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Content Marketing Lessons from Red Bull and Ford

Two Best Content Marketing Example For You - A Practical Approach

Content marketing  is all about creating and distributing information that is meaningful, relevant, and consistent in order to attract and keep a clearly defined audience, which will eventually generate profitable customer action.

Today I will give you an in-depth understanding of three of the most valuable insights related to content marketing used by brands and persons. The first insight comes from the iconic marketing campaign carried out by Ford in 2011. This case study teaches us many things about how marketing, in general, has evolved over the past 20 years. 

Now because you and I both grew up during the times of the social media revolution, which is why we do not realize how much social media has changed the dynamics of marketing. A straightforward example to understand the same would be to look at automobile marketing, which is the marketing of cars.

Digital Marketing vs Conventional Marketing

Digital-Marketing-vs-Conventional-Marketing
Digital Marketing vs Conventional Marketing

From the 1990s until 2008- 2009, Ford, like any other company, had four primary marketing mediums: TVs, radio, newspapers, and billboards. They used to spend millions of dollars on finding the best location, sponsoring the most popular events, and hiring the best ambassadors possible.

But, even after spending so much, they had little scope to find out what exactly was causing the customers to buy the product? Was it the radio ad, were the tv ads doing exceptionally well or was it the combination of both doing very well?

If you look at the case of billboards, let’s say they put out 100 billboards. They had minimal scope to determine which 30 of those 100 billboards were grabbing the people’s attention. So, they had to spend millions of dollars and hope that the output would be worthy enough. 

But after social media, this marketing pipeline has become so powerful and accurate that it is beyond our imagination, and that’s where our case study comes in. In 2009, a mastermind named Scott Monty came out with the idea that redefined the standards of automobile marketing forever. 

How Ford Used Digital Media to Market Fiesta

Now back in 2011, Ford was about to launch its fiesta model in the United States, and what they did was about two years back in 2009, they hand-picked hundreds of social media influencers and gave them the car for six months, with a few tasks. All they had to do was make videos and tell the world about their experience with the vehicle.  

In 2009, social media was starting, and it was still in its baby stages. So, to the conventional marketers, it looked like a marketing gimmick, and nobody expected anything extraordinary to come out of it. 

Coach me, but you know what? The entire automobile industry was shocked to learn that the campaign turned out to be one of the most successful campaigns ever executed by Ford, and this is what the result looked like in terms of visibility. 

content-marketinng-example
content-marketinng-example

Results of the Ford’s social media marketing campaign

It got 6.2 million YouTube views, 750,000 Flickr views, 40 million Twitter impressions, and more importantly, in terms of sales, it reached 50,000 potential customers. Six thousand pre-ordered the fiesta, and you know what the best part was? 97 of those 50 000 potential customers were first-time Ford buyers. 

Now, if you’re a marketing student, you would understand that it takes five times more money to get a new customer than sell it to an existing customer. This is what made the fiesta movement an insanely successful campaign. 

Now, as far as the campaign was concerned, Ford can look into the micro details of the campaign, find out how many people saw the campaign, how many people engaged with the campaign, what kind of people engaged with the campaign, which influencer’s video was best, which influencer’s video did not work and more importantly, they can draw a direct correlation between the campaign and the outcome of the campaign. 

Lessons Learnt

This is what gives us two precious lessons over here; number one, there is a paradigm shift. In marketing, that is happening right now, and we are moving very quickly from paid media to earned media. 

In 2021 if you want to grow your business, you have the potential to leverage content marketing. No matter how small your business is, the best way to leverage content marketing would be to use storytelling to create valuable pieces of content for your audience. 

So, if you want to leverage content marketing and are comfortable with my teaching method, you can take up the Communication masterclass and learn to tell powerful stories eventually to boost the visibility of your company and revenue. 

