Content marketing is central to digital marketing activities in that it permeates almost every aspect of a business, from social media to website development and everything in between. To this end, content marketers play important roles in helping businesses grow their digital platforms by creating, publishing, and sharing materials designed to attract new customers, sell products or services, and increase a company’s online visibility.
In this content marketing guide, we will look at five standout companies that are leading the field. They are an inspiration for emerging content marketers and are great companies to follow for emerging and experienced digital marketing professionals and anyone looking to start their own business.
What is Content Marketing?
What separates digital content marketing from traditional marketing is its focus on bringing value by educating and engaging customers rather than “selling” products outright. As companies offer content that is of genuine interest, users have the opportunity to actually learn and use bits and pieces of information, thereby getting to “know” a brand before they commit to a purchase.
Great content marketing is targeted and genuine, offering products and services that speak to an audience in a real way. Marketers can choose to do this through a number of formats, some of the most effective being videos, email marketing, social media, and even webinars. The beauty of content marketing today is that, with so many incredibly accessible tools out there, we have the opportunity to be more and more innovative at a fraction of the cost that we would have back in the day with traditional marketing.
5 Top Content Marketing Companies
- HubSpot
HubSpot has positioned itself as a giant in the content marketing world. Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah originally created the company after they met as grad students at MIT. Ten years later, they have nearly 2,000 employees and are true leaders in the field of digital marketing.
One reason that HubSpot stands out is that they offer so much information and even a few services for free. This free online tool can give you a taste of how quality content marketing can turn site visitors into paying customers. Other free online tools include services such as Lead Flows, Contacts Database, Integrations, Kickback Emails, and more.
As a SaaS (Software as a Service) clients can log into the customer portal in a centralized location rather than having to purchase software that needs to be installed locally. Their blog receives over one million hits per month and therefore clearly is a leader in SEO standing. Their secret to success is creating content that optimizes the potential of transitioning users into customers.
It is estimated that 70% of a customer’s journey has been completed by the time they seek out a salesperson to help them with a purchase. HubSpot has become successful by helping to steer and influence a consumer’s decision-making during that first 70% of the time.
- TED
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’re most likely familiar with TED talks. TED hosts conferences around the world where influencers and experts give short, timed talks about their areas of specialization. These often engaging and informative videos are shared all over social media and in blog posts.
But, did you also know that TED is a major player in the world of content marketing? It isn’t that they provide marketing services in the way that HubSpot does. But they are certainly leaders to the extent that they’ve leveraged in-person events to create high-quality educational material and made it available and accessible to anyone who wants it.
They now have over 9.5 million YouTube subscribers on just their main channel alone. With five million people receiving a notification every time a new video is uploaded, it’s easy to see the value of good content marketing, as well as the influence TED now enjoys.
TED’s main platform is YouTube, of course, where they upload a new video nearly every day, and even offer videos about content marketing itself. It is estimated that their videos have been viewed over a billion times.
- Hawke Media
Hawke Media is a brand-focused agency based out of Santa Monica, California that offers a full range of digital marketing services for businesses of all shapes and sizes. Their content marketing specialties include email marketing, Facebook advertising, SEM, paid acquisition, design, influencer marketing, media buying, affiliate marketing, and more.
One way that Hawke Media differentiates itself is that offers a la carte CMO-level marketing solutions, making it more affordable for smaller businesses and startups. They strive to provide each business with the highest return on their investment by customizing their services to the unique needs of their clients.
Hawke is a small but fierce up-and-coming player in the industry and they’ve worked with several major brands including Verizon, Raleigh, and Fjallraven.
- KISSmetrics
KISSmetrics is a leader in data collection and analytics and has many services to support businesses of various sizes in their content marketing systems and strategy.
They are focused on helping clients access the right information to help develop meaningful strategies that are brand-focused and truly meaningful. They’re also known for their own excellent content library, of which they offer plenty out for free to the public in the interest of digital marketing learning and education.
KISSmetrics is one of the Top 10 Conversion Rate Optimization Software products. By delving deep into customer behavior, the metrics provided by this company are extremely valuable. This information tells businesses how they are doing, and shows where they can impro
- Influence & Co.
Influence & Co. helps companies connect via truly engaging and innovative content. Their key offerings include Executive Branding, Content Marketing Strategy, and larger-scale specific Content Projects such as Infographics and ebooks.
Influence & Co has grown from two employees to over 75 in the past two years and has offices in Columbia, Kansas City, and St. Louis. The company has become a thought leader for various media and online publishing companies.
Influence & Co. believes that content is the strongest tool for driving business, generating leads and sales, and establishing truly sustainable customer relationships. They pride themselves on being experts in the field who can deliver your company the best quality, most impactful content to help your business maximize its ROI.
Marketing Tools: 3 Essential Ones to Make Your Life Easier
You can’t please everyone all of the time. However, as a marketer, it’s your job to try and use marketing tools to disprove this age-old John Lydgate quote (if you’re curious, he was a poet ), and get absolutely everyone interested in what you have to say.
Sure, you can’t sell your product to everyone, but the more who know about it, and like your brand, the more exposure you’ll get. In the longer term, this means more leads will trickle through and convert into precious sales.
