Have you heard that content marketing is the key to your marketing woes, but have no idea where to start? Take inspiration from these seven successful and replicable examples.
Content marketing can be daunting, especially for small business owners.
It’s easy to see things like Coke’s “Share a Coke” campaign and assume that you can’t do content marketing without a six-figure marketing budget.
This couldn’t be further from the truth.
Content marketing is not about expensive and elaborate campaigns. It’s about creating content that appeals to and attracts your target customers, then promoting it—nothing more, nothing less.
In this post, I’ll share seven inspiring content marketing examples, why they worked, and how to replicate their successes.
Let’s kick things off with one of my favorites…
1. Superdrug’s “Perceptions of Perfection Across Borders”
perceptions of perfection
Key stats
Backlinks: 1,730 backlinks from 816 referring domains.
Social shares: 34K to the page itself. Hundreds of thousands across the board.
Estimated monthly organic traffic: <100
Launched in June 2015, Superdrug’s “Perceptions of Perfection Across Borders” campaign is a masterclass in content marketing. What did they do? They asked female graphic designers from 18 different countries to retouch a photo of a woman to “make her more attractive.”
Here are just a few of the results:
perceptions of perfection examples
Each of the resulting images and body types is vastly different—which was the entire point.
Superdrug aimed to show that there’s no such thing as the perfect body. It’s subjective, not definitive. What’s seen as the “ideal” body varies massively from country to country.
Why did it work?
Body image is a controversial and emotionally appealing topic. That’s probably why the post was shared over 33,000 times on Facebook alone.
Data via Ahrefs Content Explorer
Furthermore, at the time of launch in 2015, the body positivity movement was starting to gain traction.
google trends body positivity
That meant there were—and still are—more journalists and bloggers than ever eager to cover positive, thought-provoking content around this subject.
How can you replicate its success?
The most interesting part about this campaign is that it wasn’t a totally original idea.
In June 2014, roughly one year before the launch of Superdrug’s campaign, an artist did much the same thing with a photo of her face. She asked Photoshop users from 40 countries to make her beautiful.
before and after
The project—titled Before & After—was a huge success. It got featured on Buzzfeed, Cosmopolitan, The Atlantic, Quartz, Bustle, and many others, which led to a massive influx of high-quality backlinks.
So, the trick here is to take inspiration from and build upon already-successful ideas.
Here’s how:
1. Find popular stories and themes
Head over to Ahrefs Content Explorer and search for a broad topic. If we were Superdrug, this could be something like “beauty” or “health.”
content explorer beauty
Content Explorer searches over a billion web pages for relevant matches. In this case, we get over 10 million results.
But the problem is that not all of these pages have performed well, which is what we want.
So let’s filter for pages with plenty of links from unique websites (referring domains), or social shares, or both.
content explorer filter
Here are a few articles that pop up on the first couple of pages of results:
How Outrageous Beauty Expectations Hold Women Back
See why we have an absolutely ridiculous standard of beauty in just 37 seconds.
This Woman Had Her Face Photoshopped In Over 25 Countries To Examine Global Beauty Standard
Now we know that content about beauty expectations tend to get traction. In fact, that last example is the inspiration for Superdrug’s campaign.
2. Take inspiration from these stories
Look at these pieces of content and ask yourself a few questions:
“Can I improve upon this idea with better data?”
“Can I communicate this idea more efficiently through better design or a different content format?
“Does the content exclude important points?
“Do I have an opposing view?”
Basically, if you feel that the content could be better in some way, then you may be onto a winner.
3. Present your idea to relevant journalists and bloggers
Most people create a piece of content, then try to promote it. That’s the wrong way to go about things, especially if you’re planning to contact journalists.
70% of publishers would rather be pitched an idea rather than a finished piece.
So head over to Content Explorer and run a “title” search for a topic, then add a website filter and name some relevant popular publications.
content explorer website search
This will find journalists who’ve covered your topic before and might be worth reaching out to.
journalists body image
You can even click a journalist’s name to see all the sites they write for.
author search
Find email addresses for these people, tell them about your idea, and ask whether it’s something they’d be interested in featuring.
4. Create and promote your content
Listen to journalists’ feedback and ideas, create your content, then promote via blogger outreach to all interested parties.
2. Buffer’s Marketing Library
buffer content library
Key stats
Backlinks: 203,000 backlinks from 13,000 referring domains.
Shares: 193,000+ social shares across the board.
Estimated monthly organic traffic: 580,000+
Buffer’s Marketing Library is a hub of resources to help people level up their marketing skills. Basically, it’s a non-chronological blog.
Still, the 229 pages under their /library/ subfolder get an estimated 580,000 monthly organic visits. That accounts for 52% of all traffic to Buffer.com!
Via the Top subfolders report in Ahrefs Site Explorer
Why did it work?
Buffer created their Marketing Library in December 2018, but most of the content in the library isn’t new. They got rid of blog.buffer.com and redirected all its content to buffer.com/library/*. Then they created the Library homepage.
The moving of content is more a technicality than anything else. It wasn’t this reorganization that contributed to the success of content marketing agency denver, but rather that they worked hard to build up a bank of content around topics that their audience are searching for.
Take Buffer’s list of free image sites, for example:
buffer free images
They get an estimated 84,400 monthly organic visits to this page, mainly because it ranks for “free images”—which has a monthly search volume of 144,000 in the US—plus thousands of other keywords.
How can you replicate their success?
The lesson here is simple: learn what your customers are searching for in the search engines, then create industry-leading content around those topics.
That’s what we do here at the Ahrefs blog, and our strategy is somewhat inspired by Buffer.
Here’s how:
1. Do keyword research
There’s no way to know what people are searching for without doing keyword research. So head over to a keyword research tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer and search for a few seed topics.
If you were Buffer, these would be things like:
social media marketing
facebook ads
twitter marketing
social media
From here, browse the keywords ideas reports. I recommend starting with the “Questions” report.
keyword ideas
Save any worthwhile topics that add value to your business to a list.
2. Create industry-leading content
Ranking for these terms requires content, so that’s your next step.
But this isn’t just about paying a writer $10 to create any old article on a topic. You should aim to create the best, most authoritative resource on the topic at hand. That’s the only way you’re ever going to rank and build organic traffic.
To do this, focus on the quality and value of your content.
3. Promote your content
Use blogger outreach, paid ads, whatever is more convenient for you.