Content Marketing Case Studies: A Start

Contents

Why Content Marketing Case Studies? Why Now?

content-marketing-case-studies-gotta-start-somewhere-open-books-overlapping

First, credit where credit’s due. 

I’ve always been enamored with UnderConsideration’s opinions and review on corporate logo design and brand identity via their blog: “Brand New.” Branding is a subjective art. New logos roll out and are either met with acclaim or disdain. 

Consider the feeding frenzies over Uber, AirBnb, and more recently The Met.

Wherever you stand on logos and brand identity, “Brand New” does a fantastic job breaking down design for both the graphically inclined and the newb. Their reviews typically kick off a fantastic conversation about that particular logo and the design as well.

What to Expect (And I Need Your Help)

In the spirit of “Brand New,” I wanted to start reviewing the content marketing being developed by brands in the B2B, B2C, for profit and not-for-profit space.

If you want to submit your company’s content marketing efforts for profiling, contact me on Twitter and we can discuss.

A lot of this “analysis” will be anecdotal. But if we can get real data from companies who’ve had success with content, I’d love to hear from you. 

The goal is to review one brand a month. 

The idea came when I was reading about Fast Company’s “Most Innovative Companies.” Content, and how companies position themselves vis-à-vis their content, is as important as branding and logo design. As I read about the most innovative companies, I was curious to know more about their content marketing strategy. How do they talk about themselves? Do they have a style guide? What’s their approach to social media? How responsive are they? 

One thing that’s going to be difficult to gauge is the ROI of these content marketing efforts. Whenever possible, I’ll try to include metrics and ROI. But mostly, these reviews will be qualitative, subjective reviews of content marketing campaigns. I’m really hoping for an ongoing conversation after posting the review.

In one sense, we already kicked off this when we looked at our own content efforts, with posts like this one about our most successful posts, or this analysis of one piece of content. We won’t measure everyone by the same yardstick we used on ourselves, but our deep understanding of what worked and what didn’t work will help inform our analysis of content marketing efforts by various brands out there. 

These case studies will likely evolve as new content channels enter the fray (brace yourself for chatbots). My aim is to keep the review focused and tight. The real goal is to hopefully engender an ongoing conversation about the reviews online with anyone who cares to comment. I’ll likely repost each review on inbound.org, Medium, and LinkedIn(?). Obviously, it would be nice to have everyone’s feedback in one place. So…let’s just cross that bridge when we come to it (that’ll be a good problem to have, I guess!).

Stay tuned. 

Pat Armitage

Questions? Check out our FAQs or contact us.