Your content marketing strategy can be an excellent lever for growth – but it’s easy to go wrong. Many small and medium businesses waste money because their content isn’t aligned with their audience expectations. The content sits on the company blog but never gets seen, and definitely doesn’t drive any real results. However, it is possible to see success with content marketing. In this article, we’re going to take a look at companies doing content marketing well and dissect their strategy for you. You’ll be able to take the lessons and apply them to your content marketing strategy to help achieve the results you’re looking for. Let’s jump in.

1. Metigy

At Metigy, we are building the world’s largest community of forward-thinking SME digital marketers. We have created a world-class education program called Metigy Learning to develop your confidence as a marketer by providing the very latest in tips, tricks and insights from real businesses and marketing experts. We incorporate a range of content types into our content strategy to ensure there’s something for everyone, and our content helps bring the right people to our product. Here are the key pillars of our content strategy:

Content in the Formats Our Audience Wants

Video can be an excellent content format, if you use it well. We run a video series called Small Business Over a Small Coffee where we interview and share real customer stories and case studies, to help our audience learn from other business owners and marketers. We also host webinars with marketing experts, including the team from Google Australia.  Webinars and videos are an engaging format that any business can use, with 64% of website visitors who watch a video being more likely to take your desired action. You can now create high-quality videos on your phone and as long as the content itself is worth watching, people will enjoy it. We’ve also invested in audio content – over a third of Americans listening to podcasts every month, and we have seen great results from tapping into that market. You get access to distribution channels like Spotify, Google Podcasts, and Apple Podcasts. We launched the Forward Thinking Podcast where each week we talk to inspirational business owners, brands and marketing experts to learn from their experiences on the front line and uncover what it takes to build a world-class business. We then repurpose these interviews into new blog posts and social media content.

User Generated Content

We create unique case studies using user-generated content as part of our Metigy Marketing Awards campaign. These case studies contain actionable tips that real customers have implemented in their campaigns to generate ROI.

Blog Posts, How-To Articles, and Expert Roundups

Answering questions and solving pain points is a great way to attract qualified visitors to your site. We have a whole category of how-to articles that help answer the burning questions our audience has to help them level up their marketing knowledge, and publish expert round ups so our audience can get advice from other marketers in their shoes.

2. Canva

Canva’s growth strategy has netted them over 15 million users to date, and their content strategy has been a core reason for that growth. Let’s take a look at how they’ve done it. Related: PR Masterclass with Liz Mckenzie from Canva

Jobs To Be Done

Nearly all of Canva’s content is focused on helping its users complete their Jobs To Be Done (JTBD). In Canva’s case, this could be to complete their first social media banner or design a business card. Their blog posts, videos, and onboarding emails all help their users complete that, and in turn, keep using the product. Their Design School video series helps people use Canva to its potential, and they’ve been able to 10x their traffic to that section of their site as they’ve grown by creating content around every task and pain point that people try to solve using Canva.

Content That Improves Retention

Canva’s onboarding emails are personalised for what the user was doing on the site, and how far they got into the product. They include suggestions and tutorials to encourage users to complete the signup, and the effect is huge – their onboarding emails improve week one retention by a massive 35%.

Be the Best on the Web

Canva’s content is comprehensive. Everything is written by subject-matter experts and designed to be the best content on the web on that particular topic. This helps them rank for their target keywords and attract a high volume of new users every month.

3. Intuit QuickBooks

Intuit QuickBooks, an accounting software package, used content marketing to fuel its growth. According to Ahrefs data, Quickbooks currently gets 4.1M organic hits per month – not bad, right?

Hit Every Pain Point

They do this by creating content around everything their ideal customers care about. They mix informative, educational posts with case studies and news articles relevant to their industry. Another key lever for growth is their support section. They have hundreds of FAQ articles, as well as video tutorials to help people solve their pain points using Quickbooks. These help new customers onboard themselves and see the results they want from Quickbooks.

4. Help Scout

Help Scout is another brilliant example of how to do content marketing well.

Pillar Pages Improve Usability

You’ve probably heard about the importance of “pillar pages” and their effect on both SEO and usability. If you’re looking for a real-life example of pillar pages done well, look to Help Scout. Related: How to create topic clusters to drive traffic to your website For example, their “Complete Guide to Customer Support Metrics” is an in-depth dive into everything you need to know about tracking your customer support efforts. They also link out to a ton of other useful resources to help you learn about customer support.

Combining Text and Video

They also make the content accessible by providing it in multiple formats. At the start of the article, they’ve embedded a 30-minute video if you prefer watching a video to reading.

5. Ahrefs

Ahrefs have their finger on the pulse when it comes to content marketing, and they’re open about it being a core driver of growth for them.

Promote Their Best Content

Firstly, they make it easy for people to find their most popular blog posts. They notify users inside the product whenever new content is published on their blog to help drive traffic to new articles that could help them use the product more effectively.

Actionable Blog Posts

Second, their blog posts are extremely high-quality. They’re packed with value, and always contain lots of screenshots to help readers replicate the strategies they’re talking about.

Video Courses for Customer Acquisition

Finally, Ahrefs also has two video courses. These courses help attract their ideal customers to their site, and the courses highlight the benefits of their own tool throughout. Once a user completes the course, signing up for a paid Ahrefs plan would be the natural next step.

Wrapping Up

Content marketing is a big investment, but once you have implemented a system to regularly create, post and promote high-quality content that your audience resonates with, you will start to see the results compound. It’s not easy to do, but by taking inspiration from the above companies who are seeing results from their content strategy, you can start to gather ideas to implement in your own company. What does your content marketing strategy currently look like? What types of content are you experimenting with? Let us know in the comments below.