Enterprise content operations are increasingly turning to content marketing to propel their brand’s marketing efforts, with 76% indicating that it was more important in 2022 than the previous year. Despite the challenges of producing high-quality content consistently, content marketing is effective.
However, if your team is just starting, it can be hard to see how it might help your brand achieve its goals. Your C-suite team may also have reservations.
Sometimes company executives need a little inspiration. Well, we’ve got it for you. Here are six content marketing case studies you can distribute to execs to help you sell them on the efficacy of content marketing.
Image Source: Content Marketing Institute
1. Lenovo Tops Our Content Marketing Case Studies
If you’re a tech company, marketing to millennials and Gen Zers is a must. Lenovo’s “Goodweird” content campaign leveraged those generations’ love of all things indie to set its brand apart. Jessica Gioglio points out that using content showcasing diversity, quirkiness, and taking the road less traveled led to success among these coveted demographics.
Talk to any group of Gen Zers for a few minutes, and you’ll discover influencers are a significant factor in their lives. Combining the impact of influencers with their target audience’s love of music videos, Lenovo’s content team created a dance-off video featuring three influencers.
They rocked the campaign. It’s no wonder that the video went viral, with 34.1 million views, 10% more brand awareness, and 11% more traffic to its microsite, according to the company’s content analytics.
Successful content marketing case studies show that it just takes a little research into what your target audience digs and a lot of imagination to deliver content that stands out.
2. Salesforce Hits a Homer With Videos
The world’s dominant force in customer relationship management isn’t without its challenges, according to Ritu Jhajharia. Before Salesforce transformed its content strategy, it struggled to maintain a steady traffic flow and convert visitors into leads.
Like many B2B companies, it needed to loosen its collar. Today’s B2B customers demand the same emotionally immersive experiences that B2C customers take for granted.
Salesforce took the cue, implementing a new marketing direction that didn’t disappoint. The team went all-in on their video marketing efforts, taking advantage of the fact that 95% of B2B customers prefer their content in video format.
Image Source: Brightcove
Salesforce developed entertaining videos targeting solutions to customer sales and marketing problems, created the “world’s first stop-motion slideshare,” and used videos to showcase its customers’ success stories.
The approach garnered the company an 80% boost in web traffic, 6,500 new email subscriptions, and 25 times more traffic than before its content upgrade.
3. Coca-Cola Learns From Its Mistakes
Content marketing case studies lists aren’t complete unless they include one of the industry’s longtime top guns, Coca-Cola. From its beginnings in the late 1800s to its uber-sensitive ads today, it has maintained a laser focus on its customers to produce superb content that rarely misses the mark, with one inglorious exception.
In the mid-1980s, their marketing team thought America was ready for a New Coke. They weren’t, and the campaign went down as one of the worst of all time.
The company learned from its mistake, keeping a close eye on its customer demographics to create content that entices customers to run out and grab a Coke, all while making the world a better place.
They’ve got the tug-at-your-heart-string approach down. The company also understands the value of user-generated content, implementing clever tactics to obtain it.
4. Starbucks Understands the Art of User-Generated Content
Trusting customers to create content is courageous. Most enterprises like to stay in the driver’s seat. However, 79% of today’s customers say that user-generated content greatly impacts their buying decisions. 21st-century corporations need to take note.
Starbucks is one of many leading-edge companies that opened up content creation to its customers. We include the coffee chain in our content marketing case studies because it is successful in harnessing the power of user-generated content.
Case in point: the company’s 2016 #RedCupArt campaign. For a crack at a year’s worth of coffee, customers bought a cup, drank it, and then created their own artwork on the iconic red cup.
Video Source: Alexa Fernando on Vimeo
In the year following the campaign, the company grew its social followers by 26%. Today, it continues to engage its customers, empowering them to make the Starbucks experience their own.
5. SAP Knows Persistence Pays
SAP, one of the world’s foremost B2B software brands, had no cohesive content strategy until 2016. That year, VP for influencer marketing Amisha Gandhi changed the game after convincing a team of leading tech influencers to present lectures, host panels, and create thought leadership videos during the brand’s annual Sapphire conference.
Gandhi’s belief that these content formats would be valuable to the company’s customers paid off. As a result of the team’s efforts, the company saw increased engagement and interest in its products.
As other successful content marketing case studies demonstrate, persistence is essential when developing a new content strategy. Though it wasn’t easy convincing influencers to join her efforts, Gandhi eventually landed a meeting and used the time to provide inside information about SAP, making her offer too good to refuse.
These influencers’ impact on the conference was measurable. During the influencers’ debut year, their presence boosted social impressions by 16.5%. In their second year, they drove social impressions by 25%.
6. Equifax Connects With Customers
Relationship-building is one of the foundational pillars of content marketing. Equifax uses a wealth of channels to reach its target audience, including:
- Social media
- Blog posts
- Informative and promotional emails
- Webinars
An omnichannel approach provides touchpoints that develop trust, one piece of content at a time. Providing actionable information to potential and current customers, the company doubled its webinar attendees and established its reputation as a brand that provided value above and beyond its paid services.
Use Content Marketing Case Studies To Inspire Action
Whatever strategy your company decides on, streamlining the content production process helps your team create world-class content with a strong ROI, making your C-suite happy and satisfying company goals.
Divvy’s complete content operations platform simplifies content production, providing a central hub where your team can plan, schedule, collaborate, create, publish, automate, analyze, and promote stellar content. Request a demo to discover how we can help you turn your these inspiring content marketing case studies into action.
