It’s a new year, and with it come new opportunities for promoting your brand. It’s the perfect time to reevaluate your inbound marketing strategy, to see what worked over the last year and create new goals for the coming year. So while you’re examining and revising your campaign for 2014, it might be a good idea to seek inspiration from those who really nailed it in 2013. The website Search Engine People has put together a list of five great examples, in all different areas of inbound marketing.
- Air Force Priority E-mail Campaign. The Air Force wanted to target a specific and highly specialized group of people, to recruit them for a top secret project. The question became, how do you grab someone’s attention to tell them about a project that they, of necessity, have never heard of before? How do you get them interested in more information? What they did was to give a personalized demonstration. The project involved satellite surveillance. So they used their resources to gather information on each of their candidates, and send them in a direct e-mail, including a Google Maps satellite image of their house. The e-mail was probably a little jarring, but it did the trick: it showed them the kind of opportunity that was available, and that the Air Force wanted them specifically. The campaign went on to win a Webby award.
- Drayton Bird Associates Blog. Drayton Bird Associates is an online marketing company that offers clients a variety of direct media strategies for improving marketing strategies and responses. So of course they have a blog. But rather than the typical, stuffy marketing posts that so many other companies churn out, Drayton Bird employs a wry, offbeat sense of humor to make his posts stand out and keep his readers coming back for more.
- Four Seasons Hotels’ Website. Website design is an essential part of maintaining your company’s brand, and it’s something that’s easy to screw up if you don’t know what you’re doing. With that in mind, the Four Seasons luxury hotel and resort chain hired Huge, a digital advertising and design agency, to create a new website for them. The result not only won a number of awards for its look and usability, but, more importantly, it increased online bookings by 62 percent.
- WaterisLife – Hashtag Killer Social Media Campaign. WaterisLife.com is a charity that strives to bring clean, drinkable water to impoverished communities around the globe. So how do you make a first world person, whose biggest problem is that their cell phone charger doesn’t reach the bed, aware of the problems faced by people in a country they’re barely aware exists? By putting things into perspective. The Hashtag Killer campaign took tweets with the hashtag “#FirstWorldProblems” and had them read aloud by members of poor communities in Haiti. As a result, the #FirstWorldProblems hashtag began being used, instead of to complain, to promote WaterisLife and bring in donations, and provide more people with the clean water they need.
- English National Opera – Can I Be Your Friend? To promote their new opera about the oddities (and dangers) of people’s online lives, the English National Opera hired the Don’t Panic London marketing agency to create a video. In it, a man goes up to people in the streets, asks, “Can I be your friend?” and interacts with them in a variety of ways that have become commonplace online, but seem a bit strange in the real world. The video went viral and helped boost ticket sales for the opera in the process.
