Social Media Friendly Content Marketing [Examples]

3 Examples of Content Marketing That Get Customers Talking

Is your content marketing social media shareworthy? In other words, does your non-promotional content invite readers to participate and extend the conversation by commenting and sharing it with their family, friends and social media colleagues? Further, when your content’s shared, is your brand readily discernable on other platforms or via other channels (such as email)?

To help you develop social media friendly content marketing, here are three examples that use social media to engage prospects and extend their reach along with related content marketing lessons.

Make bad feedback good for business. In their own words, “the Hans Brinker Budget Hotel has been proudly disappointing travellers for forty years.” This hostel is definitely talkworthy. It’s got an amazing 182 colorful reviews on TripAdvisor’s. The one star Hans Brinker Hostel in Amsterdam embraces its poor quality and bad ratings in their content. The website shows bad pictures and make fun of the poor quality but at about 25 euros in Amsterdam it’s a bargain and a badge of honor for student travelers. As a well situated, cheap student hostel with better TripAdvisor traveler ratings than you’d expect, Hans Brinker Hostel’s tongue-in-cheek branding works for them. The Hans Brinker Hostel proves you can use customer input creatively to enhance and grow your brand. They’ve made bad ratings a badge of honor! 

Actionable Content Marketing Tips:

  1. Embrace customer feedback. It’s a great way to integrate content marketing and social media because customer check reviews before purchasing. Unlike The Hans Brinker Hotel, most businesses need to listen and improve their product. Are you willing to let consumers tell you what they really think?
  2. Make your brand talkworthy. At its core, consumer word of mouth is content. Even better is that it generally gets spread via one person telling others so there’s limited if any distribution cost and it has a customer endorsement (most of the time!) What about your product or brand will get people chatting?
  3. Find and integrate your brand’s core attributes into your content. The Hans Brinker Hotel uses its low budget approach with a dash of dry humor in all of its content. How can you make your content recognizable even when it’s on another platform?

Give fans the velvet rope treatment. Jermaine Dupri created Global14 to give his fans and followers a stage side seat to share his life. As a one-man content creation machine, Dupri turns everyday photos and products into attention magnets. Of course, it helps that he’s engaged with his followers who feel like they’re part of his life without being personal acquaintances. Marketers should spend time examining Dupri’s content and interactions because he understand and personifies his brand. Before you write off Dupri as a a musician who’s just leveraging his larger than life, cool personality, examine Global 14 where every visual is a love note to the product and people appealing regardless of your tastes.

Actionable Content Marketing Tips:

  1. Give your product’s visuals the star treatment. Think of each image, photograph or video as if it was walking down the runway at a fashion show.  Where’s your product’s sex appeal?
  2. Engage with your audience. Customers and fans interact on social media because they’re interested in the conversation.
  3. Stay true to your brand. Don’t try to be something you’re not because people will know it a mile away. What’s core to your brand’s values?

Give prospects help. Turnstone, a business furniture retailer targeting smaller, hip firms, takes content seriously to show their style. Since their business involves having a good sense of design and color, they make it easy for any customer to DYI their office design needs with free support through their content. Interestingly, I found about the site from one of their bloggers who was covering Social Media Week in New York to gather insights and tips for their readers. Wow—how forward looking! Even better, they’ve taken a page from Pinterest in their current blog redesign to show that they’re up with the latest trends. Their blog covers a variety of design and business topics. Each post contains at least one luscious photograph to inspire readers ideas. Turnstone serves up a variety of content options with a consistent look integrating their brand. Additionally, they ask customers and fans to share their stories complete with photos and videos.

Actionable Content Marketing Tips:

  1. Use content that inspires prospects to buy. Include images that make your products jump off the screen. Show readers how to use the product with photographs, video and text.
  2. Celebrate your customers’ stories. Turnstone makes it easy for customers to share their stories on their website.
  3. Integrate your products into your content. Turnstone’s blog serves up a mix of design related content and business tips. They make all products shown clickable so readers can purchase, even on other sites! As a marketer, I suggest adding a call-to-action.

To make your content marketing effective, it must reach out to your target market and motivate them to take an action towards purchase as well as to share the information with family, friends and social media acquaintances. To this end, ensure that your brand is recognizable and integrated into your content so that it builds your credibility on social media platforms.

Do you have any other content marketing recommendations to add? If so, what are they?

Happy marketing,
Heidi Cohen

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