20 Content Marketing Examples From Brands That Get It Right
Content marketing works best when it doesn’t feel like marketing at all. The strongest examples entertain, educate, or genuinely help an audience first, and let brand awareness follow as a side effect. Here’s a breakdown of what content marketing actually means, followed by real examples of brands that have done it well, and what each one teaches about building a strategy that works. What Is Content Marketing? Content marketing is the practice of creating and distributing content, such as blog posts, videos, infographics, and social media posts, that doesn’t explicitly sell a product but builds interest in a brand by being genuinely useful or entertaining. Done well, it builds rapport with an audience, establishes a brand as a credible source of information, and drives leads and sales as a result, rather than as the direct pitch. Common content formats include: If you’re just getting started, it helps to understand the basics of content marketing before studying examples. From there, here’s a look at brands executing it well. 20 Examples of Content Marketing Done Right Canva’s Design School Canva built out an entire library of design tutorials and tips through its Design School, positioning the company as a resource for design education, not just a design tool. Canva has also run recurring social media challenges encouraging followers to recreate featured designs using its platform, generating user content while showcasing what the software can do. Key takeaway: Publishing genuinely useful educational content in your industry builds authority, and inviting your audience to create their own content with your product extends your reach organically. Spotify Wrapped Spotify’s annual Wrapped campaign compiles each listener’s personalized data, their top artists, songs, and total listening time, into a shareable summary. It has become one of the most anticipated content marketing moments of the year, largely because users do the promotion themselves by sharing their results on social media. Key takeaway: Personalized content that reflects something specific about the user, rather than generic messaging, drives far higher engagement and organic sharing. Duolingo’s TikTok Presence Duolingo built one of the most recognizable brand accounts on TikTok, growing from a few thousand followers to well over 17 million by leaning into humor, trend participation, and a recurring mascot character rather than direct product promotion. The account has gone through real ups and downs since its peak, a reminder that even a strong social strategy needs to keep evolving rather than repeating the same formula indefinitely. Key takeaway: Entertainment-first content can build enormous reach, but sustaining it requires ongoing creative risk-taking, not just repeating what worked before. HubSpot Academy HubSpot built its reputation in content marketing partly through HubSpot Academy, a library of free courses and certifications covering marketing, sales, and customer service. By giving away genuinely useful education, HubSpot positions itself as an authority that companies turn to when they’re ready to buy software. Key takeaway: Free, high-quality educational resources can be one of the most effective top-of-funnel content strategies, especially in industries where buyers need to build expertise before purchasing. BlendTec’s “Will It Blend?” BlendTec’s YouTube series showing its blenders pulverizing objects like phones and marbles turned a fairly ordinary product demo into genuinely entertaining content. The series built a loyal following and became closely associated with the brand’s identity. Key takeaway: Demonstrating a product’s capability in an unexpected, entertaining way can outperform a conventional product demo by a wide margin. Red Bull Media House Red Bull took content marketing further than almost any other brand by building an entire media division. Red Bull Media House produces sports, music, and lifestyle content that has little to do with energy drinks directly, distributing it through its own channels, a magazine, and streaming platforms. Key takeaway: A brand doesn’t have to constantly mention its product to build brand equity. Becoming a genuine source of entertainment or information in a space your audience already cares about can build loyalty that direct advertising never could. GoPro’s User-Generated Content Strategy GoPro built much of its marketing around content its own customers create. The brand curates and features user-submitted photos and videos on its website, YouTube channel, and social accounts, and runs an annual awards program that rewards top submissions with cash and gear. Key takeaway: When a product is genuinely built for capturing great moments, the most convincing marketing often comes from letting customers show what it can do, rather than producing every piece of content in-house. Amazon’s In-Garage Delivery Content Amazon has used its Key In-Garage Delivery service, which lets couriers securely deliver packages inside a customer’s garage, as a way to highlight both innovation and a direct solution to package theft, a real and growing concern for online shoppers. Key takeaway: Content built around solving a specific, relatable customer pain point tends to resonate more than content that’s purely promotional. Neutrogena’s Creator Studio Neutrogena launched a platform inviting influencers and everyday content creators to share their experiences with its products, with the chance to be featured on the brand’s own channels or included in sponsored campaigns. Key takeaway: Inviting creators to generate authentic content on your behalf can produce more relatable marketing than in-house production alone, while also surfacing real customer feedback. Buffer’s Blog and Educational Content Buffer, a social media management tool, built a loyal following through consistent, genuinely useful blog content on social media strategy, paired with visual content like infographics and video tutorials. Key takeaway: Consistency matters as much as quality. A steady publishing rhythm on topics your audience actually cares about builds long-term organic reach. The Washington Post on TikTok The Washington Post uses short, engaging videos to cover news headlines and current events on TikTok, making news more digestible for a younger, mobile-first audience. Key takeaway: Adapting long-form or traditional content into short, platform-native formats can reach audiences who wouldn’t otherwise engage with your brand. Apple’s “Shot on iPhone” Campaign Apple’s long-running campaign showcases photography taken entirely on iPhones, often through public photography challenges where winning entries are featured across Apple’s own marketing channels, stores,
