Content marketing is a refined way to connect with your audience.
Whether you want to gain a deeper understanding of your customers’ needs or want to showcase brand identity and tell your story to potential customers, content marketing can help you scale.
However, coming up with creative content ideas is tough!
While you can use content marketing in many ways, including blogging, email outreach, social media content creation and distribution, video production, e-books, infographics, increasing your Shopify store sales and more—you have to unscrew a lot of tight bolts to come up with inspiring, ‘needle-moving’ ideas.
Below are 15 examples of top-notch creative content marketing ideas you can take inspiration from—From unique strategies to one-off creative examples, we discussed them all.
Zomato’s ‘’Happy women’s day’’ Email
How often does a restaurant-finding app make a list of creative content marketing ideas to draw inspiration from? Rarely. But hey, here we are; Zomato’s on the list and for exclusive reasons.
Apart from Zomato’s unique digital marketing strategy and its trendy and minimalist approach to social media, the way it references popular culture and promotes personalized messages with its email and in-app notification can make you order a plate of sushi you’ve zero appetites for.
Zomato’s happy women’s day email shows the effort, energy, and enthusiasm its marketing team put into every ad. That’s to say that sometimes, you’d only find inspiration when you decide to put in the work.
Indeed’s “New Beginning” Commercial
Creativity is not always about creating humorous content out of trendy topics. Sometimes, you need to step back and address issues affecting underrepresented groups in the workplace.
For Indeed’s ‘New beginning commercial,‘ what spun their creative wheel was the need to help nonbinary individuals add their pronouns in their profile and gracefully approach interviews with heads held high.
Inspiration comes in different ways. But the best ideas come when you address topics you’re passionate about. If, like Indeed, you stand as a genuine LGBTQ+ ally or feel a burning desire to elevate marginalized voices, invest in ideas that speak to the soul.
Apple’s “Shot On an iPhone” Campaign
It’s nice to have a creative team that can brainstorm ideas and create original content from start to finish without outside help. But what’s even better is a creative team of brand loyalists—consumers who’d go the extra mile to see your brand thrive.
Apple’s professionalism, creativity, and unique design earned millions of occultic followers. Of course, such occultic following would mean more sales pitches and less interactive messages for most brands. But for Apple, it meant an opportunity to reduce overhead while allowing its audience to explore their interests and talents.
Shot on an iPhone is a user-driven campaign featuring photos Apple users shot on their iPhones. Simple message: ‘Yes, you can take photos as the professionals do with our product.’ Social media influencers loved the campaign, and billboards around the country helped stamp a lasting impression.
Slack’s ‘What’s New’ Section
When we talk about creative ideas, the mind easily wanders to the next blog post, a how-to guide, or an inspiring video created by a video production company. To further explore and promote creative content, why not consider running a Slack poll to get the opinions of your team on the matter? Indeed, these are great mediums to explore and promote creative content. But no, they’re just the chosen few that come to mind, not the only ones available.
As irrelevant and uninspiring as it might seem, Slack’s marketing continues to impress with its ‘what’s new’ section on its app update page. Yes, that simple write-up highlighting bug fixes and new updates in Slack’s app makes many users excited.
Slack shows that you can get creative with any content; it doesn’t matter how hidden or irrelevant it might seem. Make your content enticing, and somewhere, somehow, it would get people talking.
Zendesk’s Alternative
Hundreds of keywords flood your space. Regardless of how many optimized contents you put out there, you can’t rank for everything. The goal is to rank for those that matter and ignore the rest.
When Zendesk, a Help desk software powering over 100,000 businesses, found out that the keyword ‘Zendesk’s alternative’ ranked high among prospects; instead of leaving the keyword to chance or allowing another brand to make the best of it, they hijacked the keyword and designed a mini-site around it.
Some of the best content inspiration comes from paying close attention to the little things that matter. For Zendesk, it was a keyword; for you, it could be anything. If you can keep your eyes open and your ears on top of trends, you’d be amazed at your content ideas.
Sender’s Blogging Strategy
Every marketer talks about how impactful and powerful blogs are. But very few know how to create and maximize blogs to their fullest potential.
Sender is an email marketing service provider using blogs to empower its audience and win new clients strategically. Yes, Sender’s optimized blogs educate and entertain, but that’s not the catch.
We value the way Sender segmented their blogs into multiple categories based on keywords and search intent, ensuring consumers and prospects can skimp through without much ado.
If you’re just starting or have a few blogs under your name and believe now is a good time to optimize and segment your blogs, you might want to draw inspiration from Sender’s unique blogging strategy. Or better still try out Sender’s automation tool–a great way to automate your email marketing endeavors.
Take a look at Sender.net automation right here:
LinkedIn’s ‘’How LinkedIn Uses LinkedIn for Marketing’’ eBook
And here we are, thinking the primary goal of marketing is to convert a new audience into paying customers.🤔 Maybe LinkedIn shares the same viewpoint, but certainly not from the same perspective.
LinkedIn uses its marketing eBook to help existing customers use the platform effectively. The company eBook provides stats, tips, and tricks to help you win with LinkedIn on LinkedIn.
eBooks are great content marketing materials for offering a how-to guide or detailed description that can easily be made with eBook creators. However, LinkedIn’s method of helping its users win by highlighting its own marketing approach only shows how confident and exceptional they believe the brand to be.
Simply put, if nothing inspires you about others, detail your brand’s approach to any winning strategy you might have and allow your audience a thirst for it.
Coca-Cola’s ‘’Share a Coke’’ Campaign
Most folks have a soft spot for personalized content. We can all agree that the simple idea of a personalized email header or a customized abandoned cart text message can make us rethink our buying decisions.
