There are many reasons why you’d want to do content marketing for your brand:
- Improve your SEO presence by driving more backlinks and traffic to your site.
- Expand your brand awareness and become an authority in your niche.
- Start a conversation with potential customers and generate leads.
- Feed your sales funnel with qualified traffic.
- Build a trusting relationship with your audience.
But as a business owner, you need to know how a successful business looks if you want to replicate its success.
Since content marketing is getting more popular over the years and 71% of B2C brands have a content marketing strategy. I’ve gathered the best content marketing examples from ecommerce businesses of all kinds.
These examples do a great job at accomplishing branding, SEO, sales, and trust-building. So if you want to drive your content marketing strategy in the right direction, then keep reading.
Example #1. Blume
As an online store that sells skincare products, Blume is aware of all the pains and desires of its target audience, including dry skin, acne, and the like.
And you can tell this is true from the type of content they create. The content speaks directly to an obvious yet easy-to-miss pain point—unconfidence.
You see, it’d be easy to write content about their best anti-acne products or exfoliation tips. But addressing an emotional pain such as lack of confidence from acne makes this example stand out.
Customers buy from emotions first and logic second. So hitting their most sensitive spots is a sure way to help them make the right purchase decision.
You can do the same if you do customer research the right way by having excellent communication with your customers and caring enough about their problems.
With great customer research, you won’t struggle to come up with content ideas anymore.
Example #2. JOI
Selling almond paste would be incredibly dull if it wasn’t for JOI’s honest mission to help people have a dairy-free diet and make the planet cleaner.
Its content adds to the effort to make its mission a reality. Sharing an endless amount of dairy-free/vegan recipes and educating about how their product is made with 100% Californian almonds.
The results are evident. You suddenly want to take their quiz, start following these recipes, and try their appealing almond milk yourself—even if you’re an omnivore.
Imagine if JOI’s website would only be a single product page with no logo or appealing messaging. The branding and valuable content are what make the heavy-lifting on their success.
JOI is an excellent example of how branding and content marketing can work together to bring greater results than the sum of its parts.
Example #3. Bow Wow Labs
Bow Wow Labs sells chewing sticks and treats for dogs of all breeds, including a flagship product that prevents dogs from swallowing dangerous sticks.
Considering the particular focus on keeping your dog safe, its content attracts dog owners who want to learn how to take proper care of their pets. Covering topics like best diets, recipes, safety tips, and so on.
This content makes it so its audience becomes worried about their dog’s safety—making them more likely to purchase a “bully buddy” and healthy treats from the store.
The reason why it works is that it’s mainly focused on addressing a specific pain point that hits the emotional buttons of its audience—which is more than just writing about dogs and mentioning your products everywhere.
You can learn from Bow Wow Labs how you can focus your entire content strategy on touching *one* pain point (hence the importance of customer research).
Example #4. Soft Services
Soft Services is an online skin care store. Selling products like clearing clay, care cream, and soaps for any skin treatment you need.
However, knowing exactly how your skin works, what kind of problem you have, and which treatment you should choose is a tricky subject—that’s why the website has created content that addresses these issues.
Instead of creating a blog, Soft Services has a “mass index” page that compiles different articles covering different concerns like body acne or dry skin—all written by expert contributors.
The articles are formatted to immediately show a table with essential info about a specific symptom. And then explain its definition, causes, treatments, prevention, and related articles (and products)—simulating the same effect as Wikipedia.
This content isn’t necessarily targeted to attract traffic from SEO or go viral. Its purpose is to teach a worried audience about their problems and build enough trust to make an educated purchase decision.
To do the same, all you need to do is to be genuinely helpful to your audience, digging deeper into their problem and your solution. While also providing a great user experience and writing content that’s clear.
Example #5. Soul Insole
Soul Insole is a foot care brand that sells shoe bubbles and other accessories to alleviate/prevent foot problems like plantar fasciitis or over-pronation.
Foot health is quite complicated and underestimated. So it’s hard to see value on heel supports and insoles if you don’t understand the subject.
Which brings Soul Insole to create the Education Hub, so visitors with foot problems can learn about their issues and do something about them.
Its content covers different foot ailments, video tutorials of exercises, product FAQs, and an ever-expanding blog about foot health.
The goal is simple: make their audience aware of their problems so they can take proper actions (and purchase a product).
In a niche where people are unaware of potential problems or opportunities for improvements, you’d have to follow a similar approach to build a consistent customer base that understands and loves your products.
Example #6. Burrow
Burrow is a very professional brand with a vast diversity of customizable furniture for your home, a curated catalog that fits your needs, excellent customer support to come up with ideas, and an active community.
Since Burrow intends to innovate in their industry, they need to build an inspired audience with ideas, guides, and engaging storytelling.
Their content marketing involves conversations with experts, furniture guides, insights, and decoration ideas. They even have an “inspiration” page that shows different themes and recommends the furniture shown in the images so you can “shop the look.”
What’s more interesting, however, is the format they use in their content. Instead of following a constant margin and centered text, the content is divided by blocked sections—resembling the style of a landing page.
But not every post is an obvious guide on decorating your house for Christmas. There are also many stories from people in the decoration business, like this conversation with Jasmine Archie telling the story behind her fake cakes business.
Inspiration might be all it takes to engage an audience with your products, and that’s what’s been working for Burrow.
So if you want to stand out, try to diversify your content with more real-life stories from either your customers or niche influencers instead of obvious how-to guides.
Example #7. Beardbrand
Beardbrand is a famous grooming brand that sells men’s beards, hair, and fragrance products.
The brand relies on its content marketing approach—which is a pretty classic blog that covers everything about hair/beard styles and grooming.
On every post, they never miss the opportunity to show a use case for their products and put them in front of their readers when relevant.
Plus, it’s not all about the best Hollywood beards of 2021. The blog is dynamic and includes anecdotal content like their experience after going no-poo for two weeks. It even has three quizzes you can take to find the right product for you.
But when you scroll down their blog a little bit, you’ll find that there are 76 pages full of content like this, which makes it evident that they’ve been doing this consistently and for a long time.
You see, content marketing is a long-term game. It rewards those who invest in creating content consistently and forever.
In fact, the number one reason businesses outsource content creation is to scale their production. Because if they don’t, they’ll lose traction and become irrelevant eventually.
So if you want to achieve the same success as Beardbrand, think about the years and the constant effort you must invest. Understand how your content is worth it for you.
What These Examples can Teach You
The best part about content marketing is that it teaches your audience how to be your best customer.
The brands we studied are great examples of how you should pivot your content marketing strategy for this year.
Here are the lessons you can learn from them:
- You must know your audience intimately if you want to resonate with them, like Blume.
- Use your branding to transform dull recipes into meaningful and consistent resources, just as JOI does.
- Create content that hits a specific but strong pain point the way Bow Wow Labs does if you want your audience to care about you.
- Educate your customers about their problems to help them feel more confident with their purchases, similar to Soft Services.
- Make your audience aware of a problem they could be ignoring—like Soul Insole—and offer the right solution.
- Follow Burrow’s storytelling approach to inspire your audience and give more meaning to what otherwise would be a “boring” niche.
- Publish content consistently and indefinitely as Beardbrand does. That’s the only way to succeed at content marketing truly.
Are you creating or changing your content strategy this year?
If so, take these lessons with you and win!