Content Formats in Marketing: A Complete Guide to Every Type (2026)
Content formats in marketing are the different mediums and structures through which brands communicate ideas, information, and messages to their audiences. A content format can be a blog post, a video, a podcast, an infographic, an email, a white paper, or a webinar, among many others. Each format serves a different purpose, suits a different audience behavior, and performs better on certain platforms and at certain stages of the buyer journey. Understanding which formats exist, what each one is best used for, and how to choose between them is one of the foundational skills of any effective content marketing strategy. What Is Content Marketing and Why Formats Matter Content marketing is the practice of creating and distributing valuable, relevant content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience, with the goal of driving profitable customer action. Unlike traditional advertising, which interrupts people with a sales message, content marketing earns attention by providing something genuinely useful. The format in which that content is delivered matters enormously. The same information presented as a 2,000-word article will reach a very different audience than the same information presented as a 90-second video or a two-page PDF guide. Format affects discoverability, engagement, shareability, and the type of action a reader or viewer is likely to take afterward. Businesses that understand and use multiple content formats consistently outperform those that rely on a single format. Using a variety of formats lets you appear in more places, reach people with different content preferences, and reinforce your message across multiple touchpoints before a buyer makes a decision. The Three Broad Categories of Content Format Before diving into specific formats, it helps to understand that all content formats fall under three broad categories based on the primary sense they engage. Written content includes blog posts, articles, white papers, ebooks, case studies, email newsletters, and any other format where the primary medium is text. Written content is the backbone of most content marketing strategies because it is highly searchable, easy to produce at scale, and well-suited to conveying complex or detailed information. Related: The Art of Crafting Engaging Long-Form Content Visual content includes images, infographics, videos, slide decks, and any format where the primary medium is something you look at. Visual content tends to be more engaging and easier to consume quickly than written content, and it performs particularly well on social media platforms and in email. Audio content includes podcasts, audio interviews, audio recordings of articles, and any format where the primary medium is sound. Audio content has grown significantly as a category in recent years as on-demand listening has become a mainstream habit. It suits audiences who prefer to learn while commuting, exercising, or doing other tasks. Many effective content pieces combine more than one category. A video with a written transcript, an infographic embedded in a blog post, or a podcast episode accompanied by a summary article all blend categories to maximize reach and accessibility. Content Types vs. Content Formats: What Is the Difference This is one of the most commonly confused distinctions in content marketing, and it is worth establishing clearly. A content format describes the medium or structure of the content, meaning what it is. A blog post is a format. A video is a format. A white paper is a format. A content type describes the purpose or intent behind the content, meaning what it is trying to do. Informational content teaches. Promotional content sells. Inspirational content motivates. Entertaining content engages for its own sake. Commentary content shares perspective on current events. Thought leadership content positions a brand or individual as an authority. The same content type can be executed in multiple formats. An informational piece about email marketing best practices could be a blog post, a video tutorial, a downloadable PDF guide, or a podcast episode. The type is the same. The format is different. Choosing the right format for a given content type depends on your audience, your distribution channels, and your production resources. Understanding both dimensions gives you a much more flexible and deliberate approach to content planning than thinking only about what you are going to write. Every Major Content Format Explained Blog Posts and Articles Blog posts are among the most widely used content formats and for good reason. They are highly searchable, relatively inexpensive to produce, and well-suited to answering the questions that buyers are already typing into search engines. According to HubSpot’s 2024 State of Marketing Report, blogs remain one of the top three highest-ROI content formats across industries. An effective blog post is built around a specific search query or topic, provides a thorough and accurate answer to that query, and is structured in a way that makes it easy to scan and read. Blog posts work at every stage of the buyer journey: awareness-stage posts educate, consideration-stage posts compare options, and decision-stage posts make the case for a specific product or service. The length of a blog post should match the depth of the topic. A definition post might be 600 to 800 words. A comprehensive guide might be 2,500 to 4,000 words. Length should be determined by what it takes to fully cover the topic, not by an arbitrary word count target. Case Studies A case study is a detailed account of how a specific customer used your product or service to solve a specific problem and what measurable result they achieved. Case studies are one of the most persuasive content formats available because they provide real-world evidence of value rather than brand claims. Effective case studies follow a clear structure: the customer’s situation before engaging your brand, the specific challenge they faced, the solution you provided, and the quantified outcome. The more specific the numbers, the more persuasive the case study. “Increased organic traffic by 214% in six months” is far more compelling than “significantly improved website performance.” Case studies are particularly powerful in B2B marketing, where buyers face high-stakes decisions and want evidence that a solution has worked for businesses similar to
