Marketers and business owners have one thing in common that keeps them up at night: they all worry about how to get more from their marketing budget in predictable and replicable ways. In your case, you may be wondering how to make target prospects care more about your business enough to make a commitment for the long term. Well, luckily for you, this is how content marketing works.

Let me explain.

How Content Marketing Works

You see, content marketing goes much deeper than sharing useful tips to attract the attention of those you need to patronize your business. It entails defining your audience and creating the necessary connections to build your own personal tribe.

You’ve got to go beyond the “How” of your business to specify the “Why” as well as “Who” your business operates for.

You’ve got to know your customer just as well as you know your business, if not more.

You’ve got to be able to identity and tap into the latent emotions and worries that drive your customer through their day and occupy their thoughts in the final minutes before bed.

When you publish a blog post, whitepaper, infographic, video, or podcast, you have to be able to tell a story so emotionally relevant to your audience that you have them enthusiastically nodding their heads within 5 seconds of reading.

Content marketing is all about going beyond saying “I can help” to saying “I care”. It is about becoming a refuge in the sea of confusion that the internet has become.

Once you’ve connected with your audience in a meaningful way, they will beat a path to your door and build a camp there.

A Well Beaten Path: Good Content Marketing Examples that Led to AMAZING Results

Many of the companies which you admire today, enjoy their success because they employ a robust content marketing strategy.

Some examples include

Hubspot: One of the best examples of content marketing at its very best, employing several lead magnets to create awareness about their product and how it helps solves customer pain points. Hubspot has implemented content marketing by:

• Writing detailed blog posts aimed at tackling issues which their customers care about.
• Creating in-depth guides such as eBooks and templates to act as lead magnets.
• Creating an educational and content sharing hub known as Inbound.org, which provides a massive opportunity to promote their certification and partnership programs. Inbound.org receives about 321,000 visitors per month according to SimilarWeb statistics.
• Creating videos for Facebook and then leveraging LinkedIn to drive traffic to those videos.

Today, Hubspot is a multi-million dollar operation. But more importantly, their success is due to the authority they got by leveraging content marketing.

Rip Curl: Some businesses talk the talk and walk the walk; and Rip Curl is one of them. Rip Curl understands how content marketing works and uses this understanding to present themselves as “the ultimate surfing company” by way of a dedicated blog called The Search.

The search showcases the surfing lifestyle and chronicles surfer’s stories as they search for the best waves and live the surfing lifestyle. It’s a blog for surfers by surfers, making use of stunning photography and videos to create an experience which die hard surfers would relish.

The result? 100,000 YouTube subscribers and 2 million-plus followers on Facebook.

Rip Curl is one of the best examples of matching powerful storytelling with the right audience to grow a business and make it profitable.

GE: This is a classic tale of how a corporation used social media and content marketing to change its perception as a boring, vague, industrial company into a visible, design friendly company.

GE wanted to “drive interest among the next generation of potential shareholders” as well as inspire and attract possible future software and engineering employees.

They turned to Instagram, the storytelling platform par excellence.

They combined their campaign with influencer marketing by bringing six Instagram influencers onboard and inviting several superfans to do the #GEInstaWalk. During the event, visitors would tour the facilities dealing with wind turbines, locomotives, jet engines and so on, uploading and hashtagging pictures on their Instagram accounts.

The results speak for themselves:

8 million views on GE’s Instagram account.

3 million people reached per tour.

3000 new followers.

All without any paid advertising.

Conclusion

These are just 3 examples from diverse fields that show how content marketing works to paint your business in a new, exciting, and relevant light. You can make your company or business matter more in the hearts and minds of your target audience by doubling down on your efforts to tell the right stories the right way.

If it could work for a company as, supposedly, dull as GE, then it can certainly work for you. You have an audience to find and a story to tell. Turn your back on the naysayers and get to work.