Content marketing strategy determines SEO (to a large extent), establishes you as an authority, drives brand image, and drives sales.
Most of you are familiar with Alexa, the digital analytics arm of Amazon. Today, we’re very lucky to have a guest post from Jennifer Johnson, a marketing manager from Alexa. The guest post is based on an evaluation of Uber, Fitbit, and Ipsy, all successful online marketing firms, by her team.
An effective content marketing strategy can help your brand immeasurably. The upside of content marketing is that it isn’t particularly expensive, which means that smaller brands have a chance to compete with the big dogs.
To look at the effect of an innovative marketing plan, my team at Alexa examined the content marketing strategies of Uber, ipsy, and Fitbit – all content marketing winners in their own right. For each brand, we looked at:
Traffic/search strategy (including links, press, and traffic)
Social media strategy (primarily Facebook)
Blogs and vlogs featuring original content
Here’s what we found.
Winning at Traffic Strategy
Uber, a San Francisco–based company that connects riders and drivers in nearly 400 cities across the world, is worth over $62 billion. Search is a major source of Uber’s success. Thirty-three percent of the company’s traffic comes from search. An astounding 99 percent of Uber’s top 200 keywords contain the word “Uber,” which is a huge win for brand recognition.
Hashtag campaigns have also been a major help for Uber: The company has promoted numerous hashtags, including #UberSAFE (drunk-driving awareness) and #UberHEALTH (flu-prevention awareness).
For ipsy, a beauty-focused online community that offers a monthly Glam Bag containing personalized makeup and beauty products, having a celebrity as the face of its brand has proved successful. Nearly a third of the top sites that link to ipsy are articles written about co-founder and YouTube star Michelle Phan.
Also worth noting: Many Glam Bag subscribers link to ipsy in their profiles because its peer-to-peer program allows them to earn “points” when friends sign up through their referral link. Creating incentives for your subscribers to link to your site can help boost your name.
Fitbit offers an array of wearable sensors that track the number of steps taken, distance walked, calories burned, and other information to help people meet their fitness goals. How does the company fare traffic-wise? Of the top 30 sites that link to the company, more than one-third are articles from health blogs and a quarter are from tech gadget blogs. Promoting your brand and product to industry sites and blogs can ensure article coverage and link generation.
Winning at Social Media
There’s no one-size-fits-all social media strategy – some brands do better with listicles while others win with video content.
What works for the companies that Alexa analyzed?
At Uber, video is king. Less than 8 percent of Uber’s Facebook posts are videos, but video accounts for more than 15 percent of the company’s total Facebook shares. As we noted earlier, Uber also excels at hashtags: For a single day in select cities, the company delivered kittens and puppies to people’s offices for 15 minutes for a small “snuggle fee” to promote pet adoption and support animal shelters. The resulting hashtags, #UberKITTENS and #UberPUPPIES, have won the company social shares and media attention.
Ipsy uses timeliness to its advantage: The company’s Glam bags usually deliver the third week of each month. In the days leading up to delivery, the brand posts sneak peeks at what customers can expect. You can build buzz by providing behind-the-scenes information and teasers about upcoming products and services.
Let’s run over to Fitbit. The wearable maker usually uses Facebook to link back to content on its blog. More than 73 percent of Fitbit’s posts include links to its blog and relevant articles. Fitbit also uses social media to launch new products – the brand’s post about the launch of the Fitbit Alta got an impressive 4,500 likes. Fitbit also takes advantage of celebrity relationships; several well-known influencers act as “Fitbit Ambassadors,” promoting the brand on social media.
Winning at Blogging and Vlogging
Blogging regularly can be difficult, but it’s also a major key to success. Uber has published more than 150 articles in the past year. The average word count of an Uber blog post is 382, while the average number of pictures is two. The company is proof that sometimes, shorter is sweeter. Producing to-the-point articles regularly will help hold your audience’s attention. Uber’s blog also focuses on engaging and heartwarming topics, like the previously mentioned #UberKITTENS campaign.
Over at ipsy, vlogging is a champion: 99 percent of the company’s original content is produced via video. Videos often feature beauty hacks and tutorials as well as product sneak peeks, and the company has an impressive YouTube following with 1.1 million subscribers. When done well, video content can grab your audience’s attention quickly.
And Fitbit has a comfortable split between listicles and articles and typically posts about nutrition, fitness, and health. Only 4 percent of the company’s blog content is made up of videos. Unlike Uber, Fitbit finds success with slightly longer blog posts – the average article is 518 words, while listicles run about 660 words. Fitbit publishes constantly, which shows the importance of staying frequent with blog posts.
Regardless of your line of work, you can learn a lot from the content marketing strategies of brands like Uber, ipsy, and Fitbit. The right brand of content marketing will catapult you to the top and could even make your company a household name.
Jennifer Johnson is the Marketing Manager at Alexa. With a knack for syntax and a passion for building connections, she drives daily content strategy to bring you the latest and greatest happenings within Alexa and the wide world of web analytics and marketing.
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