I’ve noticed two examples of content marketing done right. I suppose I didn’t notice content marketing gone wrong simply because if it’s done incorrectly it wont actually be noticable.

The first example is DigitalOcean that has many guides on how to do server tasks available on https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials It, of course, makes a lot of sense since their target marketing would be people who aren’t too experience in server admin and therefore would need help but are interested in experimenting. They are also not pushing their services too much in their content making the content part the primary objective rather then the marketing part.

A couple of examples of their articles:

• “Setting up swap on Ubuntu”: if you Google this their articles are top two results.
• “Slave master mysql”: they’re ranked higher then the official MySQL docs for this and their articles are actually a better starting point then the docs for someone who has just decided to learn this.

Second example is Buffer and they write about social media marketing on their blog https://blog.bufferapp.com/ Once again, their content is very appropriately targetted towards their target market in this case relatively advanced users of social media platforms who are implementing a more serious social media marketing strategy. Their content is similar to DO since it focuses on the content rather then the marketing part. They offer articles on trends, tools and skills for their target market.

They mainly focus on their podcast, and I’m not a big fan of those, but they post the recap as articles. I for example got a few good ideas from the recap of the podcast about story telling. Other interesting articles included advice on making videos as well as a relatively comprehensive guide to starting a Facebook page for a business which was useful to me since I don’t really use Facebook.

They are also famous, or well-known rather, about the fact that they’re very transparent about how they run their organization which also attracts a lot of attention in peolpe who aren’t their target at the moment but are likely to become in the future.

The examples above as well as when I was learning SEO has convinced me that the most important thing is to be genuine and to actually work for the user. If you try to game the system and do content marketing just for the sake of content marketing you’re bound for failure. If you approach it as a genuine effort to convey knowledge and experience it will more often then not pay off.