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. What they did here, is they actually created a portal where people could go ask them any question about their food. You've got to think about this blows your mind that McDonald's would take this because it sounds very, very risky. In fact, they get some really, really interesting questions. I'm showing you here some of the samples. 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 real dairy for example? What do they think it is? Plastic or something? If this is the thing that is very common on this portal. Here's a sample question. When you say 100 percent beef, do you mean the whole cow, the organ, snout, brain, kidneys, et cetera, or just a plain beef we buy at the grocer? Man, that's a tough question. But McDonald's was very straightforward and the response so they explained that, 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're going to get all these bad things. Everybody's going to see it and I'm going to think horrible things. But the reality is 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 him about why they did this on the site, and basically what it came down to is they felt like they needed 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 out there he said channels, but comes down to social media channels, that it gets hard to monitor all of them. By creating this one central place where people could go, it gave them a place where to connect with McDonald's for these questions. 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." 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. Some campaign highlights. The transparency is a big deal. Authenticity of what they're doing, just the honest, open answers to the questions. 16,000 questions answered so far, more than 3.1 million views, this is what's cool about that. They leave all those questions out there so future people can read and browse through them, and 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 B2B example, because you may be thinking at this point, content marketing is just for B2C companies, but Fisher Storage Tanks is definitely not a B2C company. I'm pretty sure I'm not buying a storage tank anytime 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. What was the outcome of all this? Well, that first of all, overall web traffic up, organic traffic up, social media traffic way up, increase in lead conversions, et cetera. 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 to that great content that they were producing. 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. It's very much in line with what you see from the other major sports here in the US. How did they do that? Well, they did it by placing a lot of focus on this platform. You'll remember in the social media module, I talked about how 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. There are also strong on the other social channels. On Facebook, over 2.6 million likes, almost 1.5 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 it 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. What's really helped them drive success with this is they had active player in organizational participation and those people end up acting as role models. The fans actually want to engage with those people. 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 this example. We've talked about some larger companies. Now I want to talk about a smaller brand. 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 product line. But it turns out that they do a brilliant job. They focus on creating content about the eco-friendliness of things. Their Facebook page, for example, has over 1.3 million likes on it. They do this by positioning themselves in this unique way. It's a health and wellness company that just happens to produce consumer packaged goods. 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 and 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 in the focus. You can have a top-down view to guide you as you begin to put together your own campaigns.