LinkedIn Content Strategy: The Complete B2B Guide for 2026
A LinkedIn content strategy is a structured plan for creating, publishing, and distributing content on LinkedIn to achieve specific business goals, whether that is generating leads, building brand authority, or growing a professional audience. An effective strategy covers content types, posting cadence, audience targeting, and performance measurement. LinkedIn, owned by Microsoft since 2016, is the world’s largest professional networking platform with over 1 billion members across 200 countries as of 2024. For B2B businesses in particular, no other social platform comes close to matching its reach among decision-makers. Why LinkedIn Should Be Central to Your Content Strategy LinkedIn is consistently outperforming other social platforms for B2B content marketing, and the numbers back that up. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 96% of B2B content marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content, and the platform accounts for more than 80% of B2B social media leads across the industry. That performance gap exists for a few concrete reasons. It is a professional environment by design. LinkedIn users open the app with a professional mindset. They are looking for industry insights, career development resources, and business opportunities, not personal updates from friends. That makes them far more receptive to business-focused content than audiences on other platforms. The targeting options are unmatched for B2B. LinkedIn lets you target by job title, seniority level, company size, industry, department, and geographic location. If you sell enterprise software to CFOs at mid-market manufacturing companies, you can reach exactly that audience, not a rough approximation of it. The audience is made up of buyers. Four out of five LinkedIn members drive business decisions at their companies. When your content reaches a LinkedIn feed, there is a strong chance it is landing in front of someone with purchasing authority. Engagement is higher than most platforms. LinkedIn members are significantly more likely to engage with and share professional content than users on general social platforms. The platform sees more than 1.5 million pieces of content shared every minute, and organic reach for quality content remains stronger on LinkedIn than on Facebook or Instagram. It builds credibility over time. Consistent publishing on LinkedIn compounds. Each post, article, or video adds to your brand’s perceived expertise in your space. Over months and years, that compounding effect translates into inbound inquiries, speaking invitations, media mentions, and partnership opportunities that are difficult to trace back to any single piece of content. How to Build Your LinkedIn Content Strategy Step by Step Step 1: Define Your Goals Before writing a single post, you need to know what success looks like. Vague goals produce vague results. Your LinkedIn content goals should be specific, measurable, and tied to a timeline. Common LinkedIn content goals include increasing brand awareness within a specific industry, generating a target number of qualified leads per month, growing your company page follower count by a set percentage, driving traffic from LinkedIn to a specific landing page or resource, and positioning a founder or executive as a recognized voice in their field. Each goal requires a different content approach. A follower growth goal calls for broader, more shareable content. A lead generation goal calls for content that educates and moves buyers toward a decision. Getting clear on your primary objective before you start is what separates a strategy from a collection of posts. Step 2: Identify and Understand Your Target Audience Your LinkedIn content will only work if it is built around a specific audience. Generic content for everyone is content for no one. Start by building a clear picture of your ideal reader. What is their job title? Which industry do they work in? What problems keep them up at night, and what does a solution look like to them? What do they already know about your category, and what do they need to learn before they are ready to buy? LinkedIn’s own analytics tools make this easier than most platforms. Once you have at least a few hundred followers, LinkedIn provides demographic data on your audience, including their job titles, company sizes, industries, and geographic locations. Use that data to validate or revise your assumptions. You should also look at the profiles of your best existing customers. Note their job functions, the groups they belong to, and the content they engage with. That gives you a real-world profile to write toward rather than an imagined one. Step 3: Audit Your Competitors and Industry Leaders Before you start publishing, spend time studying what is already working in your space. Identify five to ten competitors or industry voices who are active on LinkedIn. Look at their most-liked and most-commented posts over the past three months. Note the formats they use, the topics that generate the most engagement, and the angles that seem underexplored. You are not looking to copy anyone. You are looking for content gaps, ideas that no one in your space is addressing well, or formats your competitors have ignored. Originality on LinkedIn comes easier when you know what already exists. Also Read: Why Competitor Analysis Is Critical for Your Marketing Strategy Step 4: Build a Content Pillar Framework A content pillar framework organizes your content around three to five core themes that are both relevant to your audience and connected to your business. Without this structure, most brand LinkedIn pages end up posting reactively and inconsistently, which kills momentum. For a B2B content marketing agency like Contentika, those pillars might include content strategy and planning, SEO and organic growth, content production processes, industry case studies, and marketing leadership insights. Every piece of content should fall under one of those pillars. This approach has two advantages. It keeps your page focused and recognizable, so followers know what they are going to get from you. And it ensures you are consistently reinforcing your expertise in the areas where you want to be known. Step 5: Create a Content Calendar Once you have your pillars, map out your content calendar. A LinkedIn content calendar does not need to be complicated. At minimum, it should
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