However, if you think the only way to send personalized messages is with emails, SMS, or social media shout-out, the Coca-Cola ‘Share a coke’ campaign might make you rethink that notion.
Coke kickstarted its ‘share a coke’ campaign in Australia by including 150 common names in bottles and advocated that consumers share a coke. After selling over 250 million bottles in Australia, it customized millions of other bottles to fit common names in other regions.
The result was a global success.
So, if you’re ever down on content marketing ideas or need inspiration for a campaign, think personalized messaging—it’s evergreen.
The Joe Rogan Experience
Most marketers view podcasts as a good medium for content marketing but not as the most valuable for their brand—mainly because they believe most consumers gasp for breath at the marketing materials they receive daily.
And since podcasts are expensive, time-consuming, long-form content, they might never have time to explore. Indeed, this belief holds some atom of truth.
But hey, sometimes, for some marketing efforts, nothing beats good old podcasts. If you’re the podcast junction {the marketing section where only podcase would suffice} and don’t know which turn to take, we recommend you take a sneak peek at Joe Regan’s playbook.
The Joe Rogan Experience podcast has over 8 million subscribers. Joe’s podcasts are accompanied by a YouTube video, allowing his audience to enjoy two valuable pieces of content in a single shot. His YouTube channel also has over 10 million subscribers.
Come on! If anyone knows a thing or two about podcasts, it’s Joe Rogan. Take a sneak peek at his playbook.
MindBody’s business content hub
Content creation is all about leading with value. If you can’t put out valuable content, you’re better off investing in PPC or any other marketing strategy that suits you.
MindBody’s business content hub perfectly exemplifies what we mean by leading with value. The content hub offers helpful webinars, blogs, and events visitors can consume to achieve revenue goals.
By giving consumers the tools and resources they need to achieve their own goal, MindBody positions itself as a thought leader, and information hub prospects and existing customers can’t do without.
The message here is simple, stop focusing on creative content that hustles your clients for every dollar. If you’re going to get creative, put in the energy, time and resources—your customers deserve better.
Old Spice ‘‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’’
There is a world image for everything. We all have a preconceived notion of how a gentleman should behave, what a virtuous woman should look like and how good kids should act.
We are not big fans of the ‘Should’ tagline and biased comparisons, but it’s unavoidable at the moment—no gain in denying its potential.
Old Spice spiced things up with the ‘‘The Man Your Man Could Smell Like’’ ad. It placed a world image of what an ideal man should look like, then enticed its audience {which for this ad were women} that with Old Spice, their man could smell like that.
So yes, you can get creative by jettisoning the old-world image in favor of something—you just have to draw inspiration from concepts relevant to your ideal audience.
Ahrefs: ‘How-to’ Content
In an ever-evolving world, we can unanimously agree that consumers are bound to face multiple challenges daily—that’s why it’s surprising many folks still don’t view Googling as a highly-priced skill.
Anyways, Ahrefs uses how-to content to help its users figure out complex challenges and position its features as ideal solutions. For example, watch how Ahrefs answers this question while seamlessly mentioning its keyword explorer.
While you might tag this creative idea as salesy and think it wouldn’t help your marketing efforts, you might want to reconsider the notion that customers love genuine brands. So yes, they expect you to brag a little if your solution can solve your problem.
HubSpot’s Lead Magnets
When evergreen blog posts spin the wheel for your sales funnel, you get to morph the mundane, physical world into a colorful space where consumers need your content to go through their day-to-day activities.
HubSpot started investing in content marketing when the idea of success was still debatable. And here they are today, unarguably dominating the space.
While there is not much inspiration to draw from the fact that HubSpot is not competing with anyone, harnessing inspiration from their lead magnet strategy can help you scale speedily.
HubSpot offers regularly updated and repurposed content with swift CTAs and enticing lead magnets to nurture and guide readers at any stage of their journey. Not much thinking here; it’s more of a copy and paste strategy—you just need to do the same.
Web flow’s ‘HelloSign Experience’ case study
As you already know, you can get creative with any content. It doesn’t matter whether the goal is to attract sales or build a reputable brand identity—when you invest time and effort into creating content, the creative energy speaks for itself.
Almost every B2B brand has a case study on its website, but here we are, telling you to look at Web Flow’s ‘HelloSign Experience’ case study as a source of inspiration. Because yes, they’re doing things differently and going the extra mile to produce results.
Web Flow uses this case study to highlight every aspect of HelloSign’s experience, from the point of contact to solution and outcome, followed by a testimonial that persuades. If Web Flow’s case study inspires you, don’t hesitate to invest in directional case studies—it’s a sure-fire way to inspire clients.
Beaconstac’s ‘Cut Printing Cost’ During Inflation Strategy
QR Codes have been with us for a while, and their use cases have only recently diversified. From becoming the most common payment method to becoming the star of advertisements, QR Codes are now one of the strongest marketing tools ever. And just like that, Beaconstac’s QR Code generator has brought to light how a simple QR code can help businesses reduce operational costs by replacing print media with QR Codes.
With the high inflation, businesses are struggling to cope, and print costs have been at an all-time high. But QR codes have matched up to replace traditional print media and cut down its cost by 98%. So whatever the content you are trying to market, QR codes can bring more flair that even traditional paper can’t. Check out Beaconstac’s blogs on more interesting content from the digital world of QR Codes.
Conclusion
Good content is hard to come by. It’s especially hard to create when you don’t have a marketing background. But it’s extremely hard to get more customers if you don’t have good content.
Our 15 examples might inspire ideas, tips, or strategies to get you started, but they are just examples, nothing more!
If you really want to get creative and produce good content, you must put in maximum effort. There are no shortcuts to content marketing, just strategic planning, determination, and a large appetite for success. Good Luck!
