As traditional media continues to decline, content marketing is becoming more important to reach new audiences. Winners of Ragan & PR Daily's Content Marketing Awards excel in many areas, including collaborating with experts, creating innovative video series, and reimagining corporate blogging.
Read practical, tactical ideas you can put into practice today from the 2023 Content Marketing Award winners. Find your name in the next article. Apply for this year's awards by February 16th.
Strategy of the Year: Bellabeat’s BPM-PR Company
Challenge: a TechCrunch's negative review comes after the company is working with consumers ahead of the launch of Bellabeat Ivy, a wearable device that monitors and tracks women's daily activities and biological responses and correlates the data with menstrual cycles, pregnancy, and other data points. It threatened to scare both investors away.
solution: While Bellabeat made changes to its mobile app, BPM-PR began working on redirecting the excitement of its launch from the tech space to the fashion, lifestyle, and wellness media markets.
This effort includes tactics such as endorsing actress and model Olivia Culpo, press surrounding Bellabeat's International Women's Day campaign, and media sensitivity to issues such as the Roe v. Wade reversal and privacy data concerns. It was BPM-PR also employs obstetricians and gynecologists, endometriosis, fitness, and meditation experts to incorporate into its PR strategy, as well as nutrition, menstrual cycle stages, postpartum depression, sexual health, and mental health. , we've hired experts for the Bellabeat podcast to provide health quotes.
BPM-PR Firm's campaigns have received top coverage in national and international media, including Time, Fox News, “Good Morning America,” and Digital Trends. One of the highlights of this campaign was when Bellabeat finally started receiving major tech media coverage, receiving positive reviews in outlets such as The Verge. The campaign ended up appearing in more than 195 media outlets, excluding television.
The idea of stealing: If one media outlet isn't working for you, change direction. By first finding other avenues for positive media coverage, we were able to build buzz with new audiences and lay the foundation for re-establishing trust with our core market.
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Winners of the Branded Content Series (Print or Digital) — B2B: Salesforce and Fortune Brand Studio
Challenge: Salesforce and Fortune Media wanted to demonstrate a commitment to both sustainability and entrepreneurship, which are core values for the company and its audience.
solution: What is “Ecopreneur”? This 11-episode video series takes a long-form, character-based storytelling approach that shows how companies are adapting to and solving some of the climate crisis's biggest challenges.
Episodes feature newly reclaimed ocean landscapes, a drone flying 15,000 feet above the Andes, capturing some of the rarest and most remote ecosystems on Earth, and restoring 1 trillion trees to the world Underwater cameras showcasing the global movement to bring viewers to the front lines of the crisis.
Salesforce promoted monthly episodes across social channels, with a focus on LinkedIn. Fortune Brand Studio created a branded content hub for each episode featuring clips from the show, Q&A, animated commentary, and long-form articles. All content on the hub was distributed through dark posts on Fortune's social channels and native promotions on Fortune.com.
This campaign met or exceeded all key performance indicators and goals. “SeaTrees”, which was released on YouTube, has been viewed more than 3.3 million times.
Steal this idea: Storytelling is king. Rather than telling everyone about their commitment to the environment and entrepreneurship, these organizations demonstrated it through compelling videos that were worth watching.
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Company Blog Winner: MD Anderson Cancer Center
Challenge: For two years, at the height of the pandemic, the Cancerwise blog has focused heavily on the impact of COVID-19 on vulnerable patient populations. But by 2022, he said, interest in the pandemic began to wane and traffic to his blog dwindled.
solution: The blog's team has shifted its focus to SEO opportunities while remaining focused on its core mission of exposing patient stories, new research, and cancer topics and issues from MD Anderson's online community.
Each month, our SEO leaders recommended data-driven topics, from “When to worry about blood in your stool” to explanations about different types of cancer. This was a shift from her previous strategy of having her SEO lead make recommendations after a story was assigned. Now they became active partners, assigning stories to a two-person writing team, who executed the stories.
The team began to see results by the winter of 2023. Search-based articles published in the summer and fall resulted in increased monthly traffic and a 44% increase in visits year-over-year. Cancerwise also said he surpassed his 1 million visitor mark in May 2023, and reached almost the same pace in April, but this has never happened in the past three years and since the coronavirus pandemic It only happened once during a surge in .
Steal this idea: SEO shouldn’t be an afterthought. SEO should be at the core of your content marketing strategy when it comes to appealing to your core audience. If you actively try to answer their questions, you will see results.
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Enter now for this year's Content Marketing Awards.