Sounds tough? Well, for the most part, it is. Thankfully, there are hundreds, if not thousands of marketing tools to help you in every part of the process. From planning right through to display advertising tools, there is software designed specifically to make your life easier.
It can be overwhelming to dig through all the available software, so we compiled a list just for you. Here, we take a look at the best marketing tools for each task facing marketers today.
- Planning
A vital part of any marketer’s job is planning. It’s the foundation that everything else is built on, so you need to be sure you’re getting this part right. We wrote about how planning used to be one of our biggest sticking points, so we had to change the way we worked.
After looking at a few options for software that were designed to help organise the process, we finally landed on one which was intuitive, well-designed, and simple.
That program is Trello.
For those unfamiliar, Trello is essentially a digital organization board where you can break bigger tasks down into individual steps, and assign steps to different members of your team. On the surface, it’s super simple to use, but the more familiar you get with the tool, the more you realize how flexible and deep it can be.
One huge benefit we found is that what seems like a huge, complicated task at the beginning can look really simple and manageable when it’s all broken down, and assigned to the different team members.
Deadlines are easily applied, and there’s a satisfying flow to this marketing tool. Once you set a flow for your workload (planning, in progress, awaiting authorization, and complete, for example), it’s oh-so-satisfying moving the task cards along, until they reach the complete column. Then, when the cards in ‘complete’ start to stack up, you can proudly look back on all you’ve achieved.
Only for a second though…you’ve got to move on to your next project now. The Trello board says so.
Some alternatives:
While neither of these are marketing tools in the strictest sense, they help marketers to work in a more agile, efficient way.
Jira – A little more complicated and in-depth than Trello, and slightly more difficult to get to grips with at first. Once you learn the system, though, it’s flexible, deep and intuitive, and a viable alternative.
Asana – This is a wide-ranging project management tool, used by the likes of Uber and The New Yorker. A well-designed, easy-to-use platform, that is more focused on pushing projects forward and maintaining cross-team communication.
- Social media advertising
If you want to be where your audience is, some sort of presence on social media is absolutely essential. Now there are options and advertising tools on every major social platform too, so you can access a wide range of totally different demographics.
The best tool is really dependent on which network is best for your particular audience. If you’re selling direct to customers, Facebook is fantastic. If you’re a business to business…business, LinkedIn is a good bet. If you’re selling clothes, or something more visual, Instagram works really well. The article on Venturebeat describes their first foray into Instagram ads returning more than ten times the engagement of a similar ad on other social channels.
Overall, though, which marketing tool works best and makes advertising on social media a breeze?
That would have to be Facebook.
Firstly, it’s the network with the biggest user base. As well as having over a billion users, most businesses can be found there.
Secondly, it’s really simple to advertise. The programmatic options are extensive, and you can drill down into really fine detail based on user behaviors and tastes, but to actually publish and target an ad, it couldn’t be easier. It’s all self-explanatory and intuitive.
Thirdly, it allows you to advertise all over the web by checking a single option. The Facebook network is extensive and means your ad will be seen on a huge number of different sites, as well as Facebook itself. If you want it to, of course.
There are options whatever your budget and the reach can be astounding.
Protip – you don’t have to do it all manually. You can manage and schedule your posts through various apps and programs. We use Hubspot, and it has made it incredibly easy to ensure we are active on all social networks regularly, without having to constantly hit the post button. Edgar and Buffer are great for this too.
Some alternatives:
LinkedIn – Great for advertising business to business, the way you advertise is similar to Facebook. The analytics are solid, too.
Instagram – Technically part of Facebook, but the advertising opportunities here are very different. Great if you have a product best presented in image or video.
- Display Advertising Tools
When it comes to online display advertising, there is a whole host of display advertising tools out there to help you. Even if you focus solely on the production of banner ads, a number of options can seem almost staggering.
What are the most important things to look for in a display advertising marketing tool?
The display advertising tool or ad creator needs to be easy to use, and intuitive. It also needs to produce all ads in HTML5. From there, you want to be able to implement video, animations, and rich media quickly and easily. You also need to be able to create a number of different sizes and translations ideally with just a few clicks, so you can scale your ads without any hassle.
From there, the tool needs to be able to publish your ads with minimum fuss, and you need to be able to edit your ads after publishing if necessary.
Which display advertising tool can do all of this, and more?
Bannerflow.
It’s an incredibly powerful tool, but one that’s easy to use. Everything is in HTML5, and scaling up campaigns takes a matter of minutes.
Through Direct Publishing, you can get your banner ads out to more than 20 of the biggest ad networks, and in front of your audience, in just a few clicks.
The variety of banners you can create is huge, too. Whether you want to use video, rich media, or animated widgets, all you need to do is drag and drop the appropriate module onto the canvas. It’s already changed the way our customers work for the better.
DC Thomson, a media agency, said “BannerFlow allows us to sell sophisticated ad campaigns and enables our designers to be more creative when executing conceptual ideas. This also empowers our sales executives and gives them the tools to compete at a local level delivering artwork on a par with a high-end agency.”