Red Bull Exploded Their Sales by Marketing Stratos Project

Insight number two comes from the genius content marketing strategy of Red Bull. If you look at the Red Bull, people like a product; it’s a non-alcoholic product. Not the tastiest drink in the world and, of course, not the healthiest drink in the world.  But even then, every year, Red Bull manages to make a billion dollars, and all of this is mere because of their marketing strategies. 

content-marketing-strategy-example

To tell you about it, this story dates to October 14, 2012, when the Red Bull came out with something called the Stratos project. 

When they decided to throw a man from the stratosphere to break the record of the highest free-fall jump, they got hold of a professional skydiver by the name of Felix Baumgartner, and they spent 65 million dollars on preparation and social media campaigns. 

Now just like the Ford campaign, everybody thought that Red Bull was crazy to spend 65 million dollars on marketing an energy drink. But do you know what the result was in terms of visibility? 

Results of the Red Bull’s Digital Marketing Campaign

They got 8 million YouTube live stream viewers, making it the most-watched YouTube live in history. They got 52 million views on the webcast. It got shown on 70 tv stations, 3.2 million tweets, 72 000 mentions with #redbull, 22,000 Instagram photos and more than 130,000 Facebook shares. 

When all of this happened, even the news channels and newspapers started reporting this event. This content marketing strategy gave them so much profit that even they did not anticipated this.

Eventually, they got a ton of PR, and the most astonishing fact of all is, Red Bull spent 65 million dollars to carry out this campaign. Some reports say that the visibility they got out of it and the publicity they got out of it was worth more than a billion dollars and the direct result in sales.  

Red Bull

Sales rose 7% in the following six months, generating 1.6 billion dollars in revenue. This brings us to the second most valuable insight from this book: content is fire, and social media is gasoline. Your business will explode beyond your imagination if you know where to light it.

Now the question is, these billion-dollar brands are doing it. That’s fine, but what about ordinary people like us? How do we market our work? That’s where the third insight comes into play: how to monetize your craft using social media. 

Print-on demand marketing strategy; My friend’s story

This is the story of my friend Rohan about three years back. He used to make these wonderful portrait paintings, but despite making great paintings, he could not find a way to monetize them. 

But then, two years back, he came out with this brilliant idea to make identical portraits. Instead of making them on a canvas, he started making them on coffee mugs, and he positioned them in such a way that he said you could give the perfect gift to your loved ones by giving them customized mugs. 

For example, for Mother’s Day, you can gift your mother a mug with her beautiful portrait on it. Valentine’s day, if you wanted to give something to your fiancé, you could bless them with a cup with a beautiful message and both of your portraits. 

Guess what? Every time somebody received his mug, they posted a WhatsApp and an Instagram story, thanking Rohan for his work and their loved ones for the gift.  

Every time someone posted a story, Rohan got a new order, and today this guy is overbooked during all such gift-worthy occasions. This brings me to the most valuable insight that Gary baba preaches every single way: social media is nothing but word of mouth on steroids. To leverage it, you must find a way to make efficient use of content marketing strategies and  make your work a value-add in someone else’s life.

The Conclusion

If you got a fantastic product 20 years back, it was practically impossible for you to scream it out to 500 people. But today, it is just one click away regarding a WhatsApp status and an Instagram story. Merely with that one press over a button, you are screaming you content out to 1000 people in your contacts, who are spread all across the country, and this word-of-mouth publicity is by far the most powerful medium of content marketing.

 

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Citations

Baker, K. (2022, May 25). The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing in 2021. HubSpot Blog. Retrieved June 23, 2022, from https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/content-marketing

Red Bull. (2012, October 14). Red Bull stratos. Red Bull Stratos – Discover the incredible story. Retrieved June 23, 2022, from https://www.redbull.com/pk-en/projects/red-bull-stratos

Wong, E. (2010, May 18). Why Ford’s Fiesta 2011 launch is a ‘pretty big deal’. Adweek. Retrieved June 23, 2022, from https://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/why-fords-fiesta-2011-launch-pretty-big-deal-107387/

 

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