Moments: A Spotlight Moment

Content is king. You’ve likely heard that expression sometime in the last few years as endless streams of content flood your social media pages, email inboxes, and television airwaves. Content marketing is your chance to get your brand in the spotlight and in front of a target audience in a way that’s valuable to both parties. But what does that look like, and how can you do it effectively? In this blog post, we’ll discuss:

1. Content Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing
2. Examples of Content Marketing Campaigns
3. Creating Content that Adds Value

Content Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing

How does content marketing differ from more traditional marketing strategies? The New York Times describes it in these contrasting terms: branded versus educational content, reaching the masses versus personal connections, interruption versus value, and monologue versus dialogue.(1)

Traditional marketing generally focuses on the brand as a whole. It focuses mostly on amplifying brand awareness in a more general sense and increasing conversions on a larger scale. Traditional marketing interrupts users when they are going about their daily lives and tends to be more one-sided as businesses send out information to consumers with the hope they will continue the conversation.

Content marketing’s goal is to add value to the reader and act as an example of thought leadership. It’s more personal and authentic and presents information often sought out by users to help them with a challenge they are facing. Content marketing gives consumers a platform on which to speak directly with business owners in a more personalized interaction.

Examples of Content Marketing Campaigns

Now that we know the difference, let’s look at some examples of successful content marketing campaigns.

At the end of each year, the music streaming service Spotify provides its users with Spotify Wrapped — a recap of their most played songs, albums, and artists. It then creates a personalized playlist using that information, which users frequently share on social media, causing the brand to trend and generating interest even among non-users.

Another fun example is Wordle, the New York Times word game that challenges players to guess a five-letter word in six attempts each day. The Wordle page received over 51 million organic views in the U.S. and attracted over 1.9 million backlinks as of February 2023.(2) It had the newspaper trending daily and created a way for people to discuss the brand regularly.

Apple’s “Dear Apple” campaign is another effective example. This one used video as the primary form of content, as a series of videos showed how the Apple Watch can save lives. It created a personal experience among viewers, calming fears, and invoking human emotion through the stories being told.

Content marketing has taken over as the dominant form of marketing and the examples are endless. Some methods include blog posts, videos, infographics, social media posts, and podcasts, to name a few. You can see a more comprehensive list of types of content marketing here.

Creating Content that Adds Value

According to the Head of Global Innovation for ServiceNow, 4.6 billion pieces of content are produced daily, and in the last 30 years, we as humans have produced more information than in the previous 5,000.(3) Oh yeah, and that number is from 2015. Can you imagine what that number is up to in 2023? We are talking about immeasurable amounts of content being created every day.