality of ingredients. Each coffee drink has a separate landing page with great pictures, descriptions, and recipes on how to prepare such drinks at home easily.
Another interesting fact about Starbucks’ content marketing strategy is using the same brand color palette in all channels they reach their consumers. This method makes the brand memorable and recognized by color, logo, slogan, and so on.
Besides coffee drinks, the company produces different brand items like mugs, T-shirts, hoodies, notebooks, and other products. Having a branded mug at home will remind consumers of Starbucks, which increases the customer retention rate.
To sum up, Starbucks follows the consistency in their content marketing strategy, translating the same message and values in different ways.
Further Reading: 11 Content Marketing Examples You Can Learn From
Summing up the content marketing examples of popular global brands, we can specify the top marketing strategies that really work—4P and customer-centric strategies. All brands have to remember that foremost they work for customers—to meet their demands and satisfy their needs with the products or services. So before applying any of these content marketing examples to your business, you need to know the key specifics of your industry, your company, and your target audience. Each brand is unique and requires an individual approach, so it’s important to develop a strategy that will work for you. And once you start creating content, maintain its quality by checking it before publishing and its quantity by keeping a posting schedule.
Ruby Leong has experience as a blogger and writer. Now, she works as a freelance writer. She provides essay writing services at the professional platform BestWritersOnline. Basically, Ruby cares about topics that relate to business and education. She devotes her free time to music and singing.
