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5 Brands Who Have A 'Lit' Inbound Content Strategy

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The verdict is in: having a well-planned content strategy is one of the best ways to engage with your audience across multiple channels, and it will really help your business grow.

This is particularly the case for ecommerce brands, businesses with a digital product offering and service based businesses. In these cases, with no physical store for your customers to experience, your digital content has to work overtime to tell stories and build relationships.

From memes to viral videos, this article will explore five brands with the kind of content strategy that dreams are made of.

Freakers USA: Stylised, consistent visual content

credit: freaker

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Freaker USA are a quirky brand with an equally quirky content strategy. Their drink insulators were designed to prevent the world from having moist handshakes, and are made out of a stretchy knit fabric, designed to fit a range of bottle sizes. This brand has recently ventured into the world of knitted socks, too. 

Freaker are constantly conjuring up novel new ways to advertise their products and entertain their audience simultaneously. For example, as a new company in 2011, Freaker invested in a box truck that they decorated and documented on their blog and social media as they travelled around the States marketing their products.

This brand’s success is in the consistency of their brand voice in their marketing messages. Freaker’s blog is full of weekly promotions with heavily discounted offerings for its customers, along with funny visual content of people dressed up in the brand’s knitted merchandise. 

Freaker supplies non-essential products, and as such must really show its customer base why they should make a purchase.

Freaker have bags of character in their content. What is your brand character and can you communicate it consistently through your content?

Chubbies Shorts: Masters of memes

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credit: chubbies

If you’re a marketer, you’ve probably heard of Chubbies before. This brand is acclaimed for its online presence, and is heralded for entertaining and delighting its followers on social media. Tongue-in-cheek and cheeky is definitely their style.

Chubbies have well and truly mastered the art of the meme. The brand posts witty and funny memes on its social feeds and receives high engagement levels on every post. The Chubbies store showcases their Instagram feed on their homepage — putting social commerce at the heart of their store which has been conveniently built on Shopify (a good option for social-first brands).

Chubbies have nailed their social/ecommerce integration, boosting the exposure of their social media posts and ensuring that no customer misses out on their sense of humour. 

Can you take some inspiration from Chubbies and get your customers involved and work your social media strategy into your website and content ?

Nike: Offline experiences for online marketing

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Nike’s Breaking2 campaign was no small affair. The sportswear giant sponsored world renowned athletes in an attempt to break the world record time of two hours for a marathon. The athletes were decked head-to-toe in Nike merchandise and the event was live streamed on their social media feeds. Nike’s social media team also updated its following with the track times as they happened.

This event was a lavish PR affair, and perhaps it isn’t something that smaller brands will be able to emulate. However, it’s a great example of how offline events can provide great material for online coverage. This event was also very in-keeping with Nike’s branding as a performance sportswear brand – after all, the athletes were testing the brand’s range by running long distance.

Omni-channel marketing is an overused term but, in short, it means that you should create a seamless experience for your customers, regardless of where they are. Embracing the omni-channel method and setting up an offline event could really help drive traffic to your online store.

Perhaps you could set up an event to post about on social media for your brand?

Xero: Broadcasting corporate customer testimonials

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credit: xero

It’s really important to find out what works for you and what will engage your audience. You should always refer back to your buyer personas and ensure that your content always appeals to them first and foremost.

Xero knows what works for them: they know that corporate customer testimonials are what helps them gain exposure and build credibility. From real life stories to sharing business strategy, these friendly and truthful case studies and testimonials help potential customers see themselves as future Xero users. 

If your brand is a professional service or operates in a B2B market, you should give customer testimonials a try.

Check out this guide to see how you could go about capturing and displaying testimonials in a creative way.

Fiat: Investing in the services of a viral video creation company

Over 64% of consumers say that watching a marketing video on Facebook has influenced their purchasing decisions recently. On top of this, video content is mobile friendly, and a great way to get across a lot of information in a short space of time.

However, marketing isn’t just about filling your audience’s mind with information about your brand and product offering. Your audience wants quality – and you can also provide this by entertaining them. Brands are quickly realising the power of viral videos, and many of the videos have very little (if anything at all) to do with the company itself.

This video, created by Rubber Republic for Fiat was created to target middle-aged mums who may be interested in Fiat’s range of cars. This piece of content is hilarious, and features a rapping mum that captures the realities of the transition into parenting. It resonated with the target audience, and is close to reaching five million views on YouTube.

Sometimes, offering your audience something funny and shareable is more effective than a traditional sales video or blog post. Showing that your brand has personality is a sure-fire way to get noticed. Can you work funny, shareable content into your strategy?

Tailoring your content strategy to suit your audience is a great way to grow your business. Pushing the boundaries of traditional marketing will get you recognised, and help your brand develop a personality. Remember to think about what you can offer your reader, viewer or watcher – they need a reason to stay engaged, and simply boasting about your product offering yourself will not cut the mustard. Whether you’re going to create the next viral video or display corporate testimonials, there will be a relevant tactic for you to employ from this list.

Which tactic will you emulate? Let us know in the comments.

  

 

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