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Three Holiday Content Marketing Campaigns That Gave a Rosy Glow This Year

It is official: the holidays are over. I’m still coming to terms with the fact that I ate way too much of my sister’s homemade chocolate cheesecake and that I’m actually back at work today. But this is a good thing (well, at least the latter is). The reason being that although I was away for the majority of the week spending time with family, I was also feeding my workaholic side by checking e-mails on the daily—and spotting some great examples of holiday content marketing in the process.

As a consumer, content marketing makes me feel great. Whether it’s a daily newsletter, a blog, a special video or a simple e-mail, personal messages really do make me feel like brands know me by name and actually appreciate the money I spend with them.

Every single company should have had a holiday content marketing plan this season. Here are some great examples that I received from some of my favorite brands this week. For all of you out there with content marketing New Year’s resolutions, these are some invaluable tips for getting it right on the first try.

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Going the Extra Mile to Strengthen Customer Relationships

I was in need of a break.

001H8178It snowed here in Connecticut last week. I am by no means afraid of driving in the snow, but after a enduring a harrowing experience en route to college in Vermont one winter—a taxi merging onto the highway didn’t yield to me during a snowstorm so I slammed on my brakes and 360’d across two lanes of traffic, coming to rest in a soft, snowy ditch—I try to avoid it when possible. I’m still driving that endearing jalopy of a 2001 Nissan Altima, so that day I worked from home, sights set on proving Marissa Mayer wrong. (If you’ll remember, earlier this year, after taking the reins at Yahoo, Mayer famously forbade her employees from working from home.)

As a diehard Yankees fan, I was still stung by the news that franchise second baseman Robinson Cano had opted to take his talents to Seattle, thanks in part to his new agent Jay Z seeking to make a big name for himself in his latest professional endeavor. And he did, helping Cano land a 10-year, $240 million contract, the third largest in baseball history. Continue reading “Going the Extra Mile to Strengthen Customer Relationships”

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Going the Extra Mile: What We Can Learn from WestJet’s Secret Santa Treat

There is no disputing the fact that companies across all industries and verticals step it up during the holidays—from holding food drives to volunteering to spearheading charitable campaigns.

One of my favorite campaigns took place two years ago when eBay, in partnership with Toys for Tots, set up two magical window displays in New York City’s Herald Square and San Francisco’s Post Street featuring storybook toys such as teddy bears, trains, and horses. By using the eBay mobile app and zapping the QR code, visitors were able to bring the toys to life and consumers could purchase a virtual toy, which translated to a donation between $2 and $10 for Toys for Tots.

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Three Easy Ways to Instantly Engage More Customers Using Your Facebook Page

facebookSay what you will, but Facebook still reigns as one of the world’s top social networks. According to the latest study by GlobalWebIndex.com, Facebook boasts a nearly 50 percent utilization rate by active Internet users worldwide. Facebook usage is also highest in North America with a 59 percent utilization rate among active users. Meanwhile, Google+ only achieves 15 percent and Twitter 25 percent.

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How Product Packaging Can Effectively Become a Part of Your Content Marketing Strategy

Marketers are always on the lookout for the next best thing to help them ramp up their content marketing strategy; however, one avenue they may not have considered traveling down is product packaging. The actual packaging that your product is delivered in can be optimized for content marketing purposes, and a few designers excellently prove this. Recently, BuzzFeed listed a few brilliantly designed packaging ideas that blew my mind as a content marketer. Maybe they will help inspire you or your product development team on new ways to reinvent the wheel, too.

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How Jean Claude Van Damme Can Revitalize Your Brand

In today’s world of viral videos, marketers are put in the unique position of knowing that if they create something that’s clever and one-of-a-kind, there’s at least a remote possibility that content can spread across the Internet like a wildfire. And recently, there’s at least one video that has done precisely that.Bloodsport-3

Creating an ad to showcase the precision steering and accuracy of its fleet line, Volvo released a video earlier this month featuring Jean Claude Van Damme. The commercial starts with a close up on the 53-year-old actor’s face and torso and slowly zooms out to reveal that he’s standing on the rearview mirrors of two adjacent trucks, which are traveling slowly in reverse. Continue reading “How Jean Claude Van Damme Can Revitalize Your Brand”

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Three Quick Tips for Retailers to Optimize Their Mobile Holiday Content Marketing Strategy

mobile holidayThis year’s holiday season lines up on the calendar so that it is six days shorter than usual. For consumers, being just a week shy of the regular holiday hustle may mean less stress and a quicker winter season; however, for retailers, this shortcoming represents the potential disturbance of their annual holiday profits. In fact, these six days could potentially cost retailers $1.5 billion in lost sales, according to a new survey commissioned by Adobe Digital Index.

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What’s in a Name? What’s in a Brand?

shutterstock_112457309Confession… I am having a bit of an identity crisis. Let me backtrack.

I have just come off of what can only be described as the best two weeks of my life. On October 26, in front of our beloved family and friends, a beautiful sunset and a birch wood, fall-colored altar, my husband and I (still so strange to say that!) said, “I do.” It was the beautiful culmination of five incredible years of dating, one long year of planning and countless well wishes over the last few months. And it truly was, as everyone predicted, the best day of my life.

That Saturday evening was electrifying—from the reading of our personal vows to our first dance to the cake cutting to the throwing of my bouquet. It was a whirlwind of emotions and one of those defining life events. Continue reading “What’s in a Name? What’s in a Brand?”

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What Marketers Can Learn from Senator Ted Cruz’s 21 Hour Speech

The next presidential election is still more than three years away, but in today’s world of instant information, members from either side of the aisle need to raise their profiles significantly in order to have a formidable seat in the national conversation.

ted cruzFollowing in the footsteps of U.S. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), who held a 13-hour filibuster earlier this year to question America’s use of violent drone strikes, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) took to Capitol Hill on Sept. 24 and spoke for more than 21 hours, urging his colleagues to support the defunding of the Affordable Care Act, commonly referred to as Obamacare.

Though not technically a filibuster—the Senate was scheduled to begin debate on a bill that would prevent a government shutdown at noon the following day, and they did—Cruz’s antics generated a ton of buzz, both good and bad, throughout every corner of the Internet and from anyone politically-connected. Continue reading “What Marketers Can Learn from Senator Ted Cruz’s 21 Hour Speech”

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Even Horse ebooks Has a Content Strategy

I’m sure by now you’ve heard of the Internet phenomenon that has been the apple of Google Search’s eye over the last 24 hours. Of course, we’re talking about Horse ebooks. In a perplexing occurrence, Horse ebooks went from being barely recognized one day to sole obsession of the mass public the next – with myself included. And if you’re anything like me, you had – or perhaps still have – no clue as to what Horse ebooks even is.

Just so you’re no longer in the dark, Horse ebooks is a widely perceived spam Twitter account which was originally intended to promote ebooks. However, the ways in which the account did this were particularly unconventional and included odd –albeit amusing – non sequiturs. These non sequiturs (see below) were apparently an effort to evade spam detection, which results in the shutdown of an account. The account also tweeted multiple times per day – most of which receive hundreds of re-tweets and favorites.

horse1 Continue reading “Even Horse ebooks Has a Content Strategy”