One of the best things to do when coming up with a content strategy is to examine what other successful content marketers are doing. While there are plenty of businesses that are doing well with content marketing, I’ve included a few examples of companies that have not only achieved a significant traffic and sales increase, but who have also become thought leaders.
1. Buffer
Target Audience: Since Buffer’s paid products start at only $10 a month, Buffer is essentially targeting anyone who is interested in social media marketing. It should come as no surprise that much of their content is about how to market effectively with social media.
Content Strategy: Data driven content that showcases interesting data about social media and provides actionable insights. Buffer has expanded into two blogs, Buffer Social which is about social media and Buffer Open which covers other business ideas.
Buffer started off their content marketing with a lot of guest posting on other sites, but nowadays focuses mostly on creating high quality content on their own site and getting it syndicated through other popular media sites.
Buffer also publishes an occasional guest post on their blog.
On Site Publishing Frequency: About once a day on Buffer social, excluding weekends and a few times a week on Buffer Open.
2. Kissmetrics
Target Audience: KissMetrics cost thousands each month and is target towards companies that are produce a good amount of revenue and want to increase their bottom lines with better analytics. Most of these companies are already generating revenue, have a good basic understanding of online marketing and are looking for more advanced marketing topics to help them grow their businesses even further.
Content Strategy: The Kissmetrics blog covers more basic topics like marketing, but also focuses on other areas like managing & hiring, and running a business with employees. Note that they are not targeting solo bloggers or people just starting out in business.
Neil Patel has written a good amount of the posts on here, but KissMetrics also allows guest posters to contribute.
Since KissMetrics is a high priced product, conversions are an important focus.
KissMetrics uses webinars to help sell their product to potential customers that arrive on their blog. A carefully placed call to action directs target prospects to sign up and learn more about the product.
On Site Publishing Frequency: Daily
3. Wordstream
Target Audience: Since Wordstream is a tool that helps people with PPC, they are targeting people with an interest in PPC advertising and Adwords.
Content Strategy: Wordstream publishes a lot of content on their blog and gets a good amount of traffic from SEO. While a lot of their content is about PPC advertising, they do also write on SEO, which is a topic that many PPC enthusiasts are also interested in.
Like KissMetrics, Wordstream also uses webinars to educate prospects about its product and convert some of those prospects into customers.
On Site Publishing Frequency: About a post a day. Sometimes two posts on the same day.
4. Help Scout
Target Audience: Help Scout is a help desk software system that streamlines the user experience for customers. It can automatically tag and organize emails without requiring a ticket number.
Content Strategy: Customer service is one topic that appears on the Help Scout blog, but they also write about other business topics. Rather than creating a ton of content, they focus more on creating quality content that their target audience will find interesting and useful.
Publishing less frequently on the blog prevents readers from getting overwhelmed with content.
To grow its readership and traffic to the site, Help Scout also does a good amount of publishing off site on other blogs and media channels. High traffic marketing blogs and news sites like Entrepreneur are some places where you’ll see Help Scout’s content.
On Site Publishing Frequency: 2-3 times per week
5. Moz
Target Audience: Moz offers inbound marketing analytics starting at $99 / month. A free trial is offered, but the product is targeted towards growing companies and agencies that have a marketing budget.
Content Strategy: Moz has a core team that gathers data and performs analysis on digital marketing data. The Moz blog is a resource for anyone looking to learn how to marketing online effectively and keep up with the latest actionable online marketing tactics.
They also have YouMoz, which allows individual users to create and share their own case studies and marketing related content. Quality standards are fairly high, but due to Moz’s brand recognition in the online marketing space, they are able to get lots of additional free content which sends them even more search engine and social media traffic.
On Site Publishing Frequency: A few posts a week on the main Moz blog and a few per week on YouMoz
6. Referral Candy
Target Audience: Referral Candy allows e-commerce retailers to increase the revenues using an automated system to incentivize customers to refer other people to the store. This SAAS makes it easy for e-commerce owners to realize additional revenue without the complexities of setting up their own affiliate program.
With pricing starting at $25, their aim is to onboard any e-commerce owner that is generating sales. They charge either a flat monthly rate or a percentage of sales, whichever is higher.
Content Strategy: Referral Candy focuses on content to help e-commerce store owners, including case studies, marketing tactics and articles about referral marketing. It’s also had a good amount of success from creating infographics from successful expert roundups from other blogs.
On Site Publishing Frequency: A few posts a week
7. Hubspot
Target Audience: Hubspot is the leader in inbound marketing software by attempting to integrate all the tools you need for content marketing into one system. Pricing starts at $200 per month, so they are targeting revenue generating companies and agencies that want to get results with inbound marketing or sales.
Content Strategy: Hubspot creates a large amount of content including multiple posts each day. Their channels include marketing, sales and agency. Each channel creates content for that segment of their target audience.
With their large audience and frequent content creation, SEO and social sharing probably drive a good amount of traffic to their site as well as create brand awareness.
On Site Publishing Frequency: Several Posts a day
8. Social Media Examiner
Target Audience: Social Media Examiner targets anyone interested in learning about social media marketing. To make money, they have a yearly conference called Social Media Marketing World which features some of the most well known experts in social media. Tickets cost over $1,000.
Content Strategy: Social Media Examiner publishes a daily post about social media marketing. Their team creates some of the posts, but most of their content comes from guest contributors that are known experts. They also make good use of tags to create content feeds that are well optimized for SEO traffic.
On Site Publishing Frequency: 1-2 Posts a day
9. WP Curve
Target Audience: WP Curve offers a low priced service that WordPress bloggers and business owners can use to outsource their site maintenance. Unlimited WordPress tweaks start at $70 / month.
Content Strategy: WP Curve incorporates a few different types of content on their blog. Perhaps the most powerful component of their content strategy is sharing their business journey as it unfolds, including income reports that show how much they are earning and growing each month. This approach probably draws in many entrepreneurs that are looking for ideas to grow their own businesses.
SEO is another consideration and some posts are targeted towards popular keywords to drive search engine traffic. High quality guests posts are allowed and podcasting is another traffic driver.
On Site Publishing Frequency: A few times a week
10. Groove HQ
Target Audience: Groove is a help desk software starting at $15 a month that is designed to take the complexity out of managing a help desk. Their target audience is businesses that require a help desk in order to manage customer support emails effectively.
Content Strategy: Groove writes about customer support topics, but also shares lessons learned from growing the company. The customer support blog directly targets the interests of their target prospect while the growth blog targets a broader audience of people interested in business.
One unique feature of Groove’s blog is that it is essentially a live case study where readers can follow along as the company attempts to grow to $500,000 a month in revenues.
On Site Publishing Frequency: About once a week on their small business blog and once a week on their customer service blog
If you want to look at some more examples, check out this post by Kapost that features 50 examples of successful content marketing operations including some big brands.
Content Marketing Guide
About Brian Liang
Hey Brian! Thank you so much for mentioning ReferralCandy amidst such esteemed company! We’re honored to be here– will be producing even better content as we go! 🙂
Welcome, Visa – congrats on your success with growing Referral Candy through content marketing!