In the last lesson, we discussed the power of partnerships and how they can help you with your overall campaign. Now, it's time to look at some case studies of people that are doing some great things with content marketing. Let's dig in. I love this one. This is from McDonald's Canada. And what they did here, is they actually created the portal where people could go ask them any question about their food. You gotta think about this, it kind of blows your mind that McDonald's would take this, because it sounds very, very risky. And in fact I get some really interesting questions. I'm showing you here some of the samples. And some of these questions are a little bit edgy. Like they're not really trusting that McDonald's is making real food. Is your ice cream really dairy, for example. What do they think it is? Plastic or something? This is the kind of thing that is very common on this portal. So here's a sample question. When you say 100% beef, do you mean the whole cow, the organ, snout, brain, kidneys, etc., or just the plain beef we buy at the grocer? Man, that's a tough question, right? But McDonald's was very straightforward in their response and they sort of, they explained. Shoulder, chuck, brisket, rib eye, loin and round. In fact we buy this beef from Cargill, the biggest supplier of beef in Canada. Very straightforward response. This is interesting because from a brand's perspective, a lot of brands are afraid, put themselves out like this. They think that it's going to be they're going to get all of these bad things and everybody is going to see it and there going to think horrible things. But the reality is that it created an opportunity for McDonald's to respond and actually do the right things to help their reputation, visibility, and frankly their brand advance. Here's some questions actually J Bare asked of the CMO of McDonald's Canada and he asked them about why they did this on the site. And basically what it came down to is they felt like they need to have a channel that they could own where they could have these conversations with customers. because there's so many different social media channels. Well, he said channels but it comes down to social media channels. But it gets hard to monitor all of them. By creating this one central place where people could go it gave them a place for to connect, to connect with McDonald's for these questions. And then when asked on why every company isn't doing this, I mean, the first sentence says it all, I think everybody's going to start, right. The way the Internet is evolving, the webs are evolving, everybody has connectivity with almost everything all the time and it's starting to be expected. McDonald's Canada has embraced this, very much to their benefit. So, some campaign highlights. The transparency is a big deal. Authenticity of what they're doing. It's the honest, open answers to the questions. 16,000 questions answered so far, more than 3.1 million views. So, this is what's cool about that. They leave all those questions out there so future people can read and browse through them. So that's why the views of the questions is so much larger than the number of questions actually answered. Here's another one. This is a B to B example. You may be thinking at this point, content marketing is just from B to- C companies. But Fisher Storage Tanks is definitely not a B to C company. So I'm pretty sure I'm not buying a storage tank any time soon. What they did is they added a blog to their website and they started putting really decent, high-quality content out there, addressing topics related to their business space. How to add 900,000 gallons to your water tank. It's not your average consumer problem. They also added a resource center, where they answered a lot of key questions and made it really easy for people to find things. So what was the outcome of all this? Well, first of all, overall web traffic up, organic traffic up, social media traffic way up, increase in lead conversions, etc, more quotes, increased revenue. But at the top of all that, you notice how I highlighted the organic traffic increase. Guess how that happened? Because they got links that had great content that they were producing. So now let's take a look at how major league soccer is doing. It's actually very competitive. It has almost 2.5 million followers. So it's very much in line with what you see from the other major sports here in the US. So how do they do that? Well they did it by placing a lot of focus on this platform. You will remember in the social media module I talked about how it can be beneficial to jump on platforms that other people aren't on as much. And that can help you grow your visibility in a very nice way. They're also strong on the other social channels. So on Facebook, over 2.6 million likes, almost one and a half million followers on Twitter, these are great presences where they have a lot of opportunity to engage with people. They also have a YouTube channel, Kick TV it's called, over a million subscribers. And another channel just for the sport overall has over 200,000 subscribers as well. They make heavy-duty use of Hangouts on air. And, that's been a great platform for them too. So, what's really helped them drive success with this, is they had active player and organizational participation. And those people end up acting as role models. And the fans actually want to engage with those people. So, what it really did for them, is it created that sense of relationship between the fan base, and the people who make up the sport. One more thing that I want to go through as an example. And so, I've talked some larger companies, and now I want to talk about a smaller brand, and this brand is called Seventh Generation. They sell diapers, toilet paper, cleaning fluids, and other household products. Surely, it's a nightmare to try to figure out how to create content for this kind of product line. But it turns out that they do a brilliant job. They focus on creating content about the eco-friendliness of things. And so their Facebook page, for example, has over 1.3 million likes on it. And they do this by positioning themselves in this unique way. It's a health and wellness company that just happens to produce consumer packages goods. So their message and their connection with their audience is about this eco-friendliness, health and wellness aspect. And the payoff is people decide they want to buy these consumer packaged goods from them. I gave you a wide range of different players doing some great things in content marketing online. Notice that not all of them were large enterprises as that is not a requirement to succeed with content marketing. Now in the final lesson of the final module of this course, I'd like to go back to the basics and recall the overall context of what makes content marketing work. My hope is that this will help you take all of the ideas and bring them back into focus so you can have a top down view to guide you as you begin to put together your own campaigns.
