If you want to be really good at playing golf, what do you do? Watch the masters and learn from them. You don’t just look at one player and mimic his or her style, either. You look at many different champions and dissect their moves to create your own game plan.
Perfecting your marketing technique is a lot like mastering your golf game. Make reviewing companies that do content marketing right part of every collaborative project management plan and learn from the best of the best.
Richard Branson and The Virgin Group
Richard Branson brings a fun, flirty and honest style to his game. If you are an entrepreneur looking for a role model, you could do worse. Branson is a hands-on player when it comes to marketing his companies, too. For one thing, he maintains his own blog on the company website. In it, he writes stories about his personal and business struggles that say I’m a regular guy that just happens to have made a lot of money. A good example of this is in his blog post: Life lessons from my father.
Mashable puts Instagram on their list of favorites, because the social media company draws its blogging power from its users. Instagram is based on the idea that a picture tells a thousand words. They translate that concept into their blog, as well. Through their Weekend Hashtag Project, for example, they invite the users to be their contributors and show the power of the picture at the same time. Their front page features people that are making their visual mark in the world.
Intuit Quickbase
Intuit Quickbase does something that you don’t really expect from a business with their girth; they blog about concepts that matter to people instead of about their products. The Fast Track blog is a pure discussion of project management and business trends. Every post doesn’t end with a call to action or plug. They don’t saturate their writing with industry keywords or brand names, either. It is there to engage business professionals with quality content that covers topics that matter.
Shopify
You would expect a company that has kind of a gimmicky flavor to it to produce a blog that sounds a lot like a used car commercial, but that is not how Shopify does things. Like Intuit, they recognize the power of the blog and focus on providing their target audience with information that engages their minds. Shopify appeals to the tech in you and so does their blog. They cover tech-based topics that matter to small business owners looking to get ahead in the big, Internet ocean.
When is a blog more than just a blog? When you treat it like a game of skill and precision. One thing all these industry champions have in common is heart. That means focusing on the needs of their audience first and providing content that makes them want to come back day after day to see more.
Writer Bio: Darla F is a full-time freelance writer who specializes in helping agencies meet their goals by developing creative and engaging content.